It seems like just yesterday we said goodbye to our family and friends and set off on our journey!
After close to 18 months, we are finishing our Asia-Oceania voyage. It has been the most excellent adventure, and we have learned so much about ourselves, as well as this great, yet complicated world we live in.
Our year in Jeju, Korea was a learning experience. We learned how to teach! We'll always remember the joys we felt when seeing our students, young and old, grasp a difficult English concept, or just learn how to pronounce the letters L, P, B, and R! Our life in Jeju quickly felt comfortable and homey thanks to our Jeju and Yale academy friends and family. We loved every moments spent at the beach, learning to surf, playing volleyball and 3-man, ultimate and rugby practices and tournaments, hand-and-foot card competitions, bike rides and hikes on beautiful Hallasan, and weekly feeds under the bridge in Jungmun, at the Panchan restaurant in Seogwipo, or of the most delicious indian food in Jeju-shi. We'll always remember our one year in Korea and we hope to meet up with our Jeju family sometime in the future!
We left our home of Seogwipo after a beautiful morning on the beach, how fitting! For the next 5 and a half months we would travel and explore. Through China by train, waiting at the stations with thousands of Chinese staring blatantly at the tall travelers and accepting random dried fish and unidentifiable foods while in our sleeping berths, walking the Great Wall with a back drop of an azure sky, and simply watching the million bicycles whiz by.
Vietnam we encountered our fabulous traveling friends whom we shared great experiences with all down the country - in Sapa, walking with the Hamong tribe women, drinking Bia Hoi and rice wine, bringing in 2007 around a huge bonfire in Mui Ne with good friends and cheap rum, renting motorbikes and driving with local kids to the sand dunes, and taking little rickety wooden boats up the Mekong Delta to Cambodia.
In Cambodia we experienced the real dichotomy of what life is like there - extreme wealth and extreme poverty, side by side throughout the whole conflict ridden country. Days were spent wandering or biking through the magical Angkor Wat temples. We could actually imagine what life was like in the Angkor empire hundreds of years ago.
Continuing along from 140kms of pot-whole ridden dirt roads in Cambodia to Thailand. We'll always cherish the time we spent with our friends in Mae Sot, experiencing just a smidgen of what life is like for displaced Burmese refugees living on the border. We were so lucky to go to the refugee camp. It opened our eyes to a reality that none of us could even fathom. From the North where we road a tiny motorbike through the elephant camps and dense forests to the silken white beaches in the South, we enjoyed it all.
The next leg of the journey was New Zealand, a country we soon felt at home in, thanks to the hospitality of our friends in Wellington. NZ for us was all about exploring the outdoors, and we did that both in the North and South island with fabulous weather, minus the chilly southerly winds from the Antarctic!. Hiking the Southern crossing, Kepler track, Abel Tasman, Queen Charlotte track and Mueller hut all at "John speed" gave us an appreciation for the stunning mountains and coasts of this unique country. With only 2 months in NZ we didn't have enough time to do and see everything, or spend enough time with our dear friends.
It was off to Australia, where we apparently needed a visa. With everything sorted out in the nick-of-time, we arrived in Sydney to hot summer weather. We shared our Eastern road trip with our trusty Speedy ghetto van, crocs, monitor lizards, wild turkeys, roos, poisonous snakes, box jellies and reef sharks! An adrenalin inspiring journey! We swam with the brilliant array of sea life at the Great Barrier Reef, drove long stretches of barren road bordered only by sugar cane, played in the ever-salty ocean, ran on squeaky white sand beaches, and surfed in turbulent waves.
And, alas, we are now at present time, staying with friends in Sydney. Incredible how fast our time has flown by! We are getting ready for the last country, tropical Fiji, and we can't really believe that this journey is coming to an end! Tomorrow we catch a plane to Fiji, then its off island hopping for 18 days in the Yasawas.
We just want to thank everyone for supporting us on this stupendous adventure of ours. To our Jeju fam, new travel friends throughout Asia, old friends whom we visited throughout our journey who made us feel oh-so welcome, and everyone at home who have been wishing us well the whole time, as well as keeping us updated on the real-world!
This will most likely be the last email from our journey, so WE LOVE YOU ALL!!!
Karina and Christian "big beard"
