One Year On
Agra, India
One year. It's been one whole year since we packed up our things... checked out of our tiny Utrecht Apartment and hit the road. A full year of busses, trains and airplanes... boats and bikes and forms of transport that we'd never previously heard of (Mocorros, Dallah Dallahs, Matatus.) 365 days of sleeping in different beds, dealing with not such clean surroundings and not knowing where you are going to find your next meal let alone when you might have your next hot shower. 12 months of foreign languages and just trying to find our way while being hassled and helped by people on the street. It's been the experience of a lifetime, but we are also very tired.
As we set out a year ago, we never anticipated the exhaustion that we're currently experiencing. Leaving "home" and the politics of day to day life was an escape from stress and tiredness. After all, we could sleep as late as we wanted, and do what ever wanted to,... right? And for quite some time, we were on the go.. multiple tourist sites every day, getting up early, enjoying the nightlife and forgetting that even folks on perpetual holiday need to have a weekend.
Since then, we've slowed down a lot... we're taking it much easier now and we find humor in sitting back and watching tourists on their two week holidays frantically racing between the "must see" sights; knowing that we've certainly been in their shoes, and relishing the simple pleasures of just absorbing a culture by being.
But it's more than just the pace of travel that has made us so tired. There is a different type of stress that comes from not having a routine or a job or a place to sleep every night. We’d followed web logs of other travelers that for forewarned of a mental and physical exhaustion that arrives somewhere around the 12 month mark... we struggled to understand why and were sure that it wouldn’t happen to us. But it has.
To compound this, things have gone a bit haywire at home. We are currently in the process of evicting the tenant who had signed a lease on our house through July of 2005. Obviously, this puts a bit of a dent in the ol' travel budget and we're not sure exactly how we're going to deal with it. The obvious choice would be to end this journey in December when we return home for Christmas, but South America still beckons and we ask ourselves… will we ever have this opportunity again? Isn’t there some old saying about being poor in wealth but rich in experience?
We’ve struggled to find great observations on life and the world in general as we’ve journeyed, but they are still elusive. If life’s big questions were so easily answered, they wouldn’t be big questions would they? We have learned tons of things about places we never even thought about before. Botswana, for example, is a shining star amongst her peers in Southern Africa with a booming economy and healthy race relations. Ugandans eat mashed plantains as their staple rather than soybean or cassava. Many modern Thai women are failing to learn the ancient cooking methods opting instead for pre-made curry paste and foods from the markets.
We’re also more travel smart… we can spot scams a mile away and can usually locate the appropriate bus in a sea of thousands at any third world bus station. We know how to bargain, when to say No (and walk away), and the difference between a cultural difference and a rude person. These are learned skills that take time to master. We certainly didn’t have them when we left home.
But, most significantly, this trip has made us appreciate what we have at home; Family, friends, and an incredible amount of opportunity not available to most of the worlds citizens. We’ve realized how many things we take for granted… and not just the big ones! Home cooking and dependable hot showers are two of the small things that are hitting us pretty hard these days!
We’ve just arrived in Agra, India… home of the Taj Mahal and the place where we will watch the US elections.
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