Well that's it then. If you managed to stay reading my messages this long, thanks very much. It hardly seems eleven months since I sat down in a dark and dingy five-foot-square curry-scented room in Jodhpur in India to write
my first email. That evening was hot and humid, the chaos on the streets below enough to make me consider that the small office was more of a respite rather than a place for a means of communication. Today could be no more different. Here in Canada it's cold and quiet, and, try as I might, I can find little to link the conclusion of my trip to its beginning.
Since I left England in January I've travelled 20,000 miles by plane, almost as many by bus, a good few thousand by train, thankfully not so many by rickshaw, one too many by bicycle, a few by car (crashing one in the process (twice)), several nautical miles by boat and four thousand in our little red van. And not forgetting some fifty uncomfortable miles on Delboy the Indian camel.
We now find ourselves in our final destination. We fly home tonight. The adventure is over. Since I last wrote from Hawaii we managed to catch a glimpse of Texas, a two-week foray into Mexico and a chaotic, exhausting two-day bus ride from the Mexican-Californian border up the Pacific west coast to where I am now.
Mexico was beautiful in parts: narrow cobbled streets winding around brightly coloured buildings typified the country, standing uncertain between American greed and third-world poverty. Several cities were rich, developed and cosmopolitan. Others, where men ride donkeys, where there is no water supply and where the indigenous population still lives, unbelievable, in caves, lay painfully behind. Nevertheless, without a word of Spanish we managed to get by relatively comfortably and, despite the poverty, one cannot help but enjoy the colonial architecture and the barmy evenings seranaded by funny-looking blokes with droopy mustaches and large hats accompanied by Mexican cuisine which, more often than not, looks and tastes like reconstituted horse manure.
Sunburn marked our last day in California - by Oregon it was snowing. Such typifies our rapid progress northwards. Christmas is magical here in Canada. Or at least it would be if it stopped raining for long enough to go outside and see the lights! The mountains are shrouded in fog most of the time and really, this could be anywhere. It's time to go home.
If you've read this far, whether I've been bugging you since India or I've met you along the way, thanks for your interest. I don't know whether I've written the wrong things too often or vice versa but even if nobody has read my emails except me when I get home, then it's served some purpose. Thanks for all your emails since January, they've been an essential contact with my little corner of the world, especially all your words after the Childers tragedy. Indeed, the emails I have been sent and the people I have met have been just as memorable as the places I have visited and the things I've seen. Maybe the link between a freezing western day in Vancouver and that stifling Indian bazaar eleven months ago, and everything in between, is the realisation that to travel the world is simply to witness the people like you and me working, playing and living. And sending each other messages.
Thanks for the memories, let's do it all again sometime.
All the best,
Ian
South-East Asia
Sydney
Brisbane
Childers
Darwin
Melbourne
New Zealand
Hawaii
Vancouver