Be seeing you

This is the end of this blog. It's over!

You don't have to live a ben and/or debs-free life though. Ben has started a new blog over here, and Debs also has her own little spot just round the corner. Oh, maybe she hasn't. She might have changed her mind. She's thinking about it, she says...

EDIT: She's done it! Deb's new blog is up and running - go check it out!

It remains for us to say thanks to everyone who hosted us, bought us drinks or otherwise brought sunshine and joy into our gruelling travelling life:

Sarah and Steve in Leeds
Pod and Nats in Leeds
Chris and Clare in Birmingham
Camilla and Nick in London
Ken in Reading
Jim and Diane in LA
Rob and Vanessa in Hamilton
Brenda and Sandy in Wellington
Pep and Kate in Wellington
Shelley and John in Batlow
Audrey, Peter and Alma in Wangi Wangi
Baz, Alice, Renee, and Diarmuid in Melbourne
Stu, Deb, Sam and Joe in Brisbane
Mel and Phil in Dunedin
Masahiro and Mariko in Tokyo
Steve and Zoe in Singapore
Jamie and Clare in Amsterdam
Monica in Amsterdam
...and the people we have forgotten, sorry, but I've got a hangover this morning and can't think straight.

And thanks to all of you for reading, commenting and enjoying this blog. Glad you liked it!


Our bookshelf is now fatter by about a dozen Lonely Planets, Deb's orange notebook and 5 of Ben's diaries. It's like a paper trail or something.

See you then, byeee!

Ben and Debs

Tops and tails

We've been home for just over a week now. Our stuff is out of storage and in our house again, we're cooking and eating delicious food - most of which is organic, drinking very few little bottles of exciting beer, sleeping in our amazingly comfortable bed, and watching Star Trek again - hooray! (Debs isn't so excited by that bit, but she's got reruns of ANTM instead, so...)

And over the past week we've met up with several hundred of our old friends and answered the same bloody questions each time: "What was your favourite place?", "did you get sick?", and of course, "was India really that bad?". (Answers: Laos/Japan/Fiji, not a lot, and yes).

Oh, and yes, haven't we lost weight and aren't we brown? Hearing this repeatedly isn't annoying at all, actually - keep saying!

So as a sanity-preserving measure for us, and a generally enlightening info-spang for everyone else, here is a round up of the highs and lows for the whole year:

Deb's bads:
Drowning when I was meant to be swimming with Manta Rays
The 18km trek in 35+ celsius conditions, Laos. 2L of water per person: "I'M TOO HOT!"
Puking in the sea, clinging onto our snorkelling boat's outrigger in Indonesia
India!

Deb's goods:
Seeing friends and family throughout the trip
Watching the fatties stuffing their faces in Dennys, LA
Pinatas in Mexico
The amazing pottery in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
The Gibbon Experience - pretty much everything about it
Chili tofu in Indonesia - mmh! This meal turned me on to hot and spicy food
Songkran in Thailand with Joey and Debs
Everything about Japan, but especially the Giants baseball game at Tokyo Dome and the Thunder Dolphin rollercoaster ride, oh, and the 100 Yen shop.
Yoga in McLeod Ganj

Ben's bads:
Severe foot pain in NZ
Jakarta
Food in Laos: totally gross
A severe "stomach upset" in Chiang Mai, followed by a gruelling trek - oof!
Deb's constant whining about India ;-)

Ben's goods:
Palenque - beautiful ruins in an incredible setting - my favourite "big, impressive old buildings" experience in the whole world!
Mexican wrestling, especially when Debs moved from "Is he OK?" to "Break his legs! Kill him!"
Snorkelling in Fiji - sen-sational
Killer nights out in Wellington, NZ with our friends
Shelley and John's wedding in Batlow. Apparently I set the dancefloor on fire
Bogans in Australia, and my favourite new swear-phrase: "Get fucked!" - sounds especially good in an Aussie accent
Deb's comedy sayings, from confused babbling ("Have you been bitten by a bee?") to razor sharp improvisations which wouldn't make any sense here even if I explained them. "I cannon believe it" is now a catchphrase!
Tai Chi in McLeod Ganj

And for both of us, it was just brilliant being able to spend 24 hours a day with each other. Being back at home it's easy to become distracted by all the other attention-grabbing stuff and drift off into our own little worlds... there's no substitute for time and space and having to get through stuff together. We feel much closer to each other than before. Nauseating, ain't it?

In summary: we recommend doing this, it's awesome. We had our ups, we had our downs, and now we can look back over the whole thing in disbelief that we pulled it off.

Oh yeah, if you do something similar - make sure you blog it and Flickr your photos as you go along. We've been inundated with comments from happy friends and family members about how great it is that they could keep up with us as we went around. Not only that, but now we have a thorough record of everything we did, which will hopefully last for ever! And we won't have to wade through boxes of photos going "What was that guy called again? Where was that?" etc.

That's it!

Anyone want to see a slideshow?!

Ben and Debs

Lifemod

We didn't find God. We didn't find ourselves. We didn't have any life-changing epiphanies. But we did see a lot of cool things and a lot of rubbish things, which made us think about how we used to live, and how we could change things for the better.

And now we're back home and starting everything with a more or less blank slate. It's a great chance to throw out old habits and get into new routines.

So here are our "how our lives will be different after all that travelling" resolutions:

• Going organic: food, drink, toiletries, household cleaning products
• Buying responsibly: no clothing or products from China or other horrendous regimes
• Getting out more: see more of Amsterdam, geographically, culturally, etc. Also, the rest of the Netherlands probably has some interesting bits we should go see
• Working differently: Ben's going freelance, Debs is... well, we'll see
• Having the time of our lives: doing our best not to get sucked back into that stresslife rut we successfully levered ourselves out of this time last year; less rush rush rush, more relaxed enjoyment
• Doing more sport: Debs likes yoga, Ben likes Tai Chi and swimming - we'd like to keep our healthy bods if we can.
• Trying out lots more exotic recipes: Why did we never cooked with tofu before?!
• Speaking more Dutch: We know it, but never use it. Must try harder (neither of us knows how to translate this phrase into Dutch - not a good start..!)
• Making more cakes: Debs is now obsessed with cakes, and intends to make lots of them.
  

Ben and Debs

Compare and contrast

If you've been following our trip from the off, you might remember this "things I want to fix" post that I wrote just before we left.

Well, here's how things stand after a year:

• Stress sickness: Gone
• Time poverty: Gone
• Arms/ hands/ RSI twinges: Gone
• Drinking: Significantly reduced
  
• Alarm clocks: Unexpectedly used them quite a lot! Plenty of early morning starts to do cool things at dawn - discovered that I like getting up early as long as there's a good reason
  
• Mobile phones: We took one, but barely used it as a phone, mainly because the go-sim chip we used was pretty useless. Shame. Came in handy for clock, torch and games functions though
  
• Computers: Plenty of blogging and Flickring; much less timewasting. Good.
  
• Rut life: No rut no more! 24 hours a day with Debs doing stuff. Very fun indeed. Will miss this a lot.
  

In addition to all this we also have some "how our lives will be different after all that travelling" resolutions. See next post.

Ben

Back to the Dam

We are pretty much finished! Tomorrow we fly back to Amsterdam and get plugged back into life as we knew it... except different. It has been almost 13 months since we were in Amsterdam; almost exactly 365 days since we flew out of London to Havana.

The year has gone so fast it's amazing. Back here in London we've been chatting to friends and family, and the consensus seems to be that "not much has happened" while we've been gone. Maybe not for you guys :-)

Over the next couple of weeks we'll be wrapping up this blog, reviewing our year, comparing our thoughts before we left with what actually happened, doing lists of highs and lows and so on. I even have some Barbershop stats to crunch for y'all, I know you're waiting for that with barely controllable excitement.

So don't switch off just yet, there's a little bit more to come over the next fortnight or so.

Ben

Things of India

The standard questions
Where are you coming from?
What's your good name?
I take one photo?
You have one (school) pen? (Debs once misheard this as "disculpe?" and was whisked back to Mexico. Not really, just in her mind.)
What's your state? (To which I was always tempted to reply "I'm a solid", but I'm not really sure that's right - I'm actually mostly liquid. Troublesome stuff innit?)
Anything else? Coffee? Bill? (As you take the first mouthful of your meal - Debs hated this)

The place
Car horns, psycho drivers etc
Pervs and gropers
"Helpful" people who intervene when you're in a shop waiting to be served, taking it upon themselves to be your middleman for the impossible task of buying a bottle of water.
Staring. Always, always staring. At us.
Charmingly antiquated use of English: "She left me high and dry", "He caused a right rumpus" etc.
When anything is rubbish or goes wrong, "politics" is to blame.

Overused words
Dickhead
Colourful
Retards / retarded
Enthusiastic
Shit / shithole
Delicious
Incompetent
Liars
Nosy
Incredible (in an exasperated way, not admiringly)

Our sayings
"India has made us old"
"I don't recognize myself any more - I've turned into a horrible person"

See ya! Wouldn't wanna be ya!

Ben and Debs

Things of Japan

Sayonara, Nihon. We think you're oi shi! Your tastiest morsels were:

• Soba, yasai gyoza and agedashi tofu
• Baseball
• Sapporo, Yebisu, Kirin, Asahi
• Cos-play weirdos
• Giant beers in izakayas
• 1 shop assistant per customer
• Obatarians
• Stuff being not as expensive as expected, especially Y100 shops
• The most confusing rail network in the world
• Cherry blossom
• The way everything just worked really well
• Toilets that spray your bum clean

We will be back, oh yes we will.

Ben

Game over SE Asia

Well, almost. Feels like we've come to the end of a very long chapter of our trip, as we leave Bangkok for Tokyo tonight. Asia was a rollercoaster of a ride. Over the past three months we've travelled through five countries and have had many highs and lows. It wasn't how we expected it to be at all.

We've missed our home comforts, and complained about the food, but when we get what we want (air conditioned tourist buses, pizza etc), we realise that what we want is boring! The best bits have been the most mundane activities, like train journeys and sawngthaew rides with the locals and their livestock; being laughed at by locals when we try to fit in; crossing the road in HCMC.

We're also exasperated by lazy hippies, and the backpacker scene. Although we are backpacking, we have little in common with the tattooed, anklet wearing, almost naked, sun-worshipers that hang round the Khao San Road, getting in our way in Boots (the chemist)!

Biggest disappointment of SE Asia - Topshop in Bangkok opens in May. I just missed it. Gutted! Now that's one home comfort I wouldn't find boring.

Ben would like to add that he's looking forward to staying in a country where he isn't constantly assailed by the rank odour of dried/fermented fish all the time. Might have to wait until after Japan before he breaks out the champagne though...

Debs

Things of Laos

Lovely and not so lovely things of Lovely Laos, our fave place so far (even better than Fiji!):

• Sticky rice - the Lao people eat about 500g of sticky rice each, for every meal, every day. And they still love it.
  
• Beer Lao, so crisp, so delicious, so cheap!
• Karaoke on the bus. Dreadful, dreadful karaoke.
  
• Lao Lao ('whisky')
• Stunned silence, followed by "What, don't you know how?", followed by giggles - The response we got from everyone when we said we'd been married for almost 5 years but have no children.
• Bugs on sticks - They'll basically eat anything that moves.
• "You buy one five thousand" - Sung by all the little girls, in exactly the same tune, when trying to sell trinkets to tourists.
• Monks!
  

Debs

Please be modest

Dress correct, dammit!

We've seen a damn sight too many people totally disrespecting local customs and mores in this part of the world.

Fair enough, Debs wouldn't wear a full Burkah or anything, but when it comes to simply covering your shoulders to avoid offending the old ladies, where's the harm in that? Similarly, it doesn't take a genius to work out that mincing down the high street in Vang Vieng wearing only a bikini isn't exactly the height of decorum.

Idiots!

Ben and Debs

Things of Thailand

Better late than never:

• Sweeping!
• Chang beer makes you ill
• Water bottle landfill
• "Hey you! Where you go?"
• Wats, wats, wats
• Monks!
• Long live the King!
• Bored of banana pancakes
• Ladyboys!
• Reckless minibus drivers
• Hippies
• BBQ corn on the beach
• Tofu in garlic & pepper sauce
• Mopeds

Ben

Plastic

You learn a lot whilst traveling, but one of the biggest things is the impact that our actions have an on the environment. The most obvious being the build up of used plastic bottles.

Since the water isn't safe to drink, everyone over here drinks bottled water, which means a lot of empty plastic water bottles. One solution would be to refill old bottles, which we try to do as often as possible, but refill stations are few and far between, so we're also constantly adding to the waste, which builds up at the sides of roads, and is weighed down and dumped in the sea by unscrupulous hotels.

On a similar note, we hate plastic bags! The plastic bag issue was always half on my mind, but I never really thought about it too much until we visited Si in NZ. He works for a company called Wannaka Wastebusters who are trying to encourage people to shun difficult-to-dispose-of plastic bags in favour of environmentally friendly cloth bags, and it makes so much sense. Once you're made aware of the issue, it's incredible to note how often bags are needlessly doled out in shops.
Now, every time we buy something, we decline the plastic bag and drop the item straight into the cloth bag we're usually carrying. Makes sense.

I know I'm preaching a bit, but what we don't see the impact of at home is all too evident over here. It would be great more hostels and restaurants and hotels would allow their customers to refill their water bottles; and if we could encourage people who read our blog to say no to plastic bags. If we all start saying no, and using cloth bags, maybe the supermarkets will catch on and stop doling them out so readily. Here's hoping.

Debs, x

Protecting your money

Most of the time we're ultra secure about keeping the cash we have on us safe and sound from would be sneak thieves. So far we've not had any trouble at all from this sort of thing, except for the usual overpricing ripoffs you find all over the world.

In fact, the only real money hassle we've had came from an excess of security - PayPal stuck a limitation on my account and withheld a payment to The Gibbon Experience because they were worried somebody had illegally accessed my account and was purloining funds.

All well and good! I'm happy that they have processes in place to detect abnormal activity and protect their customers... but it took a bit long to resolve. Pretty much a week for me going back and forth on emails and via their site to prove that I was me, dammit!

My favourite bit was when they wanted me to access my account and do some stuff from my home computer. Not exactly practical... I ended up sending them a picture of me holding up my passport so they could see I was too legit to quit. I nearly wrote a little sign, like hostages sometimes do, saying "It's OK, nobody's got a gun to my head" but I stopped short.

Anyway, limitation lifted, payment made, really looking forward to swinging with the apes in Laos in a week or so.

Ben

I Survived Indonesia

.. to coin a phrase from the t-shirt worn by a tourist in Jakarta Airport.

It's been a pretty rough month for me in Indonesia. Not sure if it was caused by the mayhem that is Indonesia, or the fact that it was our first destination on the Asia leg of the tour, but I've been feeling really low lately.

Although we've had some scary moments on this trip, I've never felt as scared and jumpy as I did in Indonesia, and I remained in that weird mood from the moment we arrived until the day before we left. I'm generally a little bit paranoid about safety anyway (I never get into a car without putting my seatbelt on. Well, I never used to - now the cars I get into don't even have seatbelts), but reading about the bombings, volcanoes, floods, dodgy airlines (who I refused to fly with) of recent times turned me into a paranoid freak.

Indonesia is a beautiful place, and I'm really glad we went, but I found Java a particularly tough place to travel around, and I was glad to get out of there to be honest. Shame, but that's the truth.

Anyway, thanks to Ben's patience and general loveliness, I've come out smiling, thnk god, because I was really low for a while there and very homesick. I still miss everyone back home, but I don't want to come home yet because I'm having a blast in Bangkok and can't wait to see what the rest of Asia has to offer.

In hindsight, maybe Indonesia was a good place to start, because now I'm prepared for (almost) anything, and everywhere else seems relatively easy in comparison :)

Debs

Sunglasses I have known and destroyed

Debs hates me. It's because I take absolutely no care at all of my cheap-ass sunglasses, then act all surprised when they break. Here's my track record so far:

1. EUR 14 Dunlop aviators from Teesside Park. Lens popped out.
2. EUR 5 aviators from Amsterdam. Arm fell off.
3. EUR 3.5 gold aviators from Cancun - bad quality to start with. Got all sloppy. Chucked em.
4. EUR 10 for 2 pairs of aviators on Venice Beach, LA. 1 pair - lens cracked. 2nd pair - lost in sea at Bondi Beach, Sydney.
5. EUR 20 red fashion 80s specs from JayJays, Dunedin. Arm snapped off in Brisbane. I think Joey rescued them from the bin.
6. EUR 15 red fashion specs from Bondi Beach. Arm snapped off en route to Lombok. Debs absolutely furious! Then the lens fell out too.
7. EUR 2.50 black aviators from Seminyak, haggled down from EUR 11! Currently going strongish, having been a little bit mangled by DEBS - LOL!

And that's all the sunglasses for now. More exciting eyewear updates as they happen!

Debs, by the way, is still on her first pair. Well, her second pair, but only cos she gave one pair away in Brisbane, and she never really liked them anyway. How clever is she?

Ben

Halfway!

It's day 183 of our year long trip. Half way there and back again. Wahoo!

I commemorated this occasion by drawing a picture, based on a suggestion from Debs, which I now proudly present to you, people of the internets:

I call it "The coconut of time falling from the palm tree of destiny"


If you look closely you can see the months written on the trunk :-)

Ben

Things of Australia

As far as we're concerned, Australia is all about:

Bogans (they're great!)
Coopers Green
Sunburn
Drive-through bottle shops (liquor stores, off-licences, whatever you want to call them)
Eskys
Sharks, dingoes, roos, koalas, lizards, snakes, spiders and crocs
Stubby holders
Flies
Internet subscriptions with tiny download allowances
Swamp donkeys
The outdoor life - primarily sport and barbecues
Double pluggers

And that's it.

Enough Oz, let's go to Asia!

Ben and Debs

Ret-ro-spec-tive

2007. MMVII. Time to go now. See ya later!

We won't forget you - during you, you special little year, we:

• Sold a car
• (Debs) Pranged a car
• Quit our jobs
• Let our flat
• (Ben) Bought and destroyed/lost 9 pairs of cheap sunglasses
• Walked up a glacier
• Stopped caring about how we look
• Got really, really bored of food
• (Debs) Fell in love with Pinatas
• Met a one-eyed man in Fiji
  
• Learned a bit of Spanish
• Acquired a few weird cyber-stalkers on Flickr - mostly to do with Ben's haircut pictures
  
• Discovered Art Brut
• Met up with a lot of old friends, a lot of new friends, and got to know some distant relatives
  
• Read dozens of books
• Saw crocodiles, dolphins, kiwis, and jellyfish (but no albatrosses or sharks yet)
  
• Bought a new camera
  
• (Debs) Got attacked by a mother duck
  
• Got bored of all the songs on our iPod/wiped and reloaded our iPod (x3)
  
• Learned to surf
  
• Realised that soap is a lot better than shower gel
• Also realised that cheap shampoo is just as good as expensive shampoo
• And while we're on the subject, most sun cream is way too greasy
  
• (Ben) Got a job offer
  
• Grew nostalgic about our life in Amsterdam/missed our friends and family back home
  
• Started this blog :-)

2008, are you ready for us? You've got a lot to live up to.

Ben and Debs

Things of NZ

A quick summary of stuff:

Flat whites
Sandflies
Shit drivers
Idiotic "give way to the right" rules
Getting IDd for booze
Harriers hovering over fields by the roadside
Maori legends
Maori bullshit
Watties is not equal to Heinz (ketchup or beans)
Soaring petrol prices
Outrageous Fortune
"Yeah yeah no, sweet as, choice bro!"
Dangerous DOC, the possum killers
Pam!

EDIT: Good God, how could I forget? This song!



(It's the Mint Chicks, BTW - Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!)

Ben

P.S. We meant to do one of these posts for Mexico too, but didn't get round to it for so long that it didn't seem worth it after a while.

OK, OK, but how do you *feel*?

Monica mailed us the other day wanting to know more about the realities of life on the road, apart from all the larks and adventures we've been blogging about so far. Good point, girlfriendo. It's all too easy to let this become a "What I did in the summer holidays" type thing, so here's some hard hitting emotional reality for you all.

This trip isn't anything like we expected, although we're both hard-pressed to say what exactly we were expecting. We seem to flick between totally chilled, sitting around for days just enjoying a place, and quick-fire hauling ass through 5 spots in as many days.

It's not all fun and frolics. We get tired. We get hungry and can't find anything to eat. We both get little schemes going in our own heads, then get angry with each other when our private plans don't coincide with the other's. It can be pretty hard work at times - although we were both really looking forward to the prospect of spending much more time together, sometimes 24h a day stuck in a little camper van together is just too much. Fortunately, we love each other very much, so we haven't murdered each other yet.

Another thing that we're being careful about is staying on top of our budget. We were super organized about setting this up before we left (yes, we have a spreadsheet) and are keeping tabs on our spending every cent of the way. The time/money continuum we talked about before we set off means that we spend less money but more time to do stuff, and occasionally make false economies (cheap cheese - don't do it).

We are totally glad we're doing what we're doing. It's brilliant! Debs is so much more relaxed than before we left, and we've met loads of nice people and done things we've always wanted to do, like surfing etc. Ben, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically short-tempered sometimes.

And it may sound bad, but we're not missing home at all (it's a bit different for us because we already lived away from family, communicating mainly via email and only seeing family at xmas and weddings anyway). The blog has probably been the biggest help in that respect, because we feel like we're talking to our friends every time we write a blog post, and they email us comments (hint to people unfamiliar with how blogs work: there's a little link at the bottom right of each post which says "1 comment" or similar - click that and add a comment of your own! It's the latest thing in internut communications).

Ben