Thursday July 22nd 2009
So, I'm sat in the gate lounge in Pearson International Airport in Toronto, waiting for my British Airways flight to London Heathrow. It's my fifteenth and final flight of my year travelling. I've just waved goodbye to my aunt who was in tears. I've had to say goodbye to so many wonderful people this past year and it has always been hard. Waving goodbye to my mum at the train station and flying to Tokyo with Robbie, almost a year ago to the day, feels both like yesterday and part of another lifetime all together. I can picture my mum's face, hear her voice and good wishes, feel her pain and excitement and can remember the tears trickling down my own face as clear as the sky on a sunny day as the train pulled out of my hometown towards London.
Since then, however, I've also travelled through parts of 4 continents. I've run and jumped off a cliff, thrown myself out of a plane and have freaked myself out scuba diving. I’ve done canopying, kayaking, river tubing, cave tubing, rock-climbing, jungle treks and volcano hikes. I've seen a mass of stunning waterfalls and breathtaking sunsets, been up many a tower or to the top of a hotel, hill or mountain to see an amazing view and have witnessed beauty I wasn’t even capable of imagining. I've seen dolphins, orangutans, caiman, sloth, snakes, capybara, koala bears, sea lions, kangaroos, wallabies, penguins, albatrosses, bats, various monkeys and reptiles, exotic fish and rare birds … all in their natural environments.
I've slept in wooden huts next to gorgeous beaches for next to nothing but also shared numerous cesspits with cockroaches, rats, enormous spiders and creatures I don't know the names of. I've curled up in an Australian “swag” under the most incredible sky of stars in the centre of Australia, spent a cold night deep inside a cave on top of a tepui at 2727m, have failed to sleep on a floor of insects in one jungle, wriggled in hammocks in others and have waited for lightening to strike all night in the middle of a lake. For the past year I've almost always bunked with at least one other person in the sleeping area ... if not ten. I shared a bed in a motor home for a few weeks, slept head to toe in vans for a couple of months and have ended up in countless cramped, smelly and noisy dorms. Towards the end of my trip I even tried “Couch-Surfing”, crashing in the living rooms of people I didn't know at all. All in all, I haven't slept that much to say I've had no job to get up for. Most days were very long (how many early starts and late nights!) and in a way my time has felt the most fulfilled it ever has. In that way, the train platform I departed from to start this trip seems as it physically has been for most of the journey: half the world away.
A lot of people have asked me which, out of the countries I've visited, has been my favourite. It's almost too difficult to answer that question. Each country had its own unique attractions, be it, for example, Japan and its temples, Australia and its isolated beautiful beaches or Venezuela and its table top mountains. More revealing would be to highlight experiences. Among some of my favourite memories (and there are many) are: an hilarious night in a karaoke booth in Japan (Robbie's Madonna with actions was unforgettable); returning from a day trip to see temples and Buddhas and finding my friend Ciara in the hotel room in Hong Kong (I still wonder how Robbie kept that one a secret); the trip to Halong Bay in Vietnam (rock-climbing, kayaking, sunbathing, snorkelling, drinking and playing games); watching many episodes of Friends, river tubing and spending days/evenings drinking, singing and dressed in banana leaves on the Island of Don Det in Laos; spending a day, from sunrise to sunset, exploring Angkor Wat in Cambodia; being with a great rock-climbing crowd in Hat Ton Sai in Thailand (I really didn't want to leave that place); discovering wonderful food courts in Malaysia; seeing orangutans within metres of me in the jungle and watching the sun go down on top of volcano Merapi (although the ascent was brutal) in Sumatra; having the freedom to drive wherever we wanted in Australia, waking up next to stunning beaches and starting the day with a run followed by a huge breakfast; opening and watching a Christmas DVD (photos and videos of good times) made by friends in Austria; sledging down volcano Ruapehu and sky diving over Lake Taupo in New Zealand; the “Pisco Sour” evening at our hostel in Chile followed by a night at an ‘80s club; watching tango dancers with good friends on a Sunday afternoon in Buenos Aires, a horse-riding trip which finished with sangria and card games and a day of nature-spotting in Argentina's wetlands; laughing with my sister throughout Brazil, dancing on a beach to live music in Salvador and being in the Amazon for four days; reaching the summit of Mount Roraima with a great bunch of people and playing Charades/Pictionary with the same people in one of their flats in Caracas a week later; discovering the beauty of Tayrona National Park, reaching the Lost City and getting massaged inside a mud volcano in Colombia; being on the stunning and isolated island of Sunidup and attempting to surf for the first time (tiring but exhilarating) off the coast of Panama; getting a little merry on rum and coke and singing and dancing to my ipod with a fellow traveller on a beach in Nicaragua; an early-morning yoga class, a 2 hour massage (costing just $25!) and the discovery of a fantastic restaurant in Guatemala; dancing for hours in the middle of the afternoon in a bar and enjoying my first crawfish boil in New Orleans; getting to know great couch surfing hosts and doing things which I would have otherwise not experienced if I'd stayed in hostels - like cycling around Central Park on a Sunday morning in New York and eating a scrumptious brunch with a group of diplomats on a roof terrace in Washington; seeing my aunt and listening to a great Mexican band play in Toronto; spending my last weekend in London catching up with friends.
All in all, considering the amount of things that could go wrong, I think Lady Luck was travelling alongside me for most of the trip. There were, nonetheless, a few low-spirited moments: Christmas Day (it felt so empty and meaningless without my family), being thrown out of a hostel in New Zealand for sneaking in and trying to use the showers in the morning (how tramp-like did we get!), saying goodbye to my sister in Brazil, feeling ill in Venezuela, getting stressed and paying a fortune in phone calls from Colombia to make flight changes, getting asked for money and later the same day being flashed at in Nicaragua, and seeing how gray and rainy London looked as my homecoming flight approached the runway.
The absolute best thing about the trip was meeting dozens of wonderful, fascinating, kind and inspirational people from all over the world. While I'm sad that I'm almost at the end of the journey, I cherish all the memories I have of those people and will be forever grateful for the warm hospitality I received in so many parts of the world. It was the people above all else that made a good trip an unforgettable one.
And now it's time to get excited about meeting up with family and old friends - people with whom I formed relationships with over years and not people I've just met because I was in the shower they wanted or we were the only white people on a crowded bus; people who may not share my passion for travelling or even understand the concept of lugging your life around on your back for a year but people who know my weaknesses and still love me; people whose likes and dislikes I got to know by spending time with them instead of by reading a box on Facebook a day after meeting them; in short, it's time to meet up with the other wonderful people in my life - those who know where I'm from instead of where I'm going to.
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Am back home now. "Just" have to write up stories for Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, New Orleans, Washington, New York and Toronto and this journal will be finished!
