The End… for now

It’s sad to say, but our round-the-world journey is officially over.

 

The travel gods were looking after us one more time on our way home from Auckland. The four hours of layover time we had given ourselves at LAX had dwindled to one hour after our Auckland to LAX flight was delayed and our LAX to SEA flight was mysteriously moved up. There was no way we could navigate immigration, customs, pick up our bags, and make it to our gate in time. To make matters worse, all the flights leaving for SEA that afternoon were completely booked. We were preparing ourselves mentally for Christmas in Disneyland.

 

After landing in Los Angeles, we hustled through customs and immigration as fast as we could, and made it to the Alaska Airlines desk just about the time our flight was scheduled to take off. We let out a big sigh of relief when they told us that our flight had been delayed two hours and that we’d be able to make our flight. For once, we were actually happy for our plane to be delayed.

 

Anyway, that was about the extent of our travel excitement. We made it back to our home town of Port Orchard in one piece. The foot of snow on the ground was kind of fun – at least to look at. It was nice to spend Christmas with our families, something we hadn’t been able to do very often during our stint in NYC.

 

Thanks everyone for following along on our liltte break from reality. The job market isn’t looking too hot, so make sure to check back in a few weeks in case we’ve decided to postpone reality just a little bit longer.

 

If you’re curious, here’s a few things we thought stood-out along the way:  

 

RTW Best Of:

 

-Favorite Sight: Machu Picchu

-Favorite City: 5 way tie between Buenos Aires, Bruges, London, Prague and Sydney

-Favorite Country: Belgium

-Favorite Continent: Australia

-Best Beach: Roatan, Honduras

-Least Tourist-Friendly City: Moscow. We think they like it that way.

-Tidiest City: Singapore. One misstep, and you get slapped with a hefty fine. NYC could learn a thing or two.

-Best Lodging Value: $100 night at the Hilton in London via Hotwire.com 
-Most Unusual Lodging: A ship called the Waitanic in Waitomo, New Zealand. How many people can say they’ve slept in a boat converted into a motel? 

-Most Scenic Train: Lucern to Interlaken, Switzerland.
-Most Un-nerving Train Moment: Conductor on night train from Krakow to Prague warning us to sleep with our money under our pillows because of all the robberies.

-Most Memorable Flight: Short flight to the Bay Islands of Honduras. The plane looked like a shipping container with wings. Air conditioning consisted of the pilot opening up the windows in the cockpit. Nothing like feeling the wind in your hair at 10,000 feet.
-Best Airport for a Lengthy Layover: London Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

-Most Traveler Carnage: Thailand. Rashes, broken limbs, burns, bites, slings, etc.

-Meanest Tourists: Rome. We’ve never seen so many people so unhappy to be on vacation

-Most Pedestrian Friendly: Sydney. Cars stop even if you look like you might want to cross the street. Several times, we crossed the street just because we didn’t want the driver to feel bad.

-Best Language Moment: A man in Brussels whizzed by on his bicycle and dropped one of his gloves. Jim rushed to pick it up while shouting in his best French accent, ”monsieur!, monsieur!.”

-Place Most Unfriendly to the Waistline: Belgium. They ride their bikes a lot, but waffles and beer are a deadly combination.
-Best Coffee: Cafe Villamil, Honduras
-Best Steak: Argentina (duh)

-Largest Beer: Munich (duh)
-Most Ice-Cream Consuming Citizens: Santiaguinos. It was the middle of their winter too. What do they eat during the summer - hot soup?
-Most Smoking: Santiaguinos. Ice cream cone in one hand, cigarette in the other.

-Person who helped the most old ladies stow their luggage in the overhead compartments: Jim 

 

RTW by the numbers:

 

151        days

25          countries

19          trains

31          flights

12          ferry rides

51          different accommodations slept in

4            dog poos stepped in

13          jars of peanut butter

23          lbs - backpack weight

4,107     photos taken (avg of 27 per day)

$500      spent in Internet cafes

11:45     hrs on plane from Auckland to LAX (longest flight)

1            tarantula spotting, Roatan, Honduras

72          hrs of one-on-one Spanish instruction

$3          haircut in Beijing

1            misplaced cell phone

18.5       books read

NZ North Island

We arrived sometime around noon in Auckland. Since we had a pretty ambitious itinerary set, and didn’t really feel like dealing with mass transit, we headed to the car rental desk to pick up some wheels. Surprisingly, driving on the wrong side of the road in the wrong side of the car really wasn’t all that big of an adjustment since we weren’t accustomed to driving on either side of the road.

We drove south to the town of Hamilton to meet up with our friend and Jim’s former colleague Emily, who is spending some time traveling around the country. Our first stop was to the small town of Waitomo. There isn’t much going on in Waitomo except for a large network of glow worm filled caves that tourists flock to. We got a little turned around on our way there and ended up stopping off at our first of several extremely helpful tourist information booths called I-Sites. The nice people at the I-Site were able to book our cave tour for the following day and also gave us some good directions to make our way to Waitomo.

Our accommodations in Waitomo were one-of-a-kind to say the least. We stayed at Woodlyn Park, home of the enterprising sheep shearer Billy Black and his creative theme based motels including the Hobbit Motel, Train Motel, and Plane Motel. We stayed in the only room available in the Waitanic Motel. As the name suggests, it was an old ferry boat refurbished into a four room hotel. We were a little skeptical, but upon boarding the vessel it was actually a very nice place complete with a couple bedrooms, full kitchen, nice bathroom and port holes.

The following day, we got up early to prepare for our 9:00am black water rafting trip called Black Labyrinth. At the tour company’s office, we suited up in our our umpa-lumpa-esq (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) outfits, which, in addition to looking pretty funny, also happened to be wet, cold and a little smelly. After a few good laughs at our cool get-ups, we shuttled up to the caves to retrieve our inner tubes. The next few hours we would spend squeezing, hiking, jumping and floating our way through a huge cave system. One of the more un-nerving things we had to do was the ‘leap of faith’ where we crept out to the edge of a waterfall, turned backwards, placed our tubes around our butts, and jumped back into the blackness. Toward the end of the trip, with most of the hiking and jumping over with, we spent some time floating peacefully down the cave in the pitch black with only the star-like patchwork of glow worms to lead us out of the cave and into the daylight.

After a hot shower and some soup, we continued on to the self-proclaimed ‘Trout Fishing Capital of the World’ (more about that nonsense later) of Turangi. We stopped off at I-Site number two, and booked two nights of accommodations at the Judge’s Pool Motel, and also reserved spot on a shuttle bus for our hike the next day.

The shuttle bus arrived at 6:30 the following morning to take us to the trail head for the Tongariro Crossing, claimed to be one the the top day hikes in the world. It’s an 18.5 kilometer (11.5 miles) hike that leads up into and out of several volcanic craters, and back down though a beautiful valley looking out over the immense Lake Taupo. Heavy wind, rain and fog plagued the first half of the hike, and we missed out on some great views of Mt. Ngauruhoe from the top of Red Crater, the high point of the hike. Finally on our decent, the clouds began to clear and let the sun peak through. We stopped for lunch at a camping hut and were able to get out of the wind. Due to frozen fingers and lack of photo opportunities, we finished the hike in just under six hours verses the prescribed seven to eight.

As we were in a trout capital, Jim couldn’t pass up the opportunity to throw in a line. Not too tired from the hike, he rented waders and fly rod and reel, bought himself a fishing licence and gave it his best on the Tongariro River. After two excursions in the afternoon he called it a day without even a nibble. So much for Trout Capital of the World.

The next day, we headed north along the east side of Lake Taupo with the destination of Rotorua. We stopped off in Taupo to visit our friendly booking friends at I-Site for our accommodations and got a coffee before getting on the road again. On the way to Rotorua, we stopped off to visit the steaming, bubbling, gurgling, and  incredibly smelly geothermal wonderland of Wai-o-tapu.

We got into Rotorua in the afternoon once again visiting the neighborhood I-Site for help in booking a visit to a traditional Maori (New Zealand’s original inhabitants) village. That night we spent the evening with the Mitai tribe and learned a little about their culture and customs, and watched a performance of their traditional song and dance. The best part of the evening though, was the vast amount of food we consumed at the hangi or feast. It was a pretty impressive eating performance we put on.

Our last day in Rotorua, Emily went off to get pampered at the Polynesian Spa, while we explored the town. We later walked through the town’s museum and learned quite a bit about the strange and interesting geothermal history of Rotorua. Inspired by all the talk of the the mineral water’s healing powers, we took advantage of the 108 degree mineral pool at our motel followed by a nice dip in the bubbly spa. Despite being smelly, slimy and uncomfortably hot, we think the mineral waters did manage to help out our sore hiker’s muscles.

We parted ways with Emily the following morning, and drove north to Auckland to check out NZ city life for a few days. It’s a pretty walkable city and we covered most of the central area in a short amount of time. Auckland is know as the “City of Sails,” so we decided to take a nice dinner sail out into the harbour. It was a fun evening on the water and a great way to close out our stay in NZ.