It was Oksana who brought up the P90X program and wondered if it was something we could do at home.  I’d heard of it before, years ago.  I remembered it as an intense workout program designed for people who are already considered “fit” (whatever that means), one that uses small weights and body resistance for most of its exercises.  We did some research and I warned her that it would be a very intense program with a large time commitment – at least if we were going to treat it seriously.  She said she was game if I was.

So, 13 weeks ago – 90 days ago, to be exact – we started in on the P90X program.  Today is our official end date.

Here’s my “before” photo, which they encourage you to take so that you can see your progress (and one which, just so you know, I have a very hard time posting online!)

The after photos are posted down near the end of this entry.  Everything else is my thoughts on the P90X program.

What is P90X?

At its simplest, the P90X program is two things:  A fitness program and a nutrition plan.  Follow their instructions to the letter for 90 days and, they assure you, you’ll be “in the best shape of your life.”

Let’s look at both parts:

The Fitness Program

The P90X fitness plan comes on a bunch of DVDs and is broken down into 12 different exercise routines (plus one “getting started” DVD, which is freely available online.)  Every day of the week, you do at least one of the exercise sessions – which last anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes – based on their pre-set schedule.

One of their selling points is that the P90X program is built around “muscle confusion.”  Right when your body starts to become accustomed to a particular series of exercises, they switch things up and give you new exercises to do.  Because of this (supposedly), you never plateau and therefore continue to build muscle all the way through the program.

No matter your fitness level, some of these exercises are hard.  Not only does each session target very specific muscle groups, it hits you with exercises that work the same muscles groups over and over and over again on the same day.  Often you’re told to keep doing a set – usually during pushups and pull-ups – until exhaustion… and a few minutes later you’ll be asked to do it again.  I don’t care if you’re the Hulk and can do 1000 pushups; your muscles will be just as sore as mine when you collapse on 1001!

Having embarked on weight training routines before (not to mention playing ultimate Frisbee for the first time after a long winter absence from the sport), I knew that the muscle fatigue and pain from the first few days would probably be so bad that we’d be in danger of quitting the program before really getting started.  I recommended to Oksana that we sample each of the sessions first – essentially just step through them without using weights.

For two or three weeks, we did just that.  And it still hurt!  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I couldn’t even get through some of the warm up exercises for a few of the sessions (I’m looking at you, Plyo!)  I don’t think I made it to the half way point in any of them during the first week.  The second week found me giving up at around the two-thirds mark.  On the third week – the last week before we actually planned to begin! – I forced myself to step through the full routines, even if that meant pausing the tape while I caught my breath.  As humbling as it was, prepping that way was a good idea.  We eased into the soreness and it was bearable.

Briefly, here are the exercises and a few comments on each:

Chest and Back
Mostly one hour of bouncing between pushups and pull-ups, without a break.  Chest exercises have always come easy (well, easier) for me, so I expected to do okay here.  Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how many ways there are to punish the body with different forms of pushups.  Standard, Military, Wide, Decline, Diamond, Divebombers.  The Diamond was particularly difficult, as you make a diamond shape on the floor with your index fingers and thumbs, and then lower your chest down on top of it before pushing up again.

Plyometrics
While chest exercises are easier for me, Oksana excels at ones that work her legs (it comes from 8 years of ski school when she was a kid.)  Plyometrics is “jump training,” working on those fast-twitch muscles.  Imagine an hour of jumping around like a rabbit, intercut with lunges and crouches.  This was the one that initially killed me on the warm up, going from a deep couch to standing up straight with your arms over your head… 30 times in rapid succession.

A small anecdote about Plyo:  About the only thing I remember from the P90X ads I saw years ago was an exercise where you stand in front of a chair and alternate swinging each leg over the back of it for one minute.  Swing Kicks, they call them.  “I could do that!” I thought.  “If the whole program is that kind of stuff, sign me up!”

In fact, the swing kicks aren’t all that hard… by themselves.  But when you get to them, they come right after three other cardio-intensive exercises:  Jump Squats (squat low, then jump), Run Stance Squats (same thing, different stance), and Airbourne Heismans (hop from one leg to the other, stopping in place at the peak of each.)  And then, once you’ve done a set of all four exercises… you do them all AGAIN.

It was a tossup between Plyo and Core Synergistics for the session I dreaded the most.

Shoulders and Arms
Almost every exercise in this session uses free weights (dumbbells.)  Shoulder presses, lots and lots of curls, and some tricep presses.  Pure weightlifting here.

Yoga X
The longest of the sessions, Yoga X, runs 90 minutes.  I never thought much of yoga until trying this program.  The amount of strength and flexibility needed to do most of the balance postures was amazing.  I’m happy to say that, though I was falling over left and right at the beginning (and quivering in place with muscle spasms when I didn’t), by the end of 90 days, I was able to do almost every one of the exercises.

Kenpo X
The Kenpo X routine is a martial arts-themed cardio workout.  Lots of air punches, kicks, and blocks.  Surprisingly, the two years of Tae Kwon Do I did almost 20 years ago did a great job preparing me for this routine.  Once my cardio had improved enough to get through it, I looked forward to days with Kenpo because it really was easy for me.

Stretch
At least once a week, you’ll have a “rest or stretch” day.  I never opted to simply rest, instead always forcing myself to at least do the stretch routine.  Still takes an hour out of your day, but it’s very low impact.  I’m sure my flexibility has improved because of it.

Core Synergistics
Thankfully, Core doesn’t come around all that often, because it’s freaking hard.  Not so much because it targets the core, but because it’s relentless during the session.  Superman/Banana, Bow-to-Boat, Plank-to-Chataranga Run (dear God!), Squat Run, Steam Engine, Plank-to-Chataranga Iso… it just never lets up.  There’s also a couple crazy styles of pushups in there, too.  Sphinx pushups, Prison pushups, Reach High and Under pushups, Walking pushups…

Core and Pylo: The only two routines that, at times, left me laying face down on the floor gasping for air.

Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps
By the time I got to this session (week 5), I thought my pushups had improved.  Ha.  No.  This takes it to a whole new level with Slow-Motion, Fast, Plange, 2-speed Twitch, Side-to-side, Clap or Plyo pushups (seriously, look at this plyo pushup!), 1-Arm Balance, and the dreaded 1-Arm pushups.  (The 1-Arm pushups were one of very, very few exercises I was never able to do.  I doubt it’s strength-related; I just couldn’t figure out the proper form…)

Back and Biceps
Back and Biceps is a lot like the Shoulders and Arms routine, only it’s targeting just the biceps with free weights.  Interspersed with lots of pull-ups, of course.  Wide, Reverse, Switching, Towel, and Corncob.  You know, all those things you can do with a chin-up bar that you’ve never considered before.
Ab Ripper X
Ab Ripper X is only 16 minutes long.  Sounds easy, right?  Nope!  It may be only 16 minutes, but if you end up doing the entire routine – which took me quite a while to build up to, let me tell you! – you’ll end up doing 11 different sets of crunches, sit-ups, bicycles, and leg raises.  Some 450 repetitions, all told.

As if that weren’t bad enough, you do Ab Ripper X three times a week, immediately after the weight training sessions.

Cardio
The Cardio routine is a quick 45-minute fat burner.  Though it’s not recycled content, it is made up of exercises you see elsewhere in the program (a little yoga, kenpo, plyo and core.)

Cardio is the one routine that is actually ignored in the “normal” P90X fitness schedule.  It was included for people who are less interested in putting on muscle and more focused on losing weight.  There are also instructions for adding cardio on top of the other exercises, which they call the “Doubles” program.  I did Doubles for the last phase, which I’ll talk about later on.

The Nutrition Plan

…has the feel of a tacked-on, poorly thought-out addendum to the fitness program.  We tried to make it work, but after two or three confusing weeks of wrestling with the many contradictions within it, we gave up and created our own diet plan.

The P90X program actually has two ways to monitor your food: By meal or by portion.  The meal plan, for instance, gives you a bunch of preset menus and recipes and expects that you plan your meals that way.  The portion approach seemed more flexible to us, so that’s what we decided to do.  Very basically, you could reduce it down to a bunch of checkboxes.  Eat this many protein foods, this many dairy, this many carbs, and check off a box for each when you do.  When you run out of boxes, you’ve run out of food for the day.

The surprisingly thing for us – and this really did blow me away – was the quantity of food we were not only allowed to have, but were encouraged to eat!  Thinking this was a going to be a diet – as I did, before we began – was the wrong way to look at it.  It was a nutritional program designed to give your body the energy needed to get through the workouts and recover from them afterwards.

For example, let’s take the Phase 1, “fat shredder,” diet plan intended for me (and my body weight):

7 Proteins (100 calories each)
3 Dairy (120 calories each)
1 Fruit (100 calories)
4 Vegetables (50 calories)
1 Fats (120 calories)
1 Carbs (200 calories)
3 Condiments (50 calories)
and 3 snacks:  A “double,” a protein bar, and a recovery shake (100 calories, 200 for double)

My target was 2,400 calories for the day and it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going to have a hard time eating all that food!  Oksana and I both had to adjust to things we weren’t used to, like eating every two hours (otherwise we’d wind up needed to consume 1400 or some other ridiculously large number of calories for dinner.)

Still, that’s a good thing, right?  It’s hard enough sticking to an exercise program, let alone a calorie-deficit diet, too.  We cut out almost all sweets and fats from our diets, instead substituting flavored fat-free yogurt for dessert.  We at tons of protein.  Grilled chicken breast, Virginia ham, oven-roasted turkey breast, and fish became our go-to meals throughout the day.  The results were subtle, but reassuring.  Oksana was the first one to notice, after a couple weeks, that she was no longer sleepy in the afternoons.  At all.

I had never eaten egg whites or protein shakes in my life, but I turned to them because it was the easiest way to get pure protein into my system without having to eat so damn much.  Protein bars became our special treat for the day, but they’re so expensive here in Australia, that it was cheaper to order 12 cases of Cliff Builder’s Bars from REI in the States and pay to have them shipped here.  There are constant reminders to down a recovery drink after most exercise routines (and club-you-over-the-head hints on where you can buy the P90X brand) and we looked forward to those, too.  We found a powdered chocolate milk drink, Sustagen Sport, on the grocery store shelves here that almost exactly matched the nutritional info of the P90X drink.  It really was like drinking chocolate milk, which was a fine reward after a hard workout.

As much as we liked some of the P90X’s diet plan’s effects on our bodies, however, for whatever reason it just wasn’t working for us.  We did a lot of research online and chose to do something else that was much better for us in the long run.

The long and the short of it was that we got apps on our iPhones and input everything we ate into them.  We were counting calories, yes, but more importantly we were counting grams of protein, carbs, and fats.

Two things were of the utmost importance to us.  1)  Don’t exceed the maximum number of calories in a given day (2200, in my case), and 2) Maintain a strict ratio of Protein, Carbs, and Fats.  Since we were interested in slimming down (rather than bulking up our muscles), the ratio we were targeting was 40/40/20.

With an app doing all the heavy lifting for us, it was surprisingly easy to maintain the diet.  Oksana would prepare her food for the next day after dinner and take it with her to work the next morning.  I simply raided the fridge every couple hours.  Near dinner time, we’d ask each other, “How are you doing on carbs today?” or “How much protein do you need?”  We’d open our iPhone apps and check our Nutrients Pie Chart to see which way we were skewing.  More often than not, we’d base or dinner decisions around what we needed to round out our ratios.

It seemed to work far better for us than the P90X Nutrition Plan.

Milestones

Day to day, it’s so hard to see the results from any exercise regimen or diet.  I know I’m in better shape now, 90 days after beginning this program, but it’s practically impossible to see the changes on a daily basis.  Am I stronger today than I was yesterday?  Am I slimmer?  If I can’t tell, why am I putting my body through all this, anyway?

Dealing with these thoughts and feelings made me more sympathetic towards both anorexics and those muscle-bound goons who can’t lower their arms.  When you can’t see the difference from one day to the next, how do you know when you’ve reached your goal?  (Hint: Taking measurements, before and after photos, tracking weights and reps for every exercise; all things that the P90X program encourages you to do!)  The hell of it is that you don’t even feel all that much different, either.  I mean, objectively I can see that running up a flight of stairs doesn’t wind me as much as it did before, but just sitting around?  Or walking to the store?  I can’t say I feel any healthier than I did before…

Every so often, however, we notice something about ourselves that confirmed that the program was indeed working.  It’s hard to describe how reassuring and encouraging these milestones were.  I remember…

…the first noticeable change in musculature, maybe 2 or 3 weeks into the program, was in my front deltoids.  One day I just lifted up my arm and noticed that the front of my shoulder seemed… bigger.  And not soft.  I thought it might have been my imagination, but I asked Oksana if she noticed anything when I did… this, and then I lifted my arm up without flexing.  She said, “Whoa!” and pointed right at my delts.

…the first time I got all the way through the Ab Ripper routine.  At first, I couldn’t come close to doing all 25 reps in each set.  Then, in the middle of week 8, I did them all, but only by pausing the video to rest in between sets.  Week 9 was a glorious week, because that was the first time I did the whole routine, all 450 or so reps, without pausing!  (It was also a terrible, terrible week, because from then on, I knew I was capable of doing the whole routine.  No more slacking!)

…watching my pushups improve.  On week one, I was able to do 25 pushups (three weeks earlier, when I was just trying out the program, I only did 16.)  At the end of 90 days, I did 52 in my post-fitness test.  Even more impressive than that, to me, was the steady progression of almost all pushup types.  Here’s a chart:

…the first time I completed the Plyo routine, fully, without pause.  Even though my legs were so wobbly that I could hardly stand, even though I was drench head to toe with sweat, even though I couldn’t even whisper a “hurray,” I felt pretty good about that one.  Not only because I had collapsed on the floor doing the same routine a week before (which was a good idea, since my heart rate was up at 175bpm at the time), but also because we had walked 12km earlier in the day and I was still able to kill it at Plyo!

…a war of inches fought with Yoga X.  Parts of the yoga routine are incredibly strenuous.  Fairly quickly I was doing pushups between each of the vinyasas and downward dogs, but the repetitions just wear you out.

Plank, upward dog, pushup, downward dog.
Plank, upward dog, pushup, downward dog, warrior one.
Plank, upward dog, pushup, downward dog, warrior one, warrior two, warrior one.
Plank, upward dog, pushup, downward dog, warrior one, warrior two, reverse warrior, warrior two, warrior one.
Plank, upward dog, pushup, downward dog, warrior one, warrior two, reverse warrior, triangle pose, reverse warrior, warrior two, warrior one…

You get the picture.  By the time we arrived at the really difficult poses (like Twisting Half Moon), you could have mixed a can of paint by strapping it to one of my thighs.  And, as I discovered sometime on our backpacking trip, there’s a muscle in my lower back (left hand side) that always seems to be clenched up tight.  While it doesn’t prevent me from doing any strength training, it did severely limit my flexibility on certain stretches (seated hamstring stretches, mostly.)

By the end, however, there were very few Yoga exercises I couldn’t do.  (Crane pose, for instance, I could never really hold for very long – a few seconds at most.)  I was especially proud of the times I held Wheel as long as the people in the video.

…when we left town for the weekend to celebrate our 10^th wedding anniversary in a fancy hotel.  This was the only time we threw our diet plan out the window (and shot it and lit it on fire before it hit the ground), but I made sure the hotel had a fitness center, so we wouldn’t miss a workout.  Previously, we had done all our exercises in our living room, without the benefit of a mirror to check our form.  As I was going through the warm up routine in front the gym’s big wall-to-wall mirrors, I noticed how defined my calves and thighs had become.  Each squat and toe raise brought the muscles out in sharp relief.  That was when I decided that Plyo really was worth all that effort…

…when, three weeks before the end of the program, I discovered that there was a weekly pickup game of ultimate Frisbee.  I haven’t played in years, but I was very curious to see what the Australia scene was like.   Oksana and I walked over to the field one Wednesday night to check it out.  We both ended up playing.

I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up, but I shouldn’t have been.  I ran for an hour and forty-five minutes, matching up with the fastest people on the field – some literally half my age – and never once subbed out.  We even played continuous-style at the end.

I had been doing the cardio “doubles” for awhile before the ultimate game, but I was still amazed at how well the P90X program prepared me for a game of essentially wind sprints.  I felt goooood out there… at least until it was over and we had to walk 2 miles to get back home.  My hips were sore that night and my legs ached most of the rest of the week.  Which was to be expected, I suppose.  Running works muscles in a very different way.

Failures and Disappointments

I can’t highlight the milestones without at least mentioning some of the disappointments we faced in the program.

• Our apartment doesn’t lend itself well to the installation of chin-up bars.  No, not even those ready-made, in-the-doorframe varieties.  Which is okay, because the P90X program shows you how to substitute resistance bands for both the weightlifting and the chin-up routines.  We bought a set of three bands and, using some nylon webbing from our backpacks, attached them to one of the hinges on our bedroom door.  We had just enough room in the hallway to do the substitute chin-up routines.There’s no doubt that we saw improvements when using the straps.  I’m sure my back is stronger now, as I can do many more reps than I could at the beginning.  Unfortunately, we learned that working with the bands doesn’t translate very well into doing actual chin-ups.  When we had access to the fitness center, we used the chin-up bar instead of bands and our performance was disappointing, to say the least.  (I was only able to do 2 wide-grip pull-ups and a handful of reverse-grip before I was completely wiped out.)  It seems that pulling on resistance bands only make you better at pulling on resistance bands.
• I still can’t do a one-arm pushup, which is especially annoying since I can bang out 50 normal ones without breaking a sweat.  (Okay, maybe a little sweat.)  Oh, I can do the “modified move,” where you have your knees touching the ground – and I actually saw my reps increase quite a bit on that exercise, too – but it’s just annoying that I can’t get these spindly arms of mine to do even one of the more impressive kind.
• That stupid Crane pose in Yoga!  I don’t know if it’s wrist strength or what, but I have a very hard time keeping my body balanced perfectly atop my arms.  I tell myself that I could do better if I wasn’t already exhausted from all the vinyasas I’m forced do before that pose comes around, but I’m too scared to try it when I’m rested.  What if I still fall on my face?  What will my excuse be then?
• Core Synergistics never really got any easier.  It may be because they move from exercise to exercise so fast in that particular routine, but it’s more likely because you only get to do Core Synergistics during 3 of the 13 weeks.  I don’t think my body ever got used to doing some of those crazy exercises.
• I still don’t have six-pack abs.  That was the one thing I really wanted out of this program, too!  It’s why I switched diets to eliminate more fat and carbs.  It’s why I did the doubles program at the end, adding a second hour to my workout routine four times a week.  Oh, I lost a lot of fat, there’s no doubting that, but what’s left is stubbornly clinging to my midsection and it’s stupidly concealing the results of all the core work I’ve done!I’m calling it baby fat.  Because it weighs about as much as one.
• Our ten-year anniversary really screwed with our diet.  We decided that we were notgoing to calorie count that weekend and just enjoy ourselves.  A seafood buffet, trip to McDonald’s, room service, Amarula and ice cream and eggs Benedict for breakfast… let’s just say we went a little overboard.  I still logged my food (Oksana was too afraid to do so), and I clocked one day with over 4000 calories.  One glorious day.
  
  Once we’d broken the barrier on calories and alcohol once, it was easier to do again later.  We went out for hamburgers and a Corona one night with friends.  We polished off that bottle of Amarula.  Oh, we made it work within the guidelines of our nutritional ratios, but it still felt like cheating.If not for that weekend, we could say that we committed ourselves to the P90X program, wholly, for the entire 90 days.  And though we never missed a single workout, as it stands now, we’ll always wonder if our results might have been just a little bit betterif we hadn’t given in to the calories and alcohol…
• Mostly, this has been the story of my journey through P90X, but I’ll mention something that Oksana struggled with here.  Weight.  We weighed ourselves every morning and over the course of 90 days, hers barely fluctuated at all.  That isn’t to say she wasn’t seeing some great results!  I dropped over 20 pounds in the course of this program, but she was the one noticing that her clothes weren’t fitting any more.  Her belt was being pulled tighter and tighter.  Really, the physical transformation was obvious as she swapped fat for muscle, but that damn scale wouldn’t budge!  We both know we shouldn’t be using the scale to judge our progress, but we just can’t help it.  Unlike something as nebulous as “strength” or “endurance,” “weight” is a metric you can measure every day.

Results

Here are some of my “after” photos:

(There are more at the very bottom of this post)

We wanted to do measurements throughout the program, mostly to be reassured that we were making progress.  But it’s actually a pain in the ass, so we only did it once about a month in.  Here are my starting and ending measurements:

Probably the most visual indication of my progress is in the statistics I copied down after each exercise.  I was religious in recording these numbers and always tried to do at least one more rep (or add more weight) than the time before.  I hand-wrote them in a notebook, so I can’t easily create Excel pie charts for them all, but I did take the time to input the ones that seemed indicative of my progress.  Here again are the pushups:

You can see clear progress in the Ab Ripper routine, too:

And, of course, there’s my weight:

All in all, I’m very satisfied with where the program has taken me.  90 days isn’t too much of a time investment to slim down and put the amount of muscle I have.  It would be a great thing to do in the spring, to get ready for a summer wearing a swimsuit.

That said, I wish I had been able to trim off as much body fat as the advertisements and testimonials for the program seemed to indicate I would.  (By the scale, I lost 23.2 pounds, but my body fat percentage only dropped from 21.4% to 17.4%.  Good lord, what do you have to do to get down to the 6%-10% range that the really ‘cut’ athletes maintain?!)

It may be because I’m not otherwise very active at all.  Besides the daily workout routine, I’m basically sitting in front of my computer all day.  Or, it may be my age that’s to blame.  I just turned 40 and I’m guessing that a person in their 20s would respond better to the exercises.  As much as I hate to admit that, it’s probably true.

But, really, I’m not complaining.  I don’t know if I’m in “the best shape of my life” at 40, but if I’m not, I’m very, very close.

Lessons Learned

We learned a lot doing the P90X program.  Some of what we learned are truly life lessons; I fully believe that the knowledge we gained these past 90 days, about ourselves and about nutrition and exercise in general, will improve the rest of our lives.

Weight
Weight is an incredibly poor indication of progress in fitness.  You’d be hard pressed to find a metric that is even close to being as bad.  Less you think I’m simply reiterating something I read online, let me assure you that this opinion comes after some extremely precise monitoring of my own food intake and frequent weighings.

With the iPhone app I was using, I can look back over all the food I’ve eaten.  I know what my ratios of protein to carbs to fat is for every day.  I weighed myself first thing every morning, at the same time, in the same clothes.  At first, I couldn’t find any correlation between my weight and the amount of food I was eating, not even when I accounted for the exercising.

How in the world could I have a calorie deficit multiple days in a row (sometimes a rather large one) and yet somehow be gaining weight every morning?  The answer turned out to be water retention.  Or, rather, sodium levels.  Eat a salty dinner, you’ll weigh more in the morning.  Doesn’t matter if you burned 2500 calories working out; if you eat a lot of salt – or salty foods – during the day, you’ll put on water weight.

(I tracked 2558 calories burned on the day I played ultimate – a day in which I only consumed 2045 calories – and the next morning the scale told me I had gained .2 pounds!  Two days after playing ultimate, I somehow put on 3.6 pounds between one morning and the next.  I checked back over my sodium levels and they were normal – perhaps even low.  What caused the biggest weight increase I had seen over the entire 90 days?  A little research seems to indicate that muscle soreness can also cause water retention…)

I knew that weight is a poor indicator of fitness before this.  Yet even now, I’m perversely happy that I lost over 20 pounds in the last three months.  Why?  I’m pretty damn sure I lost even more than that just by getting sick in Bolivia, and that only took a week.  Why can’t I ignore my weight?  Why can’t we all?  Because we’re trying to see the changes and it’s the easiest of all the physical metrics to measure.

Nutrition
Carbohydrates are consumed for fuel during workouts, protein is for rebuilding muscle afterwards.  Fats are great for storing energy for later.  That’s a gross over simplification, but close enough for government work when you’re deciding whether or not to decimate that bag of Fig Newtons.

Because we’ve been tracking the amount of protein, carbs, and fat in every item of food we eat, Oksana and I have become much better at gauging the nutritional content of food.  We can usually tell, just by looking at a product on a store shelf, if it’s something we want to “budget” into our daily diet.  Pancakes?  Sure, but no potatoes with dinner tonight, then.  Cashews?  No thanks, I’ve eaten enough grams of fat today already.

I’ve always known that McDonald’s meals are high in calories, but 550 calories for a Big Mac doesn’t sound so bad if I have a calorie budget of 2400 per day, right?  What blew me away, though, was the amount of fat and carbs in both the Big Mac and the fries you’re likely to get on the side.  Eating just one extra value meal blew our ratio so out of proportion, we’d have to drink a dozen protein shakes to get it back together!

Not that I’m swearing off McDonald’s, mind you.  It’ll always be a guilty pleasure.

I knew we were really getting a handle on our protein/carbs/fats when the iPhone app we were using started to malfunction.  At the end of one day, my ratio looked wrong; I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but it just didn’t seem like I had eaten that many more carbs that protein.  Nor did I think my calorie total should have been so high.  In reviewing the items of food I’d eaten, I realized that some of the entries had inexplicably changed.  The calories count had doubled, the numbers of grams were all wrong.  It was incredibly frustrating that the app was broken, but I was impressed that I was keyed into my food well enough to know that the results I was seeing were wrong.

It’s that kind of knowledge that will be useful going forward.  Makes picking up a Snickers bar at the checkout line a lot harder, though, let me tell you.

Exercise
Counting calories works both ways.  Sure, you count the calories you consume, but you really begin to notice how things work when you also count the calories you burn.  Most of the exercise routines in P90X burn anywhere from 400-600 calories.  If you walk for a couple miles throughout the day, you burn a couple hundred more.  It’s not that hard to offset even an evil McDonald’s meal if you’re doing some sort of exercise every day.

By putting every calorie burning activity into the same app that tracks our nutritional intake, we were able to make informed decisions on what we could and could not eat.  That night after ultimate Frisbee?  We stopped at Subway on the way home and split a foot-long sub (we could have shared four of them and still been under budget!)

When I was doing doubles, adding a 45-minute cardio routine to my normal workouts, I could have eaten all the desserts I wanted.

Track your calories burned, reward yourself when you do a good job.  Don’t exceed your overall calorie budget and you won’t gain weight.  It’s as simple as that.  (Well, except for the water retention thing.)

Mental vs Physical
This is maybe the most important lesson I learned doing the P90X program.

The hard part isn’t physical, it’s mental.

I’ll bet you that everyone who undergoes a huge physical transformation, whether it’s a dramatic weight loss, buffing up through weight lifting, or running a marathon or whatever… I’ll bet every one of those people made a decision that they were going to stick to it and see it through to the end no matter what.

I did that.  I told myself before we began that if I were to going to do this, I was going to do it all the way.  No excuses, no cheating, no quitting.  Once I committed myself, I’d make myself do plyo at 2am before going to bed if I had to.  If I was in pain from my waist down after ultimate (as I was), I would take some ibuprofen – codeine if I had to – and kick my way through the next day’s Kenpo routine.

I never skipped a workout.  I did every warm up and cool down.  On the days where you’re “allowed” to rest instead of stretch?  I stretched.  Not because I was physically strong, but because I was mentally strong.

Want to change your body?  The only thing you need to be is determined.

Final Thoughts and Recommendations

While the program itself may have a few flaws, the P90X videos are extremely well done.  With 12 different videos, there’s enough variety to keep you from getting bored… at least until week 10 or so, by which time you’ve heard every stupid joke a dozen times.

By then, though, your attention will be focused on how well-designed the videos are.  A progress bar lets you know exactly how much time you have remaining until the end of each workout.  Distinctive sounds announce the beginning and end of each exercise.  Timers or rep counters count down until each exercise is over.  Even the music is paced exactly right for each exercise to get you into the same rhythm as the instructors.  Someone put a lot of work into these videos and it shows.

As much as I would like to recommend the program, it’s not for everyone.  You wouldn’t want to launch into P90X from a sedentary lifestyle or if you’re too overweight.  There’s a fitness test you can use to gauge if you’re ready, though.  It’s a free download.  It takes about 40 minutes to complete, but even just looking it over may be enough to tell you if the program is right for you.

Cost

You can pick up the P90X DVDs and fitness/nutrition guides for a little more than $100 (much less on eBay, probably), but there are a lot of hidden costs if you’re planning to do the entire 90 days.

First off, if you don’t already have the exercise equipment, you may need to buy some.

We bought a 20kg (about 40lb) dumbbell set at Kmart for $60.  A few weeks later, we went back and bought another set because I needed more weight on some exercises and we were tired of constantly putting on and taking off plates for each exercise.

You’ll also need a yoga mat for, well, yoga, but also for the warm up and cool down stretches.  $10.

We bought a set of three resistance bands with comfy handles for $15 or $20.

You might be able to take advantage of a chin up bar, too, but we skipped that.  Skipped the optional yoga blocks, too.  $10-20.

So, what are we up to now?  Maybe $250.  Not too shabby.

Hang on to your credit care there a sec, though.  There’s more.

The food is expensive.  We went from eating cheap packaged crap (not really) to chicken, turkey, pork, lean beef, shrimp, and fish.  I don’t have an estimate for you, but our grocery bill definitely went up, up up.

On the flip side, we almost completely stopped eating out and, except for a couple of Coronas and a bottle of Amarula, we didn’t spend anything on alcohol during the same time frame.  It could be that that offset the more expensive groceries in our budget and we didn’t spend any more than usual on our food.  (We tracked all that, of course, but Oksana hasn’t had time to crunch the numbers yet.)

The biggest expense, by far, was not a monetary one at all.  It was time.

The shortest daily routine is an hour long, but most come closer 75 minutes.  Getting into workout clothes, pausing the videos to change weights, taking a shower afterwards… it may be safe to assume that 2 hours out your day – all of your days! – will be devoted to the program.

If that weren’t bad enough, there’s the food preparation.  Oh, it doesn’t take too long to snack on a couple hundred grams of chicken while you’re doing something else, but it takes plenty of time to shop for it and cook it and prepare it.  Even when all the food is cut up and sitting in the fridge, Oksana needs almost half an hour each evening to prepare the food she’s taking to work the next day.  Planning and executing a rigorous diet takes a surprising amount of work.

Fortunately, I had plenty of time to devote to such things, although… although… many other things on my to-do list fell by the wayside.  Although I haven’t stopped creating things for our travel website, I’ve slacked off greatly.  That was in very large part because of P90X.  I may only have spent a couple hours a day actually doing stuff for the program, but it was always on my mind.  I had a difficult time switching gears to work on anything creative my focus was aimed at getting fit.

And can I take a second here to point out a person who should really be commended for her mental fortitude?  Oksana not only did the same program as me, she did it while working full time!  On weekdays, she had just enough time to commute to work, come home, do her workout, eat dinner, maybe watch an episode of Breaking Bad, and then go to bed.  She rearranged her routine so that the easiest session (Stretch) would come around on Mondays so we could still go bowling or see a movie if we wanted.  Sometimes she managed to do the workouts before leaving for work in the morning.  Weekends were spent trying to catch up on everything else she couldn’t do during the week.

And she never missed a workout, either.  That’s dedication.  That’s willpower.

What’s Next?

So what now?  That’s a really good question.  For one thing, we have to work on our tans.  I mean, did you see those before and after pictures?

Seriously, though, Oksana and I are painfully aware that if we don’t maintain the same level of exercise and diet, we’ll rapidly fall back to where we started.  On the one hand, that’s so depressing that we’re talking about doing another round (P180X!)  On the other hand, after three months, it sure would be nice to skip a few workouts and order a pizza.

For tonight, we’re going out to celebrate!  It’s my birthday and we’re not going to worry about exercising or calorie counting or anything like that.  We’re going to eat some tasty burgers with our friends and then go check out The Mana Bar – something I’ve wanted to do ever since I first read about it on the Penny Arcade Report.

After that, we’re probably going to take a week off and eat out any time we feel like it.  Maybe have some ice cream for dessert when we get home!

Come mid-September, though, I think we’ll be hitting the weights again.  There won’t actually be time to do a whole ‘nother round of 90 days, though, because we’re planning to travel around Queensland in November.  But maybe we can get in a good six weeks…

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View the same video in high-definition (720p) on Youtube.

This video, of course, continues where our first Salar de Uyuni video left off.

With everything I’ve got on my to-do list while we’re living in Australia, I haven’t had as much time as I’d like for editing more travel videos. The biggest hurdle has been recording new voice-overs.  Oksana is usually off working for 40+ hours a week, so there’s not much time for us to collaborate on the next big show-and-tell.  I realized, however, that I had a set of voice-overs still on my hard drive — the ones we recorded last year during our Bolivian salt flat tour.  ’Bout time I followed up with the second part of that fantastic tour…!

It wasn’t until I started editing that I realized how little footage I shot during day two and day three of that tour.  Lots of great photos, very little video.  I suspect it was because we didn’t have a reliable power source until the tour was over and I was worried about draining my batteries.  Made the edit a little harder to pull off, but thankfully, I was able to supplement it with extra photos (as well as some of Wendy and Dusty’s videos.)  I trust the beauty of the landscape still comes through.

Show Notes:

• The original Salar de Uyuni video (part 1)
• Red Planet Expeditions
• Wendy and Dusty’s travel blog, Roam the Planet
• Aurélie Parisot & Rémy Dahan’s travel blog, NEWZ FROM THE WORLD (in French)
• Our Smugmug photo gallery for Bolivia

The following is a transcript of the above video for Google’s benefit (ignore it, watch the video instead!)

Postcard Valet
Travel Podcast
Episode 21 – Salar de Uyuni (part 2)

In comparison to being out on the Salar at sunset with a lightning storm coming in, the next two days of the tour were pretty tame in comparison, but any other time it would have been a fantastic experience of its own.

We went on a tour actually twice.  The first time we got really sick and had to bail out after the first day.  And then the second time we went a couple weeks later; we did the whole three-day tour.

It was a good thing that Arlo and Oksana didn’t come with us, because there were no bathrooms along the route – at all!

We are not tourists, we are travelers, and we like adventure.  We don’t like when everything is planned for us. We like to do what we want to do.

The driver or the guide tells you, “Well, get out of the car and just have a walk for ten minutes, take your pictures, then come back to the car.”  We drove like 50 kilometers, just stopped there, “Have a look at this wonderful rock!” or whatever, and just like, aw, fuck, I hate that.

Getting involved in a tour means that you don’t have liberty – you’re not independent to go where you want to go.  Do you want to spend like 2 or 3 hours in this place to do this stuff and you can’t – I mean, that’s what we thought about the tour!

For two days we drove through the high Bolivian deserts, through amazing scenery that you can’t see anywhere else.

And the road, different destinations…  ¿Cómo se dice?  ¿Paisajes?  Sí.  This is, “scenes.”

At times, I was dozing off in the back of the SUV and I’d wake up every five or ten minutes and look around and see a completely different landscape.

We couldn’t believe how different the landscape was.  It was like, sometimes you’re at a lake that’s red, sometimes you’re at a lake that’s green, sometimes you feel like you’re walking on the moon somewhere and then there’s flamingos.  It was the craziest trip I have ever done in my life.

We would be driving through an empty desert and then come across huge rock formations that seemed like they grew up out of the ground.

In the middle of the desert there are hundreds of giant rocks that were carved away by the wind and exposure.  Some looked like trees, some looked like mushrooms, and just let your imagination run and you can see pretty much any shape you like there.

Oh, and then at one point in the trip, we popped a tire in our SUV.  And we had to replace the tire and that was actually was quite interesting to start, but then got scary because the jack started to sink, along with the car, into the sand and our tour guide was quick to react and he grabbed the other tire and jammed it underneath the car to stop it from sinking all the way.  And he dug a hole and we filled it with rocks and put the jack back on top of the rocks and then dug another hole to actually get the tire out.  And then so he ended up changing the tire of the car under the ground with a hole dug out in order to get it working.  At the same time there was a giant storm coming behind us, so we were…

…That could have really been bad news.

That could have been bad news if our tour guide wasn’t so quick to react..

For me it was really nice because I saw, since like 1 or 2 years ago, the red lagoon in the best way.  Really really red, with lots of flamingos.  It was really good for them as well, because, you know, they are photographers.

We saw 1200 flamingos!  It was crazy, like, everywhere: Flamingos!

And the mountain reflected in the lake; it’s wonderful for me.

We would come around a corner and our guide would say, “Well, it’s lunch time. Let’s stop here.”  And he’d pick the most scenic, majestic place you’ve ever seen and they’d break out lunch and serve it on rocks for us before we got back in the SUV and continued on our way.

The rest of the trip was… it was a little lonely without our Alaskans, but we had a great time.  We stopped and stayed at each site, wherever we were, as long as we wanted and we couldn’t believe how different the landscape was.

Yeah, at one point we were… we had just left some mountain and lake and now we’re in the middle of the desert and there’s no wildlife anywhere and it’s just sand.  And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it just starts hailing.  And within seconds, the entire desert turned to white and it was just the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.  I can’t believe we’re in the middle of a white desert in the middle of nowhere!

4,500 meters, around that, and the temperature is really cold.  I think the temperature should be something like… I don’t know, like 10 or 5 degrees, but it was really windy and when we were out of the car to take pictures?  Well, we just got in the car in like two minutes afterwards.

For me it’s very cold, but I enjoy it anyway.

All the afternoon was bright, like blue skies with clouds, which makes the scenery just amazing.

On the second night, we stayed in a hotel of sorts – kind of more like a concrete bunker, really, but while we were there, we went out to see the stars and we had the most perfectly clear night.  Again, at high altitude, there’s a lot less atmosphere to get in the way and when we looked up, you could see, actually, colors in the Milky Way band across the sky.  And when I took some pictures, it was the first time I’ve ever seen any kind of color show up on starlight photos.

The last morning, we got up very early and left about 4:30 in the morning.  We arrived at our highest point, 4,900 meters, where there were some active steam vents and fumaroles.

And what we saw there were thermal vents and the strangest blue light.  And it was foggy and steam everywhere and it really felt like I was on the moon, not on planet Earth.

There was a steam vent put in by an old mining company, too.  It was hot at the base, but you could put your hand in, higher up and we took turns jumping through that, just for fun.

(woo-hoo!)

Our guide had just gotten done telling us about an unfortunate tourist that had slipped into one of the 200°C boiling mud pits and then said, “Well let’s go walk around them; just be careful where you step!”

(Wait over there.  It’s not really dangerous. Con cuidado, Soledad.  Eso.)

When we were walking across there, there were ledges that were this big that he was asking us to step on and he would say, “Oh, don’t worry about that mud pit so much. It’s only 70° C.”

Right after saying that, he would jump from one little patch of dirt to the next, right over a boiling puddle of mud!

(La boca del diablo.  La boca del diablo! [laughter])

It was really creepy, but also it was really incredible.

And on day there?  We got to go to hot springs!

It wasn’t super hot, but it sure felt good… while you were in it!  It was freezing getting out and changing, though!

Finally, we arrived at the Chilean border and unfortunately we arrived a little bit late and our bus was already waiting for us, so we make a quick round of goodbyes to our new friends and head off to Chile.

For our trips that we’ve done in South America, this was the best – it’s the best tour that we’ve done.

The conditions weren’t great. It was cold.  We were tired.  We were out in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t know what was happening. But it still was my favorite part, because it was just so beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like that.

I said I hated tours, but, well… I loved this!  I loved yesterday and today I loved it, too, and tomorrow… I’m sure is going to be amazing, too!  (laughter)

Salar de Uyuni (part 2)
Postcard Valet: Episode 21

Postcard Valet is a Travel Podcast by Arlo & Oksana Midgett

24-25 February 2011

Special Thanks to Soledad Nakama & Joaquín Rivera

Special Thanks to Aurélie Parisot & Rémy Dahan
NEWZ FROM THE WORLD
www.newsfromtheworld.blogspot.com

Special Thanks to Wendy & Dusty Doris of
roamthepla.net

Check out Red Planet Expeditions at www.redplanetexpedition.com

All footage, copyright 2011 Arlo Midgett, www.postcardvalet.com

With photos and videos by, copyright 2011 Wendy and Dusty Doris, www.roamthepla.net

And by copyright 2011 Aurélie Parisot & Rémy Dahan, www.newsfromtheworld.blogspot.com

And by copyright 2011 Soledad Nakama & Joaquín Rivera

Many of the photos in this episode can be found on SmugMug www.postcardvalet.smugmug.com

If you enjoyed watching this, the best thanks you can give us is to show it to someone else!

Want more Postcard Valet?
We upload a ton of photos to www.facebook.com/arlo.midgett and www.facebook.com/o.midgett
And we post often on Twitter at www.twitter.com/rlomidgett and www.twitter.com/o_midgett
You can “like” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/postcardvalet
Love it or hate it, we always appreciate honest reviews of our podcast in the iTunes store.
And sales from our SmugMug prints go directly into our travel budget!

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Eulogies always leave me feeling vaguely depressed.  When Steve Jobs passed away, newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet had nothing but wall-to-wall praise for the man.  How much nicer it would have been, I thought, if he were still alive to read it.  Why do we wait until someone dies before talking about all the good they’ve done in life?

Regret.  That was the first emotion I felt after hearing the news that my grandmother had died (a week ago today.)  My mom told me two days before that her parents had just celebrated their 69^th wedding anniversary.  “Why don’t you give your Mema a call tomorrow and wish her a happy Mother’s Day?”  I could have.  I should have.  All the time zones between Australia and North Carolina aren’t excuse enough for why I didn’t.

In my sadness, I think no one could possibly understand how I feel, but that’s not exactly true, is it?  Probably most of you have felt the same sense of regret, of sadness, of loss.  If only I’d visited one last time.  If only I’d told her I loved her when last we spoke.  If only she were still here.

This pain feels so personal, so unique to my situation, but in reality, most everyone can relate to losing a grandparent.  I’m luckier than most.  I knew six of my eight great-grandparents (though their faces and personalities have faded from memory since childhood) and I almost made it to forty years of age before losing my first grandparent.  Not many can say that.

***

My grandmother was one of my favorite people in the whole world and I daresay I was one of hers, too.  Her love for all her grandchildren was unconditional, but I believe there was a special place in her heart for me, if only because I was her first.  I was the one to give her the name “Mema.”  If not for my trouble with pronunciation, we might be referring to her today as “grandma” or “granny” or, who knows?  Maybe even “Mama Jean.”

Mema didn’t have a college degree, nor did she ever have a career outside the home.  In fact, she often bragged about earning only $25 her entire life, which she received after selling two of her paintings.  Nevertheless, I learned many valuable life lessons from her, because, like most of our grandparents, she was full of wisdom.

I’ll always remember a talk we had about pre-marital sex.  (It’s not what you’re thinking – it wasn’t a lecture!)  Mema was against pre-marital sex… but not for any of the reasons you’d expect.  It wasn’t about living in sin, contraception, teenage pregnancy or deadbeat dads – all the things we’re bombarded with from school, from church, and from our peers.  No.  Mema’s argument had to do with love.

“Imagine you have sex out of wedlock with a girl you really love,” she said.  “And despite all your precautions, she ends up pregnant.”

It was an uncomfortable sort of talk (with me being an awkward, nerdy teenager and all), but then uncomfortable talks with Mema weren’t all that uncommon…

“Now imagine that you want to ask her to marry you,” she continued.  “Not because she’s pregnant, but because you actually love her.  No matter what you say to her, no matter how true your love, she will always wonder if you proposed out of a sense of obligation.”

That conversation affected me deeply.  Not that I was in any danger of getting a teenager pregnant, mind you…  It was just that Mema had given me a revelation about the dangers of pre-marital sex – about the nature of relationships in general – that seemed so right.  And she did it without resorting to all that scare-tactic bullshit we’re used to, too.

I’m sure there are other examples of wisdom she passed on to me, but as I sit here fighting my grief, I can’t think of a single one.  That’s okay.  We should all be so lucky to have grandparents who give us even one insight that changes our entire whole world view.

(If you were wondering, the best piece of wisdom granddad ever gave me was, “Don’t lend money to friends or family; if you can afford to, just give it to them when they ask.  If they think it’s a loan and pay it back, that’s all well and good, but it’s not worth putting the relationship in jeopardy when they can’t – or won’t – return your money! “)

***

Almost two years ago, Mema caught pneumonia and had a heart attack while she was in the hospital.  We almost lost her then and, for awhile, it seemed like she would never make a full recovery.  My wife and I took three months out of our vacation to help care for her.  I doubt I’ve ever spent that much uninterrupted time with my grandparents and it was by turns stressful, embarrassing, and wonderful.  Seeing Mema in that condition was terribly difficult, but if I had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.

When Oksana and I left on our year-long, round-the-world trip, I was very much aware of the possibility that I would never see Mema again.  I told my mother that if the worst were to happen, I would probably not be able to make it back.  But after we left, Mema’s health improved beyond anyone’s expectations.  She was removed from Hospice care.  I began to tell myself that we could live a year in Australia and she would still be waiting for us in Hertford, or perhaps in Nags Head, when we eventually came home.

Regret.

If not for Skype, I would be inconsolable right now.  I can’t tell you how much my wife and I enjoyed watching her health improve during our periodic video conferences from around the world.  Despite her shouting into the microphone until it distorted, and even if, in every call – every single call! – she tried to passive-aggressively badger us into giving her some great-grandkids already, we enjoyed every minute we saw her on screen.

And I know that the last time we talked, I told her that I loved her.  At least there’s that.  Even if I’d somehow forgotten, however, there would be no regrets on that point.  She knew I loved her.  She always knew.

***

I’m sad today, but not for Mema.  Some years ago, she came back from a near-death experience and ever since has had no fear of what lies beyond.  She had more time than any of us expected and she died at home with her husband of 69 years.  The sadness I have isn’t for her.  It’s for granddad, who remains behind.  It’s for Oksana and me, who can’t make it back for the memorial service.  It’s for my mom, who won’t be able to Skype with her every morning.  It’s for all of us, who now have an emptiness in our lives that can never be refilled.

When I was little, Mema taught me to look up at the moon.  “No matter where you are,” she said, “You can look up at the moon it will remind you of your Mema.  And wherever I am, I can look up at the same moon and I’ll think of you.”  It’s been years since I’ve looked up at the moon and thought of it being anything other than just the moon, but when it rises tonight, I know who I’ll see there.

You’re my moon, Mema.  I love you.

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We spent four days on safari, driving through the Kruger National Park in South Africa.  Our guides drove us around for hours each day as Oksana and I hung out our respective windows, searching the countryside for the next amazing animal.

Before we arrived in South Africa, I never would have guessed that so many of the iconic African animals could be spotted in a single country.  For some reason, I thought you had to travel all over the continent if you wanted to see lions, wildebeest, rhinos, giraffes, leopards, hyenas, elephants, crocodiles, zebra, buffalo, baboons, and warthogs.  (We saw most of those the first day in the park.)  About the only big African animal I can think of that we didn’t have a chance of seeing was a mountain gorilla.

The highlight of the safari, for me, was spotting a cheetah.  After we stopped the car to watch him, his brother also emerged from the brush.  Both of those beautiful animals eventually crossed the road directly in us before disappearing into a ravine.

The next day, it got even better.  Oksana spotted another cheetah.  Our guides were blown away.  Not only are cheetahs among the rarest animals seen in the park, but we were the ones to spot them – not them, the more experienced guides!

It was nearly sunset when we spotted the cheetah on the second day and we were far from our camp.  Still, it was such an amazing animal, our guides graciously allowed us to stay as long as possible.  As we watched, the cheetah got up and stretched, then went about marking his territory.  Against all odds, his path again took him across the road we were on.

There were no other cars around, so our guide let me bend the rules this one time.  He opened up the sunroof and I stood up on the center console before carefully levering my shoulders through the small opening.  As I got my camera up, the cheetah was alongside our vehicle, heading behind us, but paralleling the road.  Our driver put the car in neutral and we coasted along beside him.  I got some great video footage of him walking through the brush like that.

Eventually we stopped and he went about marking a thick tree on the opposite side of the road.  If I’d been shooting out the passenger window, I would have lost him, but because I was standing up through the sunroof, I was able to pivot and continue shooting.  The sun was now at my back, so I switched the 5D off Live View (video) mode and started taking pictures.  I got this photo when he turned to walk away.

We took literally thousands of photos while on safari in Kruger and a handful of them turned out quite well.  This one, however, may be my favorite.

Canon 5D Mark II
Date: 4:44pm, 31 May 2011
Focal Length: 400mm (200mm + 2x extender)
Shutter: 125 sec
Aperture: F/5.6
Exposure: -.3 step
Flash: No
ISO: 400
Photoshop: Auto contrast, slight saturation boost, slight dodging around the eye.

Notes

African Big 5 Safaris was our tour operator (highly recommended!)

The story of spotting this particular cheetah is told in our African Big 5 Safari video, starting at the 19 min, 48 sec mark.

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—

It occurred to me at the time – I actually had the thought – that the situation we were in reminded me of one of those crazy African travel blog entries I’d read online.  Dropped off in the middle of nowhere, not really knowing where we were, where we were going, or how we were going to get there.  I had the sense that we were in the middle of a great story, but at the time all I wanted to know was how it was going to end.

A large man in a military uniform was the last person to step off the bus.  Because he stopped to purchase something from the roadside stand, he was soon the only other passenger still around.  As he passed by us on the way down the road, Oksana asked if he knew where the river was.

He gestured across the countryside, “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think it’s three or four kilometers that way.”  His accent was thick, but perfectly understandable.

Both Oksana and I looked the way he indicated.  It looked no different than any other direction.

“Do you… um,” I began. “Do you know how we can get there?”

“I would wave at the first car you see,” he replied.  Oksana and I looked up and down the dirt road.  There were no cars.

As he continued on his way, I helped Oksana into her packs before hefting mine.  We walked over to the kiosk and I bought a warm Coca Light as an excuse to ask the owner some questions.  When she handed me my change, I asked “How far is the river from here?”

“Four kilometers.”

“Which way?”

She pointed to a sandy dirt track a couple hundred meters from where we were standing.  I looked up and down the main road again before turning back to her.  “No taxis?” I smiled.

She smiled back.  “No. No taxis.”

Oksana and I thanked her and started to walk to where the track intersected with the road.  It only took us a few minutes to reach the juncture, but we were drenched with sweat when we arrived.  There was no way we could to carry our packs over sand for four kilometers.  We decided to set them down and wait.  I cracked open the Diet Coke and we passed it back and forth until it was gone.

Twenty minutes went by without a single vehicle passing.  No car, no bicycle, not even a person walked by.  We could see the people back at the kiosk stealing looks at us every now and again.  I got tired of standing and sat on my backpack.

Finally, we spied a small pickup truck rumbling its way up the sandy tire tracks, coming from the direction of the river.  Neither Oksana nor I wanted to be the one to flag it down, but I reluctantly stood up and waved when the truck drew near.

When the truck eased to a stop alongside me, I could see that the driver was a young woman.  The passenger seat was empty, but her three-year-old son was standing alone in the pickup’s bed.  She looked at me and waited.

“Um, hello,” I looked back the way she had just come.  A long trail of dust was settling back to earth.  “We were wondering if this is the road to the river…?”

“Yes.” No expression on her face.

“And it’s about four kilometers away?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I sighed.  She wasn’t making this any easier for me.  I gave her a sheepish smile.  “I… could you possibly give us a ride to the river?”

She looked over at Oksana and the backpacks, then at her rear view mirror.  She turned back to me and said,  “Yes.”

“Really?  Thank you!”  I started to walk around to get our bags.

Oksana hopped up and as we lifted up our bags, the woman got out and warned us that the back of the truck was dirty.  “I work on a farm; some of the dirt might be manure.”

We couldn’t have cared less and assured her we didn’t mind.  She introduced us to her son – “He loves to ride in the back!” – as we propped our packs upright against the cab window.  Oksana and I climbed in and sat on the edge.

The drive took longer than I expected.  While we bumped along the sandy tire ruts, Oksana and I tried to engage the little boy in conversation.  He understood us, but other than a shy nod or shake of his head, he only smiled and chewed on his fingers.

As we approached the river, the vegetation began to change.  Taller, greener trees appeared as we passed through another cluster of houses.  Some kids playing by the roadside noticed us riding along and started yelling and waving.   We smiled and waved back from our precarious perch.  Delighted, they chased after us, picking up more children along the way.  By the end, there must have been at least 10 kids behind the truck, running and laughing and screaming, before they finally ran out of steam and fell behind.

The road eventually led into a thicket of trees, cutting off our view of the surrounding terrain.  We coasted to a stop on a sandy field.  Tire tracks from other vehicles drew big loops in the sand. Ahead, t The twin ruts that made up our road disappeared beneath murky, mineral-brown water.

Our driver cut her engine as I hopped over the side.  I walked up to the edge of the water and peered in.  “Is this the river?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “The river is farther.  On the other side.”  Indeed, I could see tire tracks emerging on the far bank, about 50 meters away.

“What is this, if it’s not the river?  Is it flooding?”

“Yes.  Too much water this year.”  I looked at Oksana, then looked back across the pond.  I tried to think what to do.

Our driver was the first to break the silence, “How are you planning to cross?”

I laughed.  Laughed right out loud.  “I have no idea!  None at all!”  The water looked to be no more than waist deep.  I thought I could perhaps wade the bags across, one at a time, but there were hippos and crocodiles in the Okavango River.  Would they swim up the flooded road?  Finally, I asked, “Do you have a suggestion?”

“Do you have a phone number to call?” she asked.

“No.”  I chuckled again.  “We don’t even have a phone.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment.  “Maybe I can call someone.”

“Do you mind?  We would be very thankful.  We would be happy to pay you for your minutes, too.”

She placed three calls, apologizing between them for not being able to drive us across the flooded road.  “We use the truck on our farm.”  I told her we completely understood.

Eventually, she hung up the phone and told us that she called a campground, called the Swamp Stop, on the other side of the flooding.  They were sending someone to ferry us across the pond.  While we waited, Oksana dug out some cash to pay the woman back for her generosity.  We were both so thankful for her help.

Five or ten minutes later, we heard a rough engine chugging along behind the trees on the opposite bank.  A young man rode into view on a tractor, hitched to what looked to be a flat, wooden boat trailer.  He killed the engine and walked down to the water.  From behind a bush, he pulled a long slim canoe, or mokoro, down to the water’s edge and slid it in.  We watched as his poled his way across.

Our Swamp Stop employee introduced himself as Geoffrey and helped us load our packs into the middle of the skinny boat.  As we climbed into the canoe, we waved goodbye to our savior in the pickup truck.

Our boatman stood in the back of the mokoro and slowly poled us across the pond.  With all our laptops and camera gear between our legs, I was terrified we would capsize (especially with him standing in the back), but the boat was remarkable stable.  Peering over the side, I didn’t see any crocodiles, but my assumptions about the depth had been correct.

Geoffrey asked us where we were going and we told him about the riverboat that anchored in Seronga.  “I am from Seronga!” he said with a big smile. Great!  We were on the right track!

He looked pensive or a moment, then said “But why are you going to Swamp Stop?” Uh-oh.  Geoffrey went on to explain that Swamp Stop was just a campground along the River.  The road went nowhere else and there was no ferry from there to Seronga.  “It is okay,” he shrugged it off.  “You can use the phone to arrange a transfer.”

Once safely docked on the other bank, I helped Geoffrey haul the moroko all the way out of the water.  We climbed up onto the flat wooden trailer and enjoyed the ride as the tractor pulled us over to the campground.  He cut the motor and then led through the landscaped grounds, over to the reception office.

Reception was just a small, glassed-in room attached to a two-story restaurant.  The receptionist behind the desk was surprised to see us.  We soon learned that the entire campground was closed for repairs after the recent flooding.  That explained the green swimming pools teeming with frogs and tadpoles…

We told her our story, emphasizing that we were hopelessly lost and confused.  Back in Sepupa, we thought asking how to get to the river was the best way to cross it, but now crossing back over the flooded section of road would be difficult.  Obviously there would be no car waiting to take us back to the main road.

I dug the printed copies of the Ngwesi River Boat’s website out of my backpack and told the receptionist we were trying to reach Seronga.  She gave me a doubtful look, “I don’t think that riverboat doesn’t docks there.”

“Well, okay, but that’s the information we have,” I said.  “Would it be okay if we borrowed your mobile phone to call the owners?  They’re expecting us today.” It was getting late in the afternoon.

“Well…” she hemmed and hawed. “I’m not supposed to let anyone use the phone…”

“Please?” I asked.  “We just traveled all the way up from Maun.  We don’t have a phone and I don’t know any other way to reach them.  We don’t mind paying!”

Grudgingly, she gave in. “Okay.  But you’ll have to be quick.” Her eyes scanned the campgrounds behind us, searching for her boss.  “Give me the phone number.”

I handed the paper over and pointed to the contact number.  She frowned and said, “I don’t think that’s the right one.  I’m going to call another.”

I thought better about arguing and just said, “Okay. Thank you.”  She dialed the number and immediately handed me the phone.

A man with a South African accent answered.  “Hello,” I said. “I’m trying to reach Wanda.”

“Nobody here by that name.  Wanda who?”  I briefly explained our situation and told him we were trying to reach the Ngwesi  River Boat.  “Oh, sure.  I know who you mean.  Let me get her phone number for you.”  I wrote it in the margins of my printout.  It matched the number I’d given to the receptionist.

I thanked him and hung up, then asked the receptionist to if I could make another call.  She sighed, but motioned me to go ahead.

I didn’t get a hold of Wanda with the next call, either, but it was the correct number.  Her husband answered and, once I’d identified myself, he promised me she would call us back soon.

I told the receptionist – who was none too happy – and asked if there was a place we could wait.  She pointed us toward the restaurant.  We dragged our bags in and sat at the bar.  Another employee, an older woman, was watching a show on TV, but she switched over to a BBC World News broadcast for us.  I felt guilty and ordered a beer while we waited.

Half an hour later, the phone finally rang.  The receptionist handed it to me and Wanda was finally on the line.

“Hello!” I said.  “So happy to finally get in touch with you!”

“Where are you?” She asked. “We’re still in Maun.”

I wanted to thump my head on the bar.

Long story short, Wanda had a family emergency back in South Africa and was trying to arrange a flight home.  They had tried to call us at the Okavango River Lodge, even showed up while we were in our room (an employee supposedly knocked on our door and got no answer.)  She tried to apologize for the confusion, but I wouldn’t let her because the fault was all our own.  If only we’d checked our email before leaving!

Wanda told me that we were more than welcome to spend the night on the riverboat; the captain was expecting us.  I explained that we were essentially stuck at an isolated campground between rivers with no mobile phone.

We talked it over and decided the best course of action would be to wait for Adriaan, her husband.  He would be driving back from Maun the following day and he could pick us up at the campground.  I put the phone against my shoulder and asked the receptionist if it was possible for us to rent a room or a tent for just one night.  She did that nodding-shrugging thing that says, “I guess so.”

Before hanging up, Wanda asked, “By the way, why were you trying to go to Seronga?”

“Because that’s where the website said the riverboat was docked.” I said.

“Oh,” she replied.  “No, no.  It’s in Shakawe now.”  What?!  “You must have been looking at the old website.  We moved the boat when we took it over from the previous owners.”  I sighed.

We made plans for Adriaan to call the following day to let us know when he’d arrive.  I hung up and handed the phone back to the receptionist.  We counted out some coins to pay for the minutes we’d used and handed that to her, as well, before asking about the room rates.  We decided the air-conditioned chalets were far too expensive for our budget.  A huge safari tent with cots, sheets, and blankets was $30; we took one of those.

The next day – Oksana’s birthday, actually – we spent near the restaurant (the older woman offered to cook for us from a limited menu; “Do you want a hamburger or fish?”) and on its second-floor balcony.  The view of the Okavango Panhandle from that balcony was spectacular.  A narrow channel of the river snaked its way in front of us and on the opposite bank, tall reeds grew seemingly all the way to the horizon.

We celebrated Oksana’s birthday by reading on the deck, petting some of the campground’s dozen or so friendly cats, and only looking up for the occasional colorful bird or river otter.  We talked to Adriaan again in the morning and he told us he would meet us at 4pm.  Later, however, he called again to tell us that he needed to see Wanda off and wouldn’t be able to pick us up until the following morning.  We didn’t have to worry about not having reservations for another night in the tent; we never did see another traveler while we were at the Swamp Stop.

Those two days at the campground were actually quite relaxing.  We had been going pretty much non-stop for six weeks and it was nice to have a couple days without anything to do.  We might well have needed the recovery time after the adventure of getting there, too.

At any rate, Adriaan picked us up on the second day and drove us to the riverboat in Shakawe.  Oksana and I spent the next four days on the river – just us and the riverboat’s two crew members – enjoying the sights and sounds of the Okavango Panhandle.  But that’s another story…

—

Notes
Ngwesi Houseboat website 

If you want to read more about us trying to find our way in Africa, I’ve already written about the next leg of this journey (when we left the riverboat, bound for Zambia) in my Thoughts on Namibia post.

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1. PV021: Salar de Uyuni (part 2)

This is a continuation of the story told in the previous blog entry: Learning to use the bus rank in Botswana.

We spent a week in Maun, passing most of our time in a chalet at the Okavango River Lodge.  The lodge itself was nothing special, but it suited us just fine.  This far from the actual river, we expected the delta to be mostly dried up, but Maun was seeing the highest water levels in 15 years.  Our chalet was a two-room cement bunker set back in the landscaped grounds.  It was quiet, but not so far from the open-air bar and restaurant on the water’s edge that we couldn’t hear the more social travelers watching the hippos grazing at sunset.

Our room was a concrete box with a curtain hanging over a doorway into a small bathroom.  I set up my laptop on a narrow desk and claimed the only chair in the room.  Oksana spent a lot of time reading in bed, underneath the mosquito net.  After dark I joined her there.  That close to the river, the mosquitoes began to swarm just after sunset.  We learned to shake out our clothing and shoes in the morning, too.  There was a gap under the door that let in all manner of little crawly things.

We didn’t see much of the delta while in Maun because we were caught between jobs.  I spent most of the week diligently editing a video of our four-day safari with African Big 5 Safaris.  They had treated us to a fantastic time and I was set on giving them the best promotional video I could manage.  In the meantime, Oksana was coordinating our next assignment.  There was a tour operator up near the Okavango Panhandle that had expressed an interest in taking us out on their riverboat in exchange for some professional photos of their renovations.

Problem was, we didn’t have internet access.  There was a laptop at the bar we could use to check our email, but at $6 per hour, it was actually cheaper for both of us to drive into town and get online at an internet café.  We fell into a routine where we’d catch a combi to the city center every other day, buy some donuts for breakfast and check our email at a place called “Tech Times.” We’d load up on groceries before heading back out to the River Lodge – it was cheaper to eat PBJs and soup than to buy all our meals from the restaurant.

Eventually, I finished the safari video and, because it was impossible to upload it to Youtube with Botswana’s poor internet infrastructure, we planned one more trip into town to mail a DVD back to our friends in South Africa.  Oksana checked her email and discovered that our riverboat contact had just arrived in Maun the day before!  We’d already made plans to ride out on a bus the following day, but she was offering us a ride instead.

We were kicking ourselves for not checking our email the day before and for not going to the effort to get a cell phone while we were in Botswana.  If we’d done either, getting in touch with them would have been easy.  As it was, all we could do was reply to her email and hope they got in touch with us through the Okavango River Lodge.  Just in case, I printed off all the contact information and directions to the riverboat from their website.

We hadn’t heard anything by the next morning, and the bus was scheduled to leave before the internet café would open.  We debated whether we should pay for internet access at the lodge’s bar, but ultimately decided against it.  We figured we had missed our window of opportunity and that our contacts would already be heading back to their riverboat.  We took a taxi back to the bus rank.

Knowing how the bus rank worked this time, we found the bus to our destination, Sepupa, quickly.  Sepupa wasn’t our final destination, but it was the closest point to a village called Seronga on our map.  Seronga was where the website said the riverboat was anchored, but it was on the other side of the river.  We would have to find the ferry.

The bus was identical to the one we took from Gaborone except that this time we were able to put our big packs down below.  Oksana and I snatched up a three-chair span again – giving us some room for our day packs – at least until we passed though a few more towns and the bus filled up.

I put my earphones in and watched the countryside pass by.  Goats, donkeys, and cows were corralled in waist-high pens made up of tangled of sticks and braches.  The occasional mongoose scampering through the sparse dry grass.  Beige termite mounds, taller than I am, climbed up out of the brush; I must have seen thousands before the four and a half hour trip was over.

We only stopped for one military inspection.  One by one, we took our hand bags up to table set up on the side of the road and opened them up.  A bored solider gave each a cursory look before waving us back on the bus.

As we neared our destination, I opened up a digital copy of the Lonely Planet guidebook on my iPhone and studied the region to make sure we got off at the correct stop.  Just before reaching Sepupa, we started to see the 13 Etshas listed on the map.  I didn’t know what an Etsha was, but it was obvious that they were different than the settlements I’d seen in Botswana so far.  Rather than houses made of wood or concrete, large communities were constructed entirely out of reeds.  Circular huts, tall fences, animal pens; everything was made up of those dry, thin stalks.  Asking around, we learned that these settlements along the river were originally refugee camps for those fleeing from the Angola Civil War, decades past.

It was early afternoon when we arrived in Sepupa.  The bus was full, but not many people stepped off with us.  We collected our bags from underneath and hauled them over to the shoulder as the bus pulled away in a cloud of dust.  When it cleared, we looked around.

There wasn’t much to see.  A tiny store, not much bigger than shed, stood a few paces off to the side.  Three or four people sat on its cement foundation, staring at us with blank expressions.  The landscape was mostly barren dirt; there was nothing blocking our view of the other dwellings scattered around the countryside.  Even so, what we could see was barley a step up from the Etshas.

The river was nowhere to be seen and there were no vehicles – parked or otherwise – anywhere in sight.  The few people who got off the bus with us were already walking away, leaving us alone on the side of the road.  Oksana and I looked at each other.  We didn’t have to say it; we were both thinking the same thing.

What the hell do we do now?

—

Okay, so I just realized this needs to be a three-part story…

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

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1. PV021: Salar de Uyuni (part 2)

I wanted to write a story about what it was like to ride a bus cross-country in Africa.  I have two such stories that took place in Botswana, each interesting for different reasons.  This is the first. If some of it sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote briefly about this ride in my Thoughts on Botswana post.

—

South Africa was a good introduction to the continent for us.  While still very different from what we were used to in South America, it wasn’t so strange that we had trouble getting around.  We traveled around there for a month before moving on.

On our last few days in Pretoria, Oksana met a couple Canadian college students in the shared kitchen of our hostel.  They were volunteering in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, and had come down for the weekend to check out South Africa.  Oksana mentioned Botswana was next on our list and before we knew it, we had invitations to stay with them.  They departed ahead of us, but a few days later we hopped on a bus and joined them in Gabs.

The South African bus company we selected to get us there was both professional and efficient.  We made the 7-hour trip in surprising comfort.  It wasn’t until we traveled inside Botswana that we found the African busses I expected…and feared.

We spent just a couple days in the capital; our real plans for Botswana involved the Okavango Delta, further to the north.  Our new friends worked during the day, so we spent our time sightseeing and seeking out a prescription for anti-malarial medication.  In the evenings, we reconvened for dinner back at the dormitory house.

On our last day in Gaborone, we followed directions to the bus rank, to see about getting tickets to Maun.  Even after an explanation of what to expect, we were not prepared for what we found.

Our taxi driver dropped us off in a parking lot full of taxis.  He actually tried to weasel a few extra pula out of us by offering to drive us to the bus rank, but we’d been forewarned and knew it was just across a pedestrian bridge.  He smiled when we told him, “That’s okay, we know where it is.”

The pedestrian bridge was two stories tall and the hot Kalahari wind whipped dust into our eyes as we crossed it.  Still, we could see controlled chaos of the bus rank below us.  Dozens of buses were parked bumper-to-bumper in 15 parallel lanes, each about as long as football field.  Hundreds of people were milling around and vendors selling bags of dried caterpillars clustered at the bottom of the bridge.

We walked the perimeter of the bus rank, confident we would find an office, ticket salesmen, or at least a schedule written on a sign.  After searching three of the four sides, we gave up.  Oksana asked a fruit vendor how to find the bus to Maun.  She simply pointed to the buses and said, “Go ask.”

We walked into the lanes and asked a bored teenager, the first person that made eye contact with us.  As soon as we mentioned Maun, he shook his head.  “Come back in the morning.  No more buses to Maun.”

“When?”

“5:30,” he shrugged.  “Maybe 7:00.”

On the walk to the taxi lot, we decided to come back at 5:30am.  If there was only one bus to Maun each day, arriving early would be better than missing it again.

The next morning, we were up and moving before sunrise.  Sleepy hugs and goodbyes with our new friends made us slightly late; we didn’t leave the house until 5:30am, but the taxi driver took us straight to the bus rank.  He pulled up to the end of one of the ranks and asked a boy which was the bus to Maun.  I didn’t understand the exchange, but as soon as he said “Maun,” the boy shouted and started running.  Other boys joined him and the taxi accelerated behind them.

We arrived at the front of the rank just as the bus started to pull out.  Our taxi had outrun the kids and braked hard directly in front of the bus.  The bus driver leaned on his horn and began revving his engine.  I was digging out money to pay our fare when the shouting kids caught up and swarmed around us.  Oksana raced to the trunk and hauled out our packs.

It was pandemonium.   I’m sure we would have missed the bus if not for that taxi driver.  He ignored the bus driver completely – wouldn’t even look at him – while I helped Oksana shoulder her pack and hefted mine.  I approached the door and asked the driver if his bus was going to Maun.  The kids around me laughed, “Yes!  Yes, this is your bus!  Get on!”

The bus driver was ignoring me anyway, so I climbed aboard to see if there were any seats available.  There were, but I didn’t know what to do with our large backpacks.  They normally go in a luggage compartment under the bus, but there was no help to be had in that respect.  I spied two seats near the rear of the bus.  It looked like there might be enough room in the overhead bins for our packs…  The driver was still leaning on his horn and everyone on the bus was staring at me.  Screw It, I thought.  I’m sitting down.

I started to walk down the aisle when I heard a strangled cry from the doorway.  “Arlo!” Oksana yelled.  “I can’t get on!”

The first step onto the bus was a good three feet off the ground and, with her main pack on her back and a day bag on her front, she was carrying an extra 60 pounds and couldn’t lift herself up that far with just one leg.  Then engine revved again; there was panic in her eyes.

I dropped my pack in the aisle and went to her.  “Turn around, give me your pack.”  Once free of that, she was able to haul herself up onto the bus.  As soon as she cleared the ground, the taxi drove off and presently our bus was in motion.  Oksana took both day bags back to the empty seats and I shuttled the bigger packs down the aisle after her.

While I was lifting my pack overhead, a candy vendor helped Oksana with hers.  It was a clever ploy.  He smiled and showed her his candy basket afterwards.  It was too early in the morning for sweets, but she gave him the change in her pocket – 3 pula – for his help.

Finally we collapsed into our seats.  We hadn’t paid yet – didn’t even know how much it was going to cost us to get to Maun – but we didn’t care.  We were on our way.

The original bus seats had been ripped out and replaced with straight-backed, metal chairs that were welded to the floor.  Three on one side of the aisle, two on the other.  Even the leg room had been shortened to fit in as many rows as possible on the bus.  At least we had three seats to ourselves.  We placed our day packs between us and tried to get comfortable.

The bus picked up speed as we left the city and the temperature inside plummeted as the pre-dawn air streamed in through the cracks between the windows.  It was still a good hour before sunrise, another two or three before it would really start to warm up.  I ended up putting on four layers – under shirt, long sleeve, down vest, and windbreaker – just to stop shivering.  I pulled the hood of my windbreaker over my head and leaned against the window.  In minutes, I was asleep.

I woke with the sunrise as a young conductor slowly moved up the aisle.  He was taking money and issuing handwritten ticket stubs.  I motioned toward Oksana, still asleep with her arm wrapped around our daypacks, and said, “Maun.” He said, “300 pula.”  It was the price we’d been expecting, so I handed over the money without complaint.

Now that it was light enough to see, I stretched and looked around the bus.  The curtains were drawn across every window, keeping the early morning sun from shining in our eyes.  Besides an Asian man – who looked just as confused as I felt – there were no other tourists on the bus.  It was quiet; everyone was trying to sleep and no one paid us the slightest attention.  I shed a layer and tried to catch a little more shuteye myself.

The ride to Maun took 10 hours.  There wasn’t a bathroom on the bus, but we stopped on average every one or two hours, usually at a bus rank like the one in Gaborone, only smaller.  While they loaded and unloaded passengers, there was more than enough time to hop off the bus, find the restroom, and pick up a drink or a snack from one of the vendors.

Twice, we stopped at cattle gates that doubled as security checkpoints.  Each time, we were ushered from the bus by men in military fatigues with assault rifles slung over their shoulder.  They checked our IDs and waved us across a cattle grid laid across the road.  We all stood around on the dusty shoulder until the bus joined us on the other side.  Each inspection only took five or ten minutes.

Between bigger towns, the bus filled up and Oksana and I gave up the seat holding our day packs.  It grew hot as the sun climbed higher in the sky, but the locals protested when we lowered the windows.  The blessedly cool breeze was a hundred times better than the stale, body-odor heavy air inside the bus.  I couldn’t understand why they preferred it that way.  Perhaps the road dust was even worse.  At any rate, we shed every layer until we were in shorts and t-shirts, but sweat still pooled on our laps, underneath those heavy day packs.

With the sun beating down, it made sense to close the curtains too.  I regretfully turned my attention from the arid Botswana countryside to my iPhone.  I listened to a few podcasts and read a few chapters in my book to pass the time.

We arrived in Maun, sweated and tired, in the mid-afternoon.  Yet another bus rank greeted us and combi (minivan) drivers leaned out their windows in an attempt to coax us over.  We didn’t understand the system yet – and besides, we didn’t even know where we were staying yet – so we started looking for a pay phone.  We set off toward a grocery store on the edge of the bus rank called “Choppies.”

After buying a much-needed cold drink, Oksana and I gathered in the shade of a big tree and put our heads together.  We looked over the map we had of Maun and tried to find the hotel choices we’d researched ahead of time.  Turned out most of them were far outside the city limits, along the shores of the Okavango River.  We trudged back to the bus rank and found a taxi willing to take us to our first choice, the Okavango River Lodge.

It was well outside the town, 12 or 13 kilometers at least, but fortunately, the lodge had rooms available.  We piled our stuff into our little “chalet” room, went back out long enough to grab something to eat, and were in our mosquito net-draped bed by 7:30pm.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

Related posts:

1. PV021: Salar de Uyuni (part 2)

If you have a question that’s not on here, let me know.  Be happy to add something to the list.

Post Travels FAQ

Index of questions:

Q: How long did you end up traveling?

Q: Where are you now?

Q: What are your plans for the future?

Q: What was your favorite place/tour/country/thing out of all your travels?

Q: What was the craziest/most disgusting thing you ate?

Q: Which countries did you visit?

Q: Which country was your favorite?

Q: What was your least favorite country?

Q: What was the most dangerous thing you did?

Q: Did you have any trouble while traveling?  Was anything stolen?

Q: How much did you spend?  Were you able to stick to your $100/day budget?

Q: Did you ever get sick on the trip?

Q: Are you still married?  How has being together 24/7 for 18 months affected your relationship?

Q: Do you miss it?  Does life seem boring now that you’ve slowed down?  Did you burn out on travel?

Answers:

Q: How long did you end up traveling?

A: Almost exactly 18 months.

Although… that answer doesn’t really tell the whole story.  In our minds, there are three or four distinct parts to our time away from home:  Crossing the US and Canada, staying with family, active travel, and living in Australia. 

We left home on July 1, 2010, to drive across the country.  By August, we’d made it as far as North Carolina before a family emergency delayed our plans to leave the U.S.  We stayed with my grandparents until November 10, 2010.

From November 10, 2010, to December 26, 2011 (58 weeks), we were actively engaged in what I would consider “world travel.”  We visited 31 different countries in all, starting in Ecuador (Colombia, if you want to count passport stamps) and ending up in Australia.

Since December 26, 2011, we’ve been living and working in Brisbane.  While it doesn’t feel quite like “real life” again, it’s certainly not travel, but since we played tourist the first week or so we were in Brizzy, we decided to count that as part of our travels.

Our infographics chart our travel time from July 1, 2010 to January 1, 2012.

Q: Where are you now?

A: Brisbane, in Queensland, Australia.  Oksana has a job working as an assistant accountant at an auto dealership called Motorama, while I’m a stay-at-home husband trying to update our website and write a book about our travels.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: Can’t say for sure; we’re still very much in the “wing it” mentality, but we have a 10-month lease on our apartment, so it’s likely we’ll be staying until December 2012.  (We’re inviting our friends and family to visit in November; contact us if you might be interested!)

Our visas expire near the end of December, but we haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do then.  Neither one of us is looking forward to going back to Alaska in the dead of winter and there’s been talk of spending time in Central America – a region we missed because of those family emergencies.  To be honest, we’re not 100% sure we’ll even return to Juneau.  Life on the road has taught us that opportunities can arise at any time.

Q: What was your favorite place/tour/country/thing out of all your travels?

A: I don’t know!  Are you the kind of person that has a ready answer for those “what’s your favorite movie?” and “what’s your favorite song?” questions?  I’m not.  I have to qualify my answers…

Favorite geological wonder: The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia (the world’s largest salt flat)
It was incredible and like nothing else I have ever seen.

Best wildlife: Galapagos Islands and Kruger National Park (tie)
Both give you very up close and personal encounters with wild animals.

Best food: Argentina (steak and wine, asado), South Africa (biltong and ginger beer, braai), Thailand (fruit and Thai cooking), Vietnam (coffee)

Best ruins to explore: Peru, Egypt, Cambodia (tie)

Best excursions: 7-day Galapagos cruise (just amazing); 4-day private safari in Kruger National Park (best guides; proud to call them friends today!); 3-day Salar de Uyuni tour (best value for the money); and Mountain biking down the World’s Most Dangerous Road (for the extras/freebies thrown in.)

Best SCUBA diving: Galapagos (though not necessarily the dives in the video below)

Q: What was the craziest/most disgusting thing you ate?

A: Craziest?  Probably “lemon-flavored ants,” in the Ecuadorian jungle.  Most disgusting?  Finland’s Salmiakki (salted licorice) – and I love black licorice, too!  We also tried kudu, ostrich, crocodile, and springbok in South Africa; snake in Cambodia; and kangaroo in Australia.

Q: Which countries did you visit?

A: Canada, the United States, Colombia (in transit, airports only), Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia (1 day), Zambia, Zimbabwe (1 day), Tanzania and Zanzibar, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Bulgaria, Finland, Estonia, Russia, United Arab Emirates (1 day), Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.  31 in all.

Q: Which country was your favorite?

A: Again, so hard to choose a favorite.  Every country has something to like.  It may help if we rephrase the question: Which countries would you want to visit again?

There are three: Turkey, Bulgaria, and Thailand.  Of course, we’ll likely visit many of these countries again.  I’ve been to the Galapagos three times now, and I’d go back in a heartbeat.  We have many friends in Argentina and family in Russia; I’ll bet we return to both those countries, too.  But with a whole world out there to explore, it’s difficult for us to spend our hard-earned vacation time on countries we’ve already been to.  Even so, both Oksana and I would like to see more of Turkey, Bulgaria, and Thailand.

Q: What was your least favorite country?

Egypt, hands down.  Oksana and I were disgusted by how we were treated as walking wallets by almost everyone even tangentially associated with the tourism industry.  Also, while their ancient artifacts are literally some of the best in the world, they don’t seem to be valued very much by people living there today.  It’s a shame, because they’re astonishing, and I want nothing more than to recommend you plan your next vacation there.  But I can’t.  At least not without many warnings and caveats.

Vietnam (north) might also have been a contender (for many of the same reasons), but we went in with very low expectations and came out pleasantly surprised.  Oksana doesn’t have very fond memories of Tanzania, either.  Dar es Salaam felt unsafe.  Even though nothing ever happened to us in the city, we always felt on edge.

Q: What was the most dangerous thing you did?

A: Depends on what you consider dangerous.  Some might consider riding a bus through the Andes dangerous, and we did a lot of that!  Off the top of my head, though, there’s…

Mountain biking down the World’s Most Dangerous Road near La Paz, Bolivia.

Walking into pens with multiple adult tigers to let them lap milk from our hands in Luhán, Argentina.

Standing in a couple inches of water on a Bolivian salt flat as a thunderstorm rolled in.

Tip-toeing around slippery pits of boiling mud on top of a volcano near the Chilean border.

Sitting in a diving cage as a 3-meter Great White Shark bumped up against it.

And, sadly, walking down a deserted beach in Zanzibar.

Q: Did you have any trouble while traveling?  Was anything stolen?

A: We were very lucky.  Setting aside things like getting sick or being scammed out of a couple dollars in Egypt, the only bad thing that happened to us was being mugged at machete-point on a beach in Zanzibar (Tanzania.)  However, we both look back on that and laugh.  We only lost USD$15 and got a great story out of it!

Neither Oksana nor I ever had anything stolen, either from pickpockets on the street or taken from our bags in our hotel room by a maid with sticky fingers.  Of course, we’re both extremely paranoid travelers.  We had tiny padlocks on our backpacks and our pockets sealed with safety pins when out on the street.  Plus, we’re street smart, try to be aware of what’s going on all around us at all times, and watch out for each other.

Come to think of it, a couple guys in Puno (Peru) did try to pick my pockets, but my unconscious reaction to their jostling me from both sides was to shove them away and shout, “Hey!”  They instantly melted into the crowd and when I checked my pockets, nothing was missing.

Q: How much did you spend?  Were you able to stick to your $100/day budget?

A: We’re still working on the exact numbers.  Oksana needs to go back and put the first few months of receipts into our new travel budget format (the Excel spreadsheet she created grew in capabilities as we went; it’s quite comprehensive now!)

However, here are the ballpark figures:

Total travel expenses for 18 months: $61,438.11
Total fixed “back home” expenses for 18 months: $17,316.13

Breakdown
US and Canada road trip, plus stay with grandparents (1 July 2010 to 10 Nov 2010):  $13,039.20
Travel outside the US (10 Nov 2010 to 1 Jan 2012): $48,398.91

Our fixed “back home” expenses such as cell phone, ministorage, post office box, annual credit card fees, and, perhaps most importantly, health insurance, add another $17,316.13.

Our goal was $100/day (for travel expenses), but we fell short of that.  Our actual travel expenses ran just under $112/day.

We also only planned to travel for one year, but we pushed on longer than that.  If we look at only Nov 10 to Nov 10, an exact year of travel, our travel expenses were $43,059.70, or $6,559.70 over our planned budget.

For comparison’s sake, after three and a half months, we’re averaging $146.56 per day in Australia (excluding those fixed “back home” expenses.)

Q: Did you ever get sick on the trip?

A: Yes, sometimes quite severely, but even so, not as much as we anticipated.

Before we left, we took our vaccinations very seriously.  We were each vaccinated for Hepatitis A and B, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, TDAP (Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis), and Meningococcal Meningitis.  Once we reached Africa, we also got the Oral Polio Vaccine and started up Doxycycline and Malarone anti-malarial routines (which we also used in Southeast Asia.)  The only vaccinations we didn’t get, which we might have had some use for, were for pneumonia and Japanese Encephalitis.

Here are the highlights (lowlights):

• During the Galapagos trip, one night I came down with uncontrollable shivering.  I thought it might be hypothermia from snorkeling and a cold shower afterward, but the shipboard doctor checked me out, discovered I had a fever, and gave me a course of antibiotics.  I was (mostly) fine the next day, however.  Lost my appetite for the rest of the trip, but didn’t miss out on any of the outings.
• In Ecuador, I fainted dead away in front of a couple maids, falling like a bag of bricks to the hard-wood floor.  I’d been stung by a bee earlier in the day, but I suspect it was simply light-headedness brought on by the altitude.
• Oksana battled stomach problems in Lima, Peru, for a time.  Not sure if it was an actual bug or just a reaction to new food and the new bacterial strains that invariably come along with it.  She took some antibiotics and it went away.
• On our first attempt at the salt flats tour, both of us came down with severe abdominal cramping.  We suspect it was from something we’d eaten on an earlier bus ride.  Up until that time, we ate everything put in front of us, including raw vegetables and street food.  After a week of abdominal cramping, horrible gas, and generally debilitating stomach problems, we both decided to self-medicate and bought a full course of strong antibiotics (Cipro) at the pharmacy.  Did the trick; I figure it killed whatever intestinal parasite was boring away in our guts.
• Oksana experienced some signs of heat stroke when we were touring the Luxor ruins in Egypt.  That was the day it was 120 degrees and we drank six liters of water… each!
• Both Oksana and I came down with terrible sinus infections in Thailand – the first time we’d had a cold in over a year and a half.  Just head colds, though.  They passed in time.  Strangely, after doing a month-long loop through Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, we both picked up head colds again the day we returned to Thailand.  It was mild in comparison, however, the second time around.

Other than that, we were fine.  Well, except for what the anti-malarials did to our bodies.  Let me tell you there were times when we were on Doxycycline that we wondered if we’d ever have a solid poop again!

Q: Are you still married?  How has being together 24/7 for 18 months affected your relationship?

A: Yes, we’re still happily married.  More happy now that we’ve stopped traveling.

Oksana and I have always had a good relationship.  We literally (and by “literally,” I mean literally!) went three or four years into our marriage before we had our first argument.  We communicate with each other well.

But that isn’t to say being together every waking moment for a year and a half was easy!  We had plenty of arguments on this trip, some quite heated, but it never got so bad that we considered quitting.

Really, it comes down to stress.  When everything was going according to plan, no problem; we were both happy and carefree.  But when we were put into stressful situations, which happened rather often (e.g., coming into a city late at night without any hotel reservations, realizing we’re going over budget and trying to decide what to do about it, or just having to figure out where the stupid bus station is before it leaves without us), that’s when we got short with each other.

It was definitely a learning experience and because we got through it, I think our relationship has only grown stronger.  One of the things I learned about Oksana (which, surprisingly, I hadn’t already figured out in the 10 years we’d been together) is that she has a fear of the unknown.  Where are we staying tonight? Is this our bus stop?  What if they don’t take American currency?  Is that the right price or are we getting ripped off?  Those were all things that didn’t bother me much at all, but drove her crazy.  Knowing that about her now, there are things I can do to make her travels more enjoyable… which in turn makes mine more enjoyable, as well.

If we had this trip to do over again, we’d do one thing differently.  Instead of traveling non-stop for a year, we’d build in breaks like those we had in Buenos Aires and Thailand.  Travel three months, then rent an apartment somewhere for one month.  Repeat until either our time or money runs out.  Those months of non-travel let us to get to know a place and meet people, allowed us to save some money, gave us some valuable “down time,” and recharged our travel batteries all at the same time.

But the real answer to your “How has being together 24/7 for 18 months affected your relationship?” question?  Flatulence.  You can’t eat foreign foods and live with someone in a tiny hostel room without coming to terms with that.

Q: Do you miss it?  Does life seem boring now that you’ve slowed down?  Did you burn out on travel?

A: We miss seeing new things every day, but we certainly don’t miss all the planning that goes along with it.

Even now, coming up on four months after arriving in Australia, we’re both quite happy living a “boring” life.  Weekends come and go and we’re still surprised that we’re both completely comfortable not even leaving the apartment.  We’re watching movies, catching up on American TV shows, and cooking dinner every night – things we just couldn’t do on the road in South America or Africa or Southeast Asia.

Eventually, we’ll get bored of this lifestyle again, I’m sure, and the wanderlust will kick in again.  We’re already planning epic adventures to spend our annual leave on in years to come.  There’s a whole world out there; we’ll never stop traveling.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments |

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As I mentioned previously, Oksana and I have decided to spend a year living and working in Australia.  However, we’re trying very hard to replenish some of the savings we burned through traveling around the world, so playing the tourist isn’t something we’re planning to do while we’re in Brisbane.  Though it’d be a shame to live an entire year in Australia and not see anything outside of Brisbane…

So we’re making plans.  Plans which may involve you, especially if you’re one of our friends or family members (or pretty much anyone on our Facebook or Twitter list!)

Although I haven’t really had the opportunity (yet!) to share what happened on our Galapagos trip – the one where we invited friends and family to come along with us – both Oksana and I viewed it as a big success.  We had 5 people join us in Ecuador; a good friend, his cousin (who we’d never met at all), and a family of three I barely knew in passing.  We all hit the streets of Quito, found ourselves a luxury cruise at a reasonable price, flew out to the islands, and spent a week together on a boat.  Afterwards, our friend stayed an extra week with us in Ecuador, where we took him on a day trip into the jungle.  I think it’s safe to say a good time was had by all.

Solo travel has its own rewards, but there’s something immensely satisfying about sharing adventures with other people.  For that reason, I’m not only glad I got to travel the world with my wife, but I’m also thankful that other people joined us, as well.

I know that many people consider Australia to be on their “bucket list,” that is, a place they want to visit before they die.  If you’re one of them, why not consider joining us Down Under later this year?

Oksana can’t get away for more than a weekend at a time, at least not while she’s still working.  You’re welcome to come visit us in Brisbane, of course, but if your goal is to go sightseeing around Oz, we won’t be able to travel around ourselves until November.

We have a few things on our must-do list, so we’ve decided that Oksana can’t afford to work right up until the very last day before our visas are set to expire.  She’s thinking about turning in her resignation letter around the first of November.  That’ll give us a month (or two!) to do the tourist thing.

Here’s what we’re thinking:

• There’s a total solar eclipse passing over the northeastern tip of Queensland on the morning of November 13^th.  How cool is that?! I consider it to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we cannot miss!  Everything else we’re planning will revolve around that.
• Ever since we first learned to SCUBA dive on the Great Barrier Reef, Oksana and I have looked forward to the day we could do it again.  We plan to at least do a 5-day live-aboard on the near reef, and perhaps do a 7-day on the more spectacular outer reef… if other people are interested and we can find a way to pay for it.
• Since touring Cairns wouldn’t be new for us, we’re thinking of renting a camper van and driving down the coast, after our dives, just to see something new.  We’ll still have our apartment in Brisbane, so we can either stop there or continue on down to Sydney (or Melbourne?) and fly home from there.

Those are just ideas for now.  Once we get a list of people who might like to join us, we can brainstorm more together.

How much will it cost?

Good question, but a hard one to answer.  Let’s break it down.

Airline tickets from the States look like they might run a hair under $2000, round trip to Cairns.  This is assuming  you’re flying from somewhere in the continental US and not waiting until the last night to make reservations.  If you have some frequent flyer miles saved up, it’s possible you could knock a big chuck off of that price.

Diving can be expensive.  I think it’s safe to say that Oksana and I would like to go with Deep Sea Divers Den again, because we know what we’d be getting: A giant stateroom on a plush catamaran with 3 meals and up to 4 dives a day.  This should cost about $900-1000, depending on whether or not we share our cabin with two others.

Not a diver yet?  Not a problem!  You could take a 5- or 6-day course – the same one we took in 2008; and one of the best vacation decisions we’ve ever made! – and pay roughly the same amount of money.  The only catch is that the first two days would be spent in a classroom and a pool before you get out on the reef.  I’m sure we could coordinate this so you could dive with us, if you wanted to.

For those with no interest in diving, there’s plenty to see and do around Cairns.  You could pay for a snorkeling day-trip out on the reef, go island-hopping on a sailboat, take a tour into the Daintree rainforest, head up into the Tablelands and do something hiking, visit a crocodile farm, or any number of other things.  After our diving excursion, we could all meet up again and set off down the coast.  (Heck, we may even be able to plan things so that you don’t even need to come to Australia until after we’re done diving, which could be especially handy if you have a limited amount of vacation time.)

Recently we invited a couple from Holland over for dinner when they passed through Brisbane.  They had rented a camper van and had been driving all over eastern Australia.  Sounded like a great way to travel and save money.  They told us they spent about $65/day on the van and all the necessary insurance, but the ones I’ve browsed online are a little more expensive.  The good news is that they have ones that sleep four for around $100/day.  That’d be only $25 a day for both transportation and lodging (as campgrounds and both cheap – if not free – and plentiful here.)

I could think of nothing cooler than to have enough people to warrant getting two or three of these camper vans and shuffling traveling companions around every day!  And there’s no reason people have to rough it in koala- or kangaroo-infested campgrounds, either (as if you that doesn’t sound cool in its own right!)  Anyone that wanted to spend the night in a hostel or hotel would be more than welcome.  We could just meet again for breakfast in the morning!

It’s hard to give you a good ballpark figure on what a trip like this would cost because not everyone is going to be able to stay the same length of time nor want to participate in the same excursions, but let’s take a shot at an all-in, two week vacation.  You’re looking at $2000 for the flights, $1000 for diving, and $700 for a camper van.  Gas (petrol!) is more expensive here, closing in on $6/gallon.  We might put 3000 kilometers on a car if we go all the way down the coast to Sydney.  Call that $1500-$2000 for gas (ouch!), but if we put four people in a van, we can divide up the cost of that, too.   We’re getting close to $4000 before food and other expenses, such as random tour fees and hotels.  All in, $5000 per person should be a safe bet, though.  Yeah, I told you Australia was expensive, but hey!  Arguably the coolest thing of all – the total solar eclipse – will be free!  (Let’s just hope it’s not cloudy that day!)

You don’t have to decide right now, based on that $5000 number.  Do your own research, see if you can knock things down by using frequent flyer miles, bringing a friend along to share expenses, or just skipping certain parts of our proposed itinerary altogether.  Maybe we can work something out.

Next Step

So!  Interested?  Even just enough to get more information before making a decision?  Then fire me an email or speak up on Facebook or Twitter or something.  I want to use the next week or so to gather up the interested parties and create an email list (or a Facebook group or something) where we can all brainstorm together about dates, costs, activities, and such.

Come on!  Oksana and I would love to see you.  And you… well, you deserve to tick an item off your bucket list!

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

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When we were planning our trip, it was only supposed to be a year-long thing.  July 1 to July 1.  We were both hoping that our jobs could be held for us, but in my case, that didn’t work out.  I’m glad.  We would have lost out on a world of opportunities if we’d had to rush back to the daily grind.

Just after we left the United States, we heard about one of those opportunities from a fellow traveler in Ecuador.  He (or she; wish I could remember who it was!) told Oksana about Australia’s Work and Holiday Visa program.  Basically, if you’re 30 or under, you can apply to live and work in Australia for up to a year.  I was over the age limit, but Oksana was both qualified and intrigued.  It seemed like a risky proposition at the time – spending almost 3 days worth of our travel budget on the application fee – but ultimately we decided to give it a go.  Maybe, if everything worked out just right, we’d be able to extend our trip.

Two or three days later, she received confirmation that her visa had been approved.  It stipulated that she must enter Australia by December 28^th, 2011.  Perfect!  We had a full year to decide if we were going to use it.

By the time we were in Thailand, we had met many Australians while traveling and most of them had suggestions about where to stay and how to go about finding work.  During our month of downtime in Phuket, Oksana started the job hunt, mostly using Seek, Australia’s job search site.  She sent her resume to dozens of recruiters and companies and collected an impressive set of rejection letters.  We learned that companies don’t often give interviews to applicants who can only work a maximum of 6-months in one place…

Getting her resume out there wasn’t a complete waste of time, however.  She had a least one Skype conversation with a recruiter that specialized in auto-industry work.  He confirmed what we already knew: Just after Christmas (which was when we were planning to arrive) was literally the worst time of year to be looking for a job.  Nobody’s hiring during the summer holidays.

He asked her to contact him when we arrived, though.  Maybe something would turn up.

Since we didn’t have a job lined up for Oksana, we had no idea where we should fly.  Australia is huge.  Should we go to Sydney or Melbourne, because the job prospects may be better?  Cairns because we could go diving on the weekends?  Or Brisbane, because we knew some people (including the recruiter) there?  We decided on Brisbane, if only because the tickets from Singapore were slightly cheaper.  We reminded ourselves that we weren’t in Australia to sightsee, but rather to work.  We could always hop another plane if a job offer came in from Sydney or elsewhere; heck, we’d even spend a year in an outback mining town if the price was right!

Just before Christmas, I emailed a family we met in Ecuador that lives near Brisbane and asked them for recommendations on how to go about looking for a place to stay.  They had good news and bad.  The bad news was that they wouldn’t be there when we arrived; they were off enjoying their holiday in New South Wales.  The good news was that their daughter was with them and wasn’t using her apartment in Brisbane…

It was perfect for us.  We arrived the day after Christmas and moved in for three weeks.  It was a 2-bedroom, shared apartment in St. Lucia, which is a suburb outside of Brisbane known for its proximity to the University of Queensland.  We had our own bathroom and shared a living room and kitchen with a delightful Indian couple who helped us figure out where to shop for food, how the public transportation works, and other important thing you need to know whenever you move some place new.  Except for the ongoing job hunt, those first three weeks in Australia were practically stress free.

Half way through January, Oksana still hadn’t heard back from any recruiters or companies though, and one day, while we were walking back from the store, we discussed what would happen if we couldn’t find her a job.  We agreed that Australia was too expensive, so we started brainstorming where we could go.  Being the middle of winter back in Alaska, we weren’t in any hurry to rush home.  We thought maybe spending a month (or six) in a place like Guatemala might be nice.  I could study Spanish and she could study for her CPA exam.  We decided to give it until the end of February before making new plans.

Of course, she got a call the very next day.  Funny how these things work out.

We’d slept in and Oksana was still in her PJs when the phone rang at 10:30am.  A local company was looking over her resume and wanted to know if she could come in for an interview that day.  In an hour.  Oksana managed to push it back another half hour, until noon, but it was still a rush to get her showered, dressed, and out the door with instructions on how to cross the river and find her way to their office with Google Maps.

Before the interview was over, she’d been hired by a gourmet foods importing business.  She started the very next morning.  Unfortunately, she quickly realized that what they told her she’d be doing in the interview wasn’t actually what she ended up doing on the job.  Rather than entry-level accounting, more often than not she was stuck answering the phone.  Which wasn’t easy when the person on the other end was a foreign-born chef with an incomprehensible accent asking for cheeses and pastas she’d never heard of.

She lasted two weeks.  By then, the recruiter she’d connected with way back in Thailand had a line on two automotive accounting jobs.  The first was in Cairns; it sounded great, but they were looking for someone to stay 2-4 years.  The other was right here in Brisbane, filling in for another accountant on maternity leave.  Oksana jumped at the chance to interview and, once again, she was hired before it was over.

While all this was going on, I was struggling to find us a place to live.  Our friend had returned from her holiday and needed her place back, so I stopped by a few real estate agencies and looked at a few properties.  We quickly learned that all realtors require a minimum 6-month lease.  We couldn’t commit to that before Oksana passed her two-week trial period at the new job.

So we looked into “house shares” on Gumtree – Australia’s answer to Craigslist.  We found a temporary arrangement in another house and stayed there two and a half weeks.  By then, we knew Oksana was happy at work and felt comfortable signing a lease until December.  We moved into our new place in Highgate Hill on Feburary 7^th.

Oksana quickly settled into a Monday-through-Friday routine, but I still had some work to do before I could find a routine of my own.  The first was to get internet hooked up at our new place, which was much easier said than done.

Long story short, the entire suburb is going through a fiber optic upgrade and all copper-based internet installations have been frozen.  Even though our neighbors have ADSL or cable, it was impossible for us to get the same thing because the company handling the infrastructure, Telstra, didn’t want to have their technicians spending time undoing that work.  The fiber plans were expensive, but they were fast.  I was happy to pay for the installation, but there was nothing to do about the wait time.  It took two weeks before we had internet in the apartment, and that was only after five or six calls and three visits to a local Telstra shop to iron things out.

But I have to say, it was totally worth it.  I have a true 100Mbps connection and it’s screaming fast.  At least 12 times faster than anything I had back home in Alaska!

The other thing on my to-do list was more worrisome.  While Oksana’s visa was good for a year, my tourist visa was only good for three months.  If I didn’t figure out something by the end of March, we’d have a real dilemma on our hands.  Should Oksana stay and work while I go back to the States?  Should we break our lease, pay the penalties, and pack up and go together?

Fortunately, we never had to make that decision.  I filed for a tourist visa extension and, in spite of my stressful anticipation, it was quickly and painlessly approved.  The only hard part was paying the nearly $300 application fee.

So now I’m settling into my routine, as well.  Everyone asks, “If Oksana’s bringing home the bacon, what the heck are you doing all year long?”  Well, my plan is to write a book about our travels – it’s something I know I’d never get done while working a 9-to-5 – but I have plenty of other goals, as well.  I want to keep creating content for our website and that includes more photos, more videos, and more writing.  By the end of the year, I could easily envision having enough content for, not just a novel, but also a coffee-table photo book and a DVD.  I even have an idea for an audio podcast I’d like to explore, but with all the other work I have in front of me, I don’t know if I should try to tackle that, too…

Our current budgetary projections indicate that we’ll probably just break even at the end of our stay in Australia.  That’s based on Oksana’s salary.  I don’t have any illusions of my travel book setting the world on fire, but any money I can make selling it would be great.  My modest goal is to earn just enough to cover the amount we went over our travel budget last year.  I’m still waiting for Oksana to give me exact numbers, but I suspect that’s on the order of $6,000-$8,000.  (I’m just guessing, but we exceeded our travel budget in late September and didn’t reach Brisbane until December 26.  Shit, maybe that number is closer to $10,000.)  I can make some money selling it as an ebook, of course, but I’ve been thinking about a Kickstarter campaign, too, in the fall.

So.  That’s where we are now; living and working in Brisbane through the end of the year (Oksana’s employers have already offered to sponsor her for full work visa, but we’ve been away from home for so long, we just can’t see ourselves taking them up on their offer.)  We never planned it, but I’m glad for the opportunity to try something new.  My only regret is that we may leave this country without seeing much more than Brisbane and its suburbs…

…But we’re already batting around travel ideas for November.  Watching a total solar eclipse, SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef, and perhaps driving down the Sunshine Coast.  More on that in the next blog post (with an invitation to join us, too, if that sounds like something you might want to do!)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments |

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This one’s all about transportation.  Specifically, the time we spent traveling from place to place on our trip.

It was easy enough for me to collect this data.  I spent a lot of time on my iPhone on those long bus rides.  Watching movies, reading books, and listening to podcasts; it really wasn’t such a bad time.  At some point during the long ride, I’d remember to jot down the beginning and end points in the Notes app and, once the trip was done, I’d count up the hours we’d spent on the road and jot that down, too (rounding to the nearest quarter hour.)  While I did the same for trains, boats, and minivans, I neglected to write down much of anything about our airline travel.  I had to recreate that data by digging through archived emails for the itineraries.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t keep track of any travel within the cities and towns we visited.  Taxis, metros, city buses and the like were too frequent and too short to worry over.  To that end, what you see below is only the intercity travel.

I’ve been looking forward to totaling up these numbers and sharing them with you ever since we took an epic 34-hour bus ride in Africa.  I knew the numbers would be impressive, but even I didn’t expect the total we came up with.  Look at that first number:  737 hours and 45 minutes of travel.  That’s 30.74 days we spent moving from one place to another.  One entire month of our 13-month, ’round-the-world trip was spent sitting in a bus, plane, train, boat, or automobile !  (Over two weeks of our lives spent in bus seats alone!!)

It kind of boggles the mind.

(Make sure to click the image to see a larger version.)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

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While on the bus from Malaysia to Singapore, I reflected on all the Southeast Asian countries we’d traveled through.  Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, in that order.  I realized that (excepting a small backwards step to Cambodia) we had been easing ourselves back into the first world with every new country we visited.

Once I started to look for them, I found arguments to support this theory everywhere.  Bathrooms steadily improved, from bucket-flushing in Laos to modern toilets in Thailand and beyond.  Hotel keys changed from big, metal skeleton keys to RFID-enabled plastic cards.  Safe drinking water was more readily available; we could once again drink from the taps in our Singapore hotel.  Internet access speed increased and wifi hotspots, while more prevalent, were also more often locked down and monetized.  English in Laos was only found in hostels and travel agencies, but by the time we arrived in Kuala Lumpur it was the de facto standard.  In Singapore, we could watch the local news (a novelty for us!) because the major newspapers and television news broadcasts were all in English.

Perhaps the most obvious indication that we were climbing back up to U.S. standards was the lessening number of scooters on the road.  It was literally impossible to view any stretch of road in Vietnam, no matter how short, and not see a motorcycle somewhere.  There were fewer in Cambodia, fewer still in Thailand.  By the time we arrived in Singapore, it was almost all cars again.

Anyone who has traveled extensively knows that reverse culture shock is a very real thing.  Setting aside the psychological problems that some travelers cope with after being in a third-world country long enough (being unable to share experiences with friends and family because they’re don’t care about or, conversely, are jealous of them; difficulty readjusting to “the daily grind,” etc.), there are many surprises – some good, some bad – waiting for you when you return home.  Toilet paper in public restrooms.  Drivers sticking to their lanes.  People showing up to appointments on time.  Having to make hundreds of choices in a grocery store.  High prices.  The constant barrage of advertising.

Personally, I’ve noticed it always takes me at least a week to stop mentally preparing my approach to each and every person in public.  How do I translate my question into Spanish?  What gestures can I make if they don’t understand me?  Shut up, brain!  I’m back in the States!  I can just ask in English!

After a year on the road, I expected our reverse culture shock to be of epic proportions.  I was honestly worried that Australia would be too much for us when we arrived, but something as simple as our route through Southeast Asia put my mind at ease.  Instead of being hit with it all at once, we eased into our reverse culture shock over the course of an entire month.

In some ways, Australia turned out to be a step backwards.  Singapore was the wealthiest country we visited on our entire trip (by gross domestic product, at purchasing power parity, per capita.)  And that includes the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)… and the United States of America!  Singapore is 3^rd in the world after Qatar and Luxembourg.  The U.A.E. is 6^th, the U.S. 7^th.

It occurs to me that someone new to travel, someone who wants to see Southeast Asia but is worried about diving right in, could take a lesson from the story above.  They could reverse our route, start in Singapore, and ease themselves into the countries that are more difficult to travel through.  Anything you can do to lesson culture shock – or reverse culture shock, for that matter – can only make your travel easier and more enjoyable.

Rules

Like most first world countries, Singapore has a high regard for the rules.  You might remember the controversy when an American broke one of them a few years back and was sentenced to caning as punishment.  Oksana had her first run in with the rules at the border.

While we were standing in line at immigration, we could just barely see a LCD-screen playing a loop of prohibited items.  There were plenty of the things you’d normally expect to see screened at customs: no guns, no live animals, no seeds – those sorts of things.  Only two items gave us cause for concern: My Swiss Army knife and Oksana’s chewing gum.  (If we’d been arriving from South America, I might also have had to ditch any bootleg DVDs I’d bought, but I’d long since stopped carrying those around…)

The ban against knives was ambiguous.  The screen said no knives, but the accompanying pictures showed things like swords and bayonets.  I decided to take my knife out of my pocket and bury it in my big backpack instead.  Argue to keep it if it ever came to that.  Oksana decided to declare the big container of gum she’d just purchased in Kuala Lumpur.

When she did, the customs officer opened up the canister and looked inside.  When he saw all those chiclets, he shook his head and tsk tsked us.  “You can’t bring gum into Singapore,” he said.  Oksana was already resigned to losing it; she simply sighed and picked up the rest of her stuff from the x-ray belt.  But then the customs agent leaned in and said, “Here. Hold out your hand.”  He then shook out a generous portion and smiled.  What the hell, I thought, and stuck my own hand out.  He winked and gave me a handful, too.

I always assumed that the U.S. was the pinnacle of rules-based societies, but Singapore has us beat.  Some of the rules I agree with and would happily endorse: No smoking in public places, no littering, and stiff penalties for things like drunk driving and “crimes that disrupt racial or ethnic harmony.”  On the other hand, they also go to ridiculous extremes.  No chewing gum (unless it has a therapeutic value), no spitting, and mandatory flushing of public toilets – all are fineable offenses.  Sadly, there are also some laws that I flatly disagree with.  For instance, homosexuality is strictly illegal in Singapore.

A great byproduct of all those rules, however, is a sense of safety and security (assuming you’re not gay.)  Oksana and I had no concerns walking the streets late at night.  In Vietnam, I heard horror stories of cab drivers extorting huge fares from unwitting tourists.  In Singapore, that shit is illegal.  Taxis not only are not allowed to overcharge (everything is by the meter), but they’re not allowed to tout, either.  That was a huge relief.  We’d much rather stand in line for a taxi than have a dozen drivers shouting at us the moment we set foot in a new city.

Size Matters

While there are plenty of countries smaller than Singapore (it ranks at 193 out of 249), it’s still pretty darn small.  Total area is about 270 square miles, which is still only a quarter the size of our smallest state, Rhode Island.  The country is so tiny it can truthfully be called a city-state.

Already, there are over 5 million people living in Singapore.  That’s a lot of people in a relatively small area (the aforementioned Rhode Island has barely more than 1 million.)  As a city, it’s not exactly high on the population density list, but as a country it sure is.

Singapore’s urban planners are doing a good job conserving what land they have.  We saw many examples of their efficient usage of space while we were there.  Skyscrapers were the most obvious and visible examples.  When land is scarce, build up!

We also saw entire malls with subterranean levels.  Enter on the ground floor and you could shop up or down.  Our bus drove under the airport, on a busway that entered on one side and exited out the other.  Not only was it space-saving (just like the terminals stacked on top of one another), it also served to keep us out of the rain… like the bus station in Kuala Lumpur!

Perhaps the most extreme example of space saving was the soccer pitch we saw down by the marina.  Or, I should say, the soccer pitch we saw floating on the marina!

Christmas

Christmas certainly is different in Singapore.  I don’t know what the major religions are, but it appears that only the shopping part was adopted from this Christian holiday.  Oksana and I went out to record our McDonald’s video at 10pm on Christmas Eve, thinking the streets and malls would be clear by then, but boy were we wrong!

Midnight, Christmas Eve, is a huge event in Singapore.  In the States, people are more likely to be going to midnight mass (religious), or trying to sleep (with kids), just before the clock ticks over to Christmas day.  Singaporeans are more likely to be shopping shoulder-to-shoulder before heading out to the streets to count down the seconds until midnight together, New Year’s Eve style.

It was all a little much for Oksana and me, especially considering we had a flight to catch the next day and the rain wouldn’t let up.  The street decorations were nice, though.

Rain

The rain was spectacular in Singapore.  It rolled through the city, multiple times a day, and trapped everyone in mall entrances.  There were times when it hit and we were only a block away from our hotel, but we didn’t dare make the dash back.  Better to duck under an overhang and wait it out.

We packed lightweight rain jackets, of course, but we didn’t carry them around with us in Singapore. Too hot.  More than once, Oksana and I took the rain as an excuse to laze around at Starbucks and browse the internet on our iPhones.  Eventually we bought a cheap umbrella from 7-Eleven just so we could get back to the hotel with our top halves dry.

Prices

About that “third wealthiest country in the world” thing?  Yeah, it affects prices.  We knew that going in and decided not to skimp on our hotel accommodations.  After all, Singapore was the last country on our trip, so why not go out in style?

We stayed three nights at the four-star Rendezvous Hotel Singapore for an average of USD$118 per night.  Normally it’s up around USD$150 – a far cry from our target of USD$20 throughout most of our travels – but we’d been wisely booking our hotels throughout Southeast Asia on Hotels.com and we’d built up to a coupon code worth about USD$100 off our stay.  Made the added luxury a little easier to rationalize.

We didn’t buy much more than food while we were in Singapore, just window shopped our way through a few malls.  The food we did buy was mostly through grocery stores.  We’d spent so much on lodging, we had to find ways to save in other areas.

One thing we couldn’t avoid was laundry.  Other than hand-washing a few items in the sink, we hadn’t had clean clothes going all the way back to Koh Mak in Thailand, three weeks and as many countries before.  It was the single longest stretch we’d gone without doing laundry on our entire trip and I’m sure we looked quite the sight when we walked into the Rendezvous lobby with giant backpacks and rumpled clothes.

As in the sections of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpor we’d stayed in recently, the Orchard Road area of Singapore had no laundry businesses catering to tourists nearby.  The best we could find was a small coin-op Laundromat in a mall nearby.  Cost us $20 to wash and dry two loads – easily the most we ever spent having our clothes washed – but by that point we would have twice that.

The one thing that was surprisingly inexpensive in Singapore was the public transportation.  Both buses and taxis were surprisingly cheap.  It cost us less than $4 for the both of us to get to the airport (which took about 40 minutes by bus.)  I didn’t think to check, but I wonder now how their gasoline prices compare.

Cybercafés

There are cybercafés all over the world.  In the smallest place, in the middle of nowhere, if tourists visit, someone will cobble together a couple old computers and charge them to check their email.  Oksana and I were traveling with laptops, so we didn’t frequent many internet cafes.  More often than not, we looked for wireless hotspots (easily found in restaurants, cafes, and hostels) instead.

Even so, I noticed that cybercafés are big business in Singapore.  They’re not like the ones we’d seen in other countries, with hand-me-down computers, fluorescent lighting, and a loud fan pushing hot air around the room.  No, in Singapore, there were rows of high-end computers, dressed out in neon lights, in a pitch black room.  These were gaming cafes.

When scouting out McDonald’s locations and menus for our video, we walked into one mall that had no less than three packed cybercafés.  Right inside the main doors, a giant decal for a popular game was plastered on the floor, advertising league play.  As we walked past the open café doors, I spied people playing Counterstrike, Starcraft, and other popular games.  Judging from the shouts and cheers coming from different cafes across the multi-level mall, I wouldn’t be surprised if players in one were competing against teams in another.

Fake Eyelashes

Oksana decided to have a pair of fake eyelashes applied in Singapore.  She’d tried the same thing in Thailand where the prices were much cheaper, but unfortunately you get what you pay for and they started to fall out sooner than she expected.

She did her research and decided on a place in Chinatown.  Once we found it, I left her alone to have single eyelashes glued on, one at time, over the course of a couple hours.  That’s Oksana’s sort of thing, not mine, so I didn’t think much about eyelashes until after she had them applied.  It was only then that I noticed practically every woman we passed on the street had fake eyelashes, too.

Reminds me of the women in Bulgaria who dyed their hair.  Just another reminder that different cultures place different values on what they think of as beautiful.

Toy Outpost

Oksana spotted an interesting store in the Plaza Singapura mall called Toy Outpost.  Basically, the “shelving” of the store was row upon row of clear glass lockers.  Every locker was filled with toys, mostly collectibles.  I saw dozens of plastic movie action figures, Barbies and manga characters arranged in full pose, stacks of Magic the Gathering cards, Beanie Babies… as well as plenty of other things I didn’t recognize.

We finally figured out the business model.  The store owners rent out the glass lockers, people fill them with toys or other memorabilia they want to sell, set their prices, and the store handles all sales (and keeps a small commission for their effort.)

It occurred to me that this is essentially a “physical eBay.”  Instead of trying to guess the quality of merchandize from a few amateur photos taken in poor lighting, buyers at the Toy Outpost are able to see potential purchases up close.  And because the items are right there, there’s no worry that a scammer is behind the sale, either.

Well, that’s about it.  Twenty-seven “Thoughts On…” articles on Postcard Valet and I’m called it done.  I’m caught up!

For the record, there are four countries on this trip that I didn’t write about:

• The United States, because, well, that’s where I’m from everything else is compared to it.
• Canada, because, come on, unless you run into a French-Canadian, you can hardly tell the difference!
• Colombia, because while we did get stamps in our passport for the country, they were only “en transisto;” we never left the airport.
• And finally, Australia, because we’d visited it for the first time in 2008 and I wrote about my impressions then.

I may or may not write an update on Australia after we’ve lived here a year.  I’m definitely learning many new things about the country, but they’re not exactly travel-oriented.  After a whole year, that could be a daunting post to write.  You know what?  I’ll probably skip it.

At any rate, finishing up my “Thoughts On…” posts has been holding up my Postcard Valet to-do list for awhile now.  Glad to have it behind me.  I plan to write the next post about coming to Australia, what we’re doing in 2012, and where we’ll go from here.  After that, I really need to make some changes to the site (such as updating the FAQ and About this Site pages) before diving into what I really want to be doing: Writing about many of our adventures on the trip (as well as calling attention to some of our favorite photos, editing together some more videos, and pulling together more infographics.)

Stay tuned.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

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The final McDonald’s — country number 29! — in Singapore.   Our video record of eating at the restaurant chain sort of ended with a whimper; the signature meal was the same as in Kuala Lumpur, so we didn’t get to try anything new and exotic.  Come to think of it, the most memorable thing about it was that it was Christmas day and some of the cashiers had on Santa hats.

As I mention in the video, Oksana and I already ate at an Australian McDonald’s in 2008, so even though we’re going to be living in Brisbane for the year, it’s not like we’re in a hurry to take our camcorder down to “Maccas” (as they call it here.)  Still, you can bet we’ll probably record another video before we leave.  The McOz has a slice of beetroot on it!

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