Here we are at Quito airport, waiting for the plane to take us home. We’ve got two heads full of memories and two backpacks full of all the stuff that we’ve needed for a whole year. A few new bits added, a few discarded on the way, but mostly what we set out with. Mum and dad will be waiting for us at Heathrow airport – funnily enough, our Galapagos postcard left the barrel and got home before us, posted second-class from Edinburgh!
In our year of travelling we haven’t been scammed or cheated by anyone beyond a couple of quid. No-one has held us up at gun-point or knife-point or attempted to pick our pockets or rob us in any other way. We haven’t lost or broken anything of great value, the worst of it being a bracelet that Maureen got in Bali for £15 and lost somewhere in Chile. We haven’t been attacked by any wild animals, unless you count the adder that headbutted my ankle in the Drakensberg.
Neither of us have injured ourselves or caught any frightening tropical illnesses (we hope). We haven’t stayed in any hideously unclean fleapit accommodation, or been trapped in a nowhere town for a week by floods or volcanoes. We haven’t even had a flight cancelled on us. Our luggage did go astray between Kathmandu and Bangkok but was restored to us in a couple of days.
Various folks have suggested to me along the way that I should write a book about our travels. I dunno. We’ve had a great time and I’m really glad nothing dire or dramatic has happened to us. This probably makes us good travellers; we plan things, we research, we’re careful about where we go and how we behave. But I don’t think it makes for best-seller material; people like to read about drama and catastrophe. My book would have to be titled: “Don’t Worry (How To Travel Around The World And Have Nothing Really Bad Happen)”.
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I don’t know I think the thieving temple monkey incident in Indonesia might qualify as “attacked by wild animals”.
Gosh – good point! It’s hard to remember everything from a whole year which has been almost as packed with stuff as 26 typical two-week vacations! Grr… thieving monkeys.
But anyway, the main point is nothing dramatically bad happened in the whole year, which might make for dull reading but which is *much* better to live through. : )
OMG. What a year it has been!
Thank you for this blog. I’m glad your trip went so amazingly well… Love.
Thank you for reading and commenting! Honestly, if we’d had no comments at all we may have given up the blog in South Africa. It’s for our own memories, of course, but nevertheless every writer likes to have some readers. ; )
Europe, and in Ancient Russia