23 countries in 9 months.It feels good to be home!

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Trip Start Feb 26, 2006 Previous
Entry Trip End Nov 28, 2006

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Just wanted to let everyone know that we're home now. After a 13.5-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to London, an 11-hour stopover in London (just enough time to see the National Gallery, walk along the Thames River again, and a grab a pint of ale and some fish and chips), followed by an 8-hour flight to Toronto, we are finally home. People ask us how it feels to be home - it does suck to be faced with reality again, but it also feels really good to be around familiar faces, places, and a way of life. We're still adjusting though, because some things feel weird - for example, walking around a store without a salesperson following 2 steps behind, and salespeople who accept it when we say "I'm just looking" or "Thanks, but I'll think about it". I thought that once we got home we would spend a day doing nothing but sleep and lounge in front of the tv, but we haven't done that yet. We've barely slept because we've been suffering from major jetlag, and we haven't had the time to watch tv because we've been trying to get our lives organized (one of the first things on our list - get a cellphone).

The last 9 months have been a truly amazing and eye-opening experience that's given us so many wonderful memories. I'm not going to say that we 'found ourselves' because of it, but it did give us a different perspective on who we are, where we come from, and of life in general. Even though we've traveled to 23 countries, it's a big world out there, and we've only scratched the surface of it. People always ask us which place we liked most, so here is a list of what we liked, didn't like, etc.:

Top 5 places we've been to:
- Namibia's sand dunes
- Ngorogoro Crater, Tanzania
- Temple of Abu Simbel, Egypt
- Everest Base Camp, Tibet
- Taj Mahal, India

Top 5 coolest experiences:
- Jungle walk in the Okavango Delta, Botswana
- Game viewing in the Ngorogoro Crater
- Exploring a water-filled cave on a rubber tube in Laos
- Being blessed by the Panchen Lama in Tibet
- Being surrounded by rats in the Karni Mata Temple, aka 'Rat Temple', in India

Top 5 scariest moments:
- Sneaking up on a herd of buffalo in the Okavango Delta only to end up too close and almost being charged
- Being threatened with "trouble" by our unofficial tour guide in Fez, Morocco who kept insisting on more money than we were willing to give
- Taking a wrong way in Essaouira, Morocco and ending up in a very sketchy part of town
- Crossing a scary suspension bridge in Vietnam
- Running out of gas on the top of a mountain in Nepal

Top 5 overrated places/things:
- Morocco (ALL of it)
- Camel riding in Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, India...anywhere!
- The lost city of Petra in Jordan - beautiful, but not as magical as we had imagined
- Going inside the Pyramids - it's hot, stuffy, and there's nothing to see
- Angkor Wat Temple - it's still a must-see though, just don't go with any expectations
- Phi Phi Island (post-Tsunami) - (relatively) expensive, much of it still rebuilding, and the beaches are not as nice as Phuket's

Things we are thankful for:
- flush toilets
- toilet paper in public toilets so we don't have to carry a roll everywhere we go
- taking a shower without needing to wear flip flops
- taking a shower in an enclosed tub/stall - in many countries we traveled to, the shower is in the open in the bathroom. It's hard to explain, but imagine having a shower head mounted in the middle of your bathroom (with water spraying onto the sink, toilet, toilet paper, and everything else) and the water flowing into the drain in the corner of the room.
- taxi drivers who use the meter
- buying stuff without needing to haggle
- not worrying about whether or not the sheets you're sleeping on are clean
- brushing my teeth with tap water
- no flying cockroaches!
- being given serviettes at restaurants
- being ignored by salespeople in a store
- more than one season - with the exception of Tibet, most of the places we went to were hot with varying degrees of humidity. The hottest country was Egypt, the most humid was Singapore. Call us Canadian, but we need some sub-zero temps to cool off after all the heat.
- most of all, we're thankful for the cultural diversity of Canada. In most countries around the world, you are surrounded by people of one race, but in Canada, no one thinks twice about being surrounded by people of all different backgrounds. Nobody questions your nationality or ethnicity...and NOBODY questions why a non-white person speaks English so well! It's just one of the great things about Canada.

If there's anything that we've learned from this trip, it's that we should appreciate what we have because so many people in the world (especially children) are happy with much less. You don't realize how fortunate you are until you've seen the other side of the world.

Thanks to everyone who followed our blog over the last 9 months!!

-- Ed and Amy

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