After ten and a half months, and a few weeks earlier than planned, we are heading home. This adventure, which we have saved and planned for since we met five years ago, has come to an end. It has been without doubt the best experience of our lives, and it fills us with excitement for adventures yet to come.
For now, as I type this, we are flying home; flying back in 28 hours over the distance it took so many months to travel across. After a stop in Hong Kong, we will land at Heathrow on the morning of Thursday 14th May, and return to our families as best we can during this epidemic. We are so very sad that this is over, our life has been a beautiful dream, and now we must return to wakefulness. Through the sadness we have so much to be excited for. We are excited to see our friends and family, excited to catch up with everyone, and excited to meet some newborn family members. We are excited to take steps into the next parts of our lives, and to see and decide what direction that takes. We will nonetheless take time to remember with such fondness everything we have experienced this last year, and mourn its end.
We have shivered in our sleeping bags high in the Himalaya, and we’ve bathed in beautiful hot oceans. We’ve pushed through crowds in bustling cities, and had our breath taken away by vast empty landscapes.
We have seen the most beautiful beaches, and the highest mountains, thick jungles and arid expanses. Fishing boats have hopped us between islands, and monorails have carried us around cities. ‘Paradise’ has been our ‘new normal’.
We have flown, ferried, bussed, tuk-tuk’ed and trained our way across the world, we have driven motorhomes, cars and scooters. Most of all, we have walked….a lot.
We have worn through pretty much everything we left with, in some cases several times over. We’ve also worn through many layers of skin through sunburn and strange tropical skin conditions.
We have climbed cliffs and mountains, from the heights of Nepal to the beaches of Vietnam, from city outcrops in Brisbane to remote jungles in Thailand, our love of the outdoors and of waging war against gravity has introduced us to so many beautiful places and people.
We have redefined our sense of self, what home means, and what we feel life is about and has the potential to be. Our horizons have expanded tenfold.
Most of all, we have met people, so many people, so many friends.
We’ve made friends with people from all corners of the world, from a Norwegian chef to an Indian humanitarian aid worker, from Israel’s #1 mountain biker to a Polish dentist.
People with everything have welcomed us with humble warmth, and people with nothing to give have nonetheless given us everything. We have been welcomed into hotels and homes, have shared the best and the worst experiences. We have seen how much binds us all together, the human connection that exists between us all, regardless of background, how much we all share with each other.
We have made so many wonderful friends, people who we will treasure and visit for the rest of our lives.
And most of all, we have been together, we have shared this amazing experience with each other, and are stronger and happier as a couple for it.
To try to sum up this year in a few paragraphs would be to do it a disservice. We have already written a lot, and we will continue to write a lot in reflecting on our experiences, how they influence us going forward, and hopefully helping those who may think of taking similar footsteps. But the best thing we can say is that we stand by what we said in our first post, wherever we are, and with all we have done, it’s all about the people.
