250 Days!

Sitting, admittedly bored, on a 27 hour train journey we worked out that today was our 250th day of travelling. Not hugely significant really, 250 days come and go as often as…..I dont know, but very fast! And to be honest our day was spent like many others we’d experienced but there is something nice and rounded about 250! We were leaving our 10th country and heading to Hong Kong, we were leaving Asia just after that and returning to English speaking parts of the world – ok so they still sound a bit weird and don’t really talk it proper, but still Oz and the US means no real language barriers so to speak. So sitting on the train reminising and getting vaguely melancholy about the past 250 days…which is more difficult than it sounds when all around you is the noise of dredging phlegm or sucking noodles! Mongolian gers, declined entry into Tibet, being ill on Everest, burning bodies in India (we didn’t do the burning, just watched!), Christmas in Oz, freedom of mopeds in Thailand, friends in Vietnam, bike ride in Laos and the national parks of China! It has all flown by and some already seem like a life time ago while others like they happened yesterday. We have gone from sea level to 5,545m above, from desert to jungle, from non moped riders to wanting to buy mod jackets and Vespa’s. We have travelled through different seasons – I only thought there were 2 kinds of season before we left home, its either football season or its not! But we’ve experienced wet, dry, monsoon, autumn, winter, spring and summer.
We haves tasted some of the best and worst foods around – fermented horse milk and mutton fat soup in Mongolia, stinky and I mean really stinky tofu and throat numbing, eye watering, painful chillies in China, to the best curry and nan bread you’ll ever taste whilst drinking beer from a teapot in India. We’ve walked so long and so hard at times I thought my legs would give up and my lungs would burst from the lack of oxygen as I took huge gasps trying to suck as much in as possible! Rice terraces, tea plantations, cannabis fields, mountains where avatars fly, fruit orchards, fields of wheat, bamboo forests, jungle, desert and glaciers… we walked the lot. We have cycled in one day over a mountain pass higher than Snowdon in 40 degree heat then free-wheeled down the other side, so tired that even steering seemed hardwork!
But we still have many adventures ahead of us, camping in Hong Kong, the volcanos of Hawaii, national parks of California and the history of the Aztecs – bring on the next leg, just hope mine can keep up!