The End

We are writing this final post sitting at Gus' parents' kitchen table in Fort Collins. Our trip has officially come to an end. And what a trip it was. We knew it would be a fantastic adventure, but the things that we got to see and the people that we met were even more amazing than we could have imagined. We know that the experience has changed both of us at least a little (and hopefully for the better).

We feel so lucky for the good fortune that followed us through our whole journey. Along the way, we were afraid to state our good luck out loud for fear that we would jinx ourselves. But we can now say that neither of us got sick or injured, we didn't have anything big or small stolen from us, and we didn't lose anything along the way. This is probably a big part of the reason that we never really got tired of traveling (and why we are already talking about when we can take this kind of trip again).

But for now, we are relishing the little things in life that we missed while we were away (for Gus, cheddar cheese, of course...for Sarah, a mind-boggling array of clothing options) and preparing for our drive to DC. We plan to be Colorado for another week or so and then will begin the drive, hopefully stopping to see a few friends along the way. By mid-April, we should be in Washington, and hopefully great jobs and that perfect house will follow soon thereafter.

So, the end of one adventure, but the beginning of another. It makes us think of a line from that silly movie 'Hook' (about Peter Pan) that has for some reason stuck with us. A little boy says to Peter Pan upon returning home from Neverland, "So the adventure is over, Peter?" And Peter replies, "No, never. Life...life is the adventure."

Thanks for reading.

Best of Africa

After racking our brains over New Zealand & Asia bests, we couldn't leave Africa out of the fun. So a short list of some of our favorite memories from Africa:

Best Hotel: The Plantation Lodge, just outside of the Ngorogoro Conservation Area. This is a restored home on a working coffee plantation, and it had beautiful rooms, spectacular food and an amazingly peaceful setting. We think this might actually have been our best accomodation of the entire trip. And it was set up by our safari company, so we had nothing to do with finding it. Just good luck.

Best Sunset: We saw some spectacular African sunsets, but the best had to be watching the sun sink below the horizon of the Serengeti.

Best Meal: Our dinner at the Zanzibar Palace Hotel in Stonetown (on Zanzibar Island). We weren't expecting much, but the owner of the hotel whipped up a delicious curried soup, an amazing red snapper and Gus' dream dessert (involving chocolate ice cream, bananas and chocolate syrup).

Best Character: Our Nile rafting guide, Peter, whose continuous percentile estimations throughout our rafting trip ("I think there is a 5% chance the boat will not flip.") provided us with a new form of communicating for the rest of our trip. ("I think there is a 93% chance that this cafe will serve ice cream." "I think there is a 1% chance that this cab driver will not try to rip us off.")

Best Thing Witnessed Balanced on a Head: In Asia, it was the motos laden with stuff that amazed us. But in Africa, we couldn't stop marveling at all that they carried - for not insignificant distances - on their heads. We saw all kinds of impressive stuff, but I think the 40 pound sack of potatoes probably takes the cake. It's heavy and lumpy and not at all conducive to being balanced on anything. And yet a woman walked down the road with the potato sack on her head...and a baby strapped to her back. Puts our 10 pound dumbbell workouts to shame.

Tanzanian Safari and a Little Beach Time

In what turned out to be one of the best decisions of our trip, we decided to go on safari with a very small company called Green Footprint Adventures. We chose them because they offered activities like canoeing and mountain biking in addition to more traditional driving safaris. What we didn't know until we arrived is that they are the only company in Tanzania that had permits to do these kinds of things. We canoed with hippos in Arusha National Park, went on a nighttime drive where we saw huge groups of elephants and hippos grazing out of the water, took a wet and very muddy bike trip in Lake Maynara National Park, visited a missionary hospital and a public elementary school, ate a Tanzanian home-cooked meal, and visited a banana beer "brew-pub."

Of course, even the "normal" game drives were spectacular. Our guide, Protti, had the amazing ability to find animals almost on command. Highlights included two cheetah enjoying an afternoon meal and giraffes that definitely knew that they had the right-of-way on park roads. We thought that we would be lucky to see lions at all. But in one day we saw a half-dozen prides with lots of cute cubs. But even without animals, the endless plain of the Serengeti, the Maasai villages dotting the valleys around Ngorongoro Crater, the forests of acacia, and sunsets and sunrises were incredibly spectacular and impossible to capture fully on camera or even to describe.

The last few days of our trip were spent on the island of Zanzibar, just off the coast of mainland Tanzania. It was a wonderful, relaxing way to end our adventure. We drank "Kilimanjaro" brand beer while sitting in hammocks and playing an uncountable number of games of mancala. Our one exciting activity was a snorkel trip which started out as a quiet day looking at starfish and parrotfish and ended with a bone-jarring speedboat ride through a driving thunderstorm. Ah, the travel gods weren't going to let us off too easy at the end of the trip. We spent the afternoon commiserating about our bruised butts and the state of world politics with a friendly Belgian couple. It was great way to spend our last day of vacation.



On our first day of Tanzanian safari in the small Arusha National Park we witnessed what can only be described as an elephant traffic jam. Once we started eeking our way through, this young guy looked up and seemed to say to us, "What the heck are you doing with your head out the roof of a car? Don't you know you look really goofy?"



The Serengeti sunset. This photo was taken from the porch of one of our lodges.



We thought we would be lucky to see even one lion during our safari. But we lucked out and saw several prides, some of which were only a few feet away.



Cheetahs on the Serengeti with a young wildebeest that hadn't had a great day.



Sadly, the last photo taken on our wonderful trip while standing on the beach at our last stop on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. The clouds were gathering over as if to say "now you have to go and get a job, ha ha ha ha."