The End

I hope we haven’t completely alienated our devout followers. Clearly we’re having trouble keeping up with the fast-paced “real world” so we don’t have the time to wrap up this blog thing once and for all. Elise started work last week which means I’m officially a kept man. My role is now to stay home and write blogs, make dinner, give foot massages etc. etc. I guess life could be worse…

So this is our final blog posting – unless of course you all choose to hit the streets with placards in protest of this blog being over. In that case I’m sure we could find something to write about to keep you entertained. In the meantime you can save your Sharpies and Bristol board; here are a couple more top 5 lists from our year-long vacation.

Top 5 Things We Miss from Travelling

1. Getting eight hours of sleep every night.
2. Not knowing/caring which day of the week it is (or in some cases which month!)
3. Cheap booze everywhere (except Australia)…it also helps that we never had to get up early for work the next day.
4. Looking and dressing like hobos every day and not caring at all.
5. Using sweat and sunscreen instead of moisturizer to keep our skin baby-soft.


Top 5 Things We Missed/Took for Granted From Home

1. Good shower
2. Real kitchen
3. Blackberries
4. Hockey (well, more so Gully than Elise)
5. Dogs and cats are not mangy and rabid
6. We don’t bother counting our change


Top 5 Countries (in alphabetical order)

1. Bosnia
2. Brazil
3. Japan
4. Switzerland
5. Vietnam

So I guess that’s that. It’s been a slice. We hope you enjoyed reading as much as we enjoyed writing! If you want to get in touch with us you can email us at gullyandelise@gmail.com. The wanderlust has abated (for now), but we’ll try to let you know if we decide to travel around the world again, or maybe we’ll just become professional writers!

BYE!!!

G + E

Austria - let the party begin!

Czech Republic

Slovenia

Croatia

Bosnia

Montenegro

Albania

Macedonia

Greece

Turkey

Bulgaria

Romania

Slovakia

Switzerland

Spain

Argentina

Chile

Peru

Brazil

Australia

Vietnam

Thailand - our engagement spot!

Japan - the party ends :(

What Does It Cost to Travel the World?

We’ve really been slacking on the blog since we’ve got home – I hope we haven’t lost all our readers yet because we still have more to say!! At the very least, there needs to be a tearful goodbye, and we need to do a little reflection on the meaning of it all….

But before then, let’s talk dollars.  Is anyone out there curious at all about the final financial tally? Dying to know?  I thought so.  I’ll finally satisfy your curiosity.  But first I’ll tell you what we spent in Southeast Asia.

We spent 25 days in Vietnam, 25 days in Thailand, and 4 days in Japan.

Lodging: $1217

Southeast Asia was all about hotels and guesthouses – sleeping in style on the cheap.

Food and drinks: $1734

So much rice and so many noodles….

Entertainment and Activities: $897

Necessities (clothing, shampoo, internet, sending packages home etc): $1403

Transportation: $1432

We ended our trip in luxury, flying everywhere and having drivers pick us up at the airport. It was heaven!

Total for Southeast Asia: $6683

And now (drumroll please) the total for 11 months on the road! 

Grand Total: $54,800!!!!!!

This includes $11,150 for trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights.

So now that our bank accounts are empty, we are looking forward to the next challenge – refilling them!! So if anyone is looking to hire a couple of budget-savvy engineers, send them our way…

-E

PS Sadly there are no new pictures to post, but I promise that for the next blog entry I’ll pull some gems out of the archive.

Back to the Future?

Still smiling after losing our luggage on the way home from Tokyo. We went all over the world and they lose our bags on the last leg!

We thought that when we got back to Toronto everything and everyone would have changed and coming home would be like going through a time warp for us. Well, we got home six days ago and indeed it was like travelling through time – not because things have changed so much while we were away, but rather because almost NOTHING has changed. ‘Back to the Past’ is more like it! By and large, things seem to be exactly like they were last June when we left. Now, you’d think that that would be a good thing because it means we didn’t really miss out on anything here while we were gone. Au contraire, it’s actually painfully depressing. Just like that, the trip is over and we seem to be right back where we started as if nothing happened. Business as usual. How sad.

Now dry those teary eyes!! To ease our transition back to tedium we figured we would reminisce with you all and leave you with a few more posts to tie up all the loose ends in this blog. Plus, after being inundated with positive feedback about our blog when we got back home (how flattering!), we felt that it would be unfair to our loyal readers, both here in Canada and around the world, if we unceremoniously ended the blog just because we now have all sorts of real-life responsibilities (nothing big really, just trivial stuff like finding a job and a place to live).

So how can I sum up such an epic undertaking as travelling around the world for eleven months? I won’t even try. But I will say that this trip was NOT about gaining perspective or ‘finding ourselves’ or something trite like that. Make no bones about it: this trip was an eleven-month-long hedonistic pursuit of pleasure (although somehow we still managed to suffer a great deal of hardship in the process!). We saw some amazing places and did some remarkable things – just peruse the material in this blog going back to last June and you’ll see! And for the record, we learned a ton about how the world works and we did manage to gain some perspective on our own lives in the process blah blah blah.

We figured a great way to sum up our experiences abroad was to post a series of Top 5 lists (or Top 3 or whatever number suits our needs). Those are always fun right? Ya know, deep and insightful topics like “Top 5 Waves Surfed” or “Top 5 Haircuts”. So, without further ado, I give you:

Top 4 Cultural Experiences

4. Bosnian coffee – Like Turkish coffee but comes served in fancy wares with Turkish delight sweets. Much better than the coffee in Turkey itself where everyone drinks tea anyway!

 3.  Walking around town with a beer – a sanctioned activity virtually everywhere except North America and Australia. I could get used to it.

2. Not wearing shirts in Brazil – No shirt? No shoes? NO PROBLEM! It’s pretty much ok to go to church bare-chested in Brazil!

1. Japanese toilets – is there anything they can’t do? It’s worth the airfare to Japan just to try one. With a heated seat, built-in bidet, air dryer, and soundtrack I might just have to import me one of these.

  And…

Top 5 Haircuts (omg he wasn’t joking about that?)

5. Vietnam – cheapest haircut I got, but the girl wasn’t even going to wet my hair before she started snipping. They also offered “massages” so maybe cutting hair wasn’t their forté…

4. Peru – Woman was a little too eager to snip it all off. When I said “uno centimetro por favor” she must have thought I wanted the final length to be one centimetre!

3. Thailand – Professional salon care for the bargain basement price of $5.

2. Australia – We finally acknowledged that we were bogan when Elise cut my hair in the trailer park.

1.  Greece – Seaside on the Mediterranean. It doesn’t get better than this.

Stay tuned....More to come later.

-G

Tokyo Drifters

Tokyo is a crazy place.  Now, we’ve been to a lot of really crazy cities - huge crowds, gridlocked honking traffic, major air pollution, stray animals, burning garbage.  Tokyo is crazy in a whole different way.  Organized crazy.  Efficient crazy.  12 million people going about their daily business at the same time and the same place, and it’s like a well-oiled machine. Nobody bumps into one another, nobody jay-walks, nobody spills their latte.  Any problem or hardship ever faced by any human at any time in the history of man has been thought about and dealt with by the Japanese.

Lost?  Just look around, you’ll find a map on every corner.

Can’t read the Japanese menu?  That’s okay, there are pictures.

No time/space for a pet?  Just rent one.

Run out of toilet paper? The toilet will give you a little freshening spritz and a blow-dry and a song.

Your shihtzu getting mangled by the great dane at the dog park?  The dog park is separated into weight classes.

Miss the last train home to the suburbs? Stay in the city and sleep in a drawer for cheap.

Don’t like beer (like me)? Drink sake!!!!!!

And the list goes on.  And everyone is so well-dressed and formal.  Even the taxi drivers wear a shirt and tie and white gloves.

Seeing as these are our last days of travelling, we felt the need to get the most out of them as possible.  So we hit the town hard.  We saw temples, shrines, trains, noodles, rice, electronics, parks, vending machines, neon lights, harajuku girls, and of course sushi.  We did weird stuff like visiting a cat café – we thought that we could rent a cat by the hour for a one-on-one cuddle session, but it turned out that a cat café is just a room full of bored lazy cats and coffee.  We woke up early to go see the famous fish market, but ended up just stuffing ourselves with breakfast sushi and completely missing the market.  We (along with half the tourists in Tokyo) videotaped a cycle of the Shibuya Crossing (supposedly the busiest intersection in the world).  We went to Tokyo’s version of Central Park and watched warring factions of Japanese ‘50s greasers (think Danny & Sandy) have a dance-off.  This city is GREAT!  We’re only just getting warmed up, and now we have to go….

-E

Smoking and walking - not okay

The king of concrete jungles

Luring the kitties with food morsels

Gully tries to tempt the kitty into cuddling

Waiting for the train

Does this place look familiar?  Look closely... this restaurant is the inspiration for the setting of the big massacre scene in Kill Bill

Shibuya Crossing - everyone is out for a Sunday stroll

Go Greased Lightening, you're burning up the quarter-mile.....

We come all the way to Japan for authentic sushi:  hamburger nigiri

Sake!

Luxury: $8 per piece

Not so luxury:  Our not so spacious accommodations

After eleven months on the road and on our way home, you can imagine that we're pretty anxious about what the future holds for us.  Thankfully, our Japanese fortune really cleared things up for us:

We're doomed

The Big Bangkok Theory

That bar (above) was just calling our names!! There are five days left of our eleven-month-long vacation. I can’t believe it’s all coming to an end in less than a week! In the little time we have left, Elise and I have been trying to take full advantage of all the great things Thailand has to offer – NO, I’m not talking about ladyboys and ping-pong ball shows, but rather the more classic elements of Thai culture like cooking and massages (umm…legitimate massages, that is). We spent a few days in the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand cooking curry by day and getting stretched and pummelled by Thai masseuses at night. I never knew it, but making curry paste from scratch can be so physically demanding that you NEED a massage afterwards (what with all the grinding with the pestle and mortar). And when the going rate for an hour long, spa-quality couple’s massage is about $5, it’s hard to justify NOT getting one everyday anyway.

For some reason the Thais love country music. Oh don’t worry, Justin Bieber still owns the airways over here, but I swear John Denver’s “Country Roads” is still on Thailand’s top 10 chart. Perhaps its popularity is maintained by all the hickish old North American men who come over here for sex tourism. On more than one occasion in Bangkok, Elise and I have found ourselves at a restaurant awkwardly surrounded on all sides by so-called sexpats (that is, a sixty-something-year-old western man with a twenty-something-year-old Thai girl – who may or may not even speak English).

And how’s this for irony: as we all know, westerners generally like to (arrogantly) consider themselves the most civilized people on Earth. At the same time (and much to our surprise), Thailand is an exceedingly civilized and developed country – in our opinion much more so than many countries in Eastern Europe and South America. Despite this, Thailand is notorious for being a place where people can go to engage in exceedingly, let’s say, uncivilized activities, and some of the most uncivilized behaviour in all of Thailand takes place on Khao San Road, aka ground zero for western tourism in Bangkok!!

-G

Food Network hopefuls

Elise giving 'er on the pestle and mortar

The age-old battle of curries: green vs. red

That is one GIANT buddha in Chiang Mai!!

Hmmm.....massage?

The people parade on Khao San Road