Jerome and I have some exciting news to share as you may have deduced from the photo! We're happy to say that we're expecting a new addition to our family in August! Everything has been going really well so far, I've been very lucky to have had hardly any morning sickness or anything, aside from being a bit more tired than usual. We're looking forward to starting this new phase of our adventures which will have its share of rewards and challenges. Jerome keeps assuring me when I get nervous, that if we can survive being marooned on an island, we should be able to handle a little person! While I'm not sure quite how the two relate, I'm confident that together we'll be able to rise to the challenge and enjoy the ride!
Jerome-- Sorry for the long delay in posting. I accidentally went snorkeling with our camera in my pocket and we're still tring to figure out if we can recover our pictures from Indonesia. We'll post something about that later.
We had originally planned to visit Bangkok for about a week, but we decided to change our plans because of the coup, curfew and protests. AirAsia also canceled our flight to Bangkok. And we also wanted to try to do some more diving.
We searched for last minute deals on a liveaboard and found a great one in the Maldives on a boat called the Maldives Aggressor. Maldives is definitely farther afield then we were planning on going, but we also found cheap, direct flights from Singapore.
The Maldives Aggressor
The Maldives Aggressor is a 115ft diesel and sail powered yacht. We had a completely full boat with 20 guests and a double contingent of crew (half the crew was being trained). Guests came from all around the world - Australia, Germany, USA, Russia, Switzerland.
Selfie with our safety sausage
We did 21 dives over the 7 days, including 4 night dives. Laura and I have now completed 67 dives (63 dives since we started our trip in April) and we've logged a total 56 hours and 42 minutes underwater! We also did our Nitrox certification before we went, which allowed us to use tanks filled with 32% oxygen (rather than regular air which has 21% oxygen). This lets us dive for a longer time at a deeper depth without having to worry about getting "the bends".
Maldives anemonefish in a magnificent sea anemone
Diving in the Maldives was fantastic! One of the night dives we did at an underwater pinnacle had circling sharks, giant moray eels out of their holes, huge sting rays feeding, and a highly venomous stonefish camouflaged on the sea floor. Another dive was with the huge, graceful manta rays. Another with a 6m - 8m whale shark. During one of the night dives, Laura and I found an octopus out hunting. Previously we'd only seen then hiding in little holes, but this one was swimming across the reef and camouflaging itself as it went. Very cool to see. Below are some pictures taken using our new underwater camera housing - if you want to see more check out our album.
Manta Ray and its accompanying remoras
Lion fish - beautiful, but poisonous
Snorkeling with a whale shark
Octopus
Stonefish
Eagle ray
Whitetip reef shark
Diving is surprisingly tiring, especially since we start the day at 6am. Usual day went something like: wake up at 6am, eat something small, first dive, breakfast, second dive, lunch, third dive, snack, night dive, dinner, bedtime. Basically we just ate and dove all day long. The chef on the boat was great - always preparing an amazing spread from the tiny little kitchen. My favorite was the Sri Lankan lunch which had some really nice and spicy curries.
Our first liveaboard was a great experience and we'd love to do another in the future. Our trip is coming to an end - we're off to Cambodia tomorrow and then it's Hong Kong and back home in early July. Time's really been flying by!
Jerome -- Vera Falls seems like its straight out of a movie. It's a fairly small waterfall that falls into a cascading set of clear swimming pools. The water is nice and cool (almost too cold for some of the locals, but it was perfect for me). The falls are small enough that you can dive under them, and surface in a small cave behind them. The locals were super-friendly. The guy who looks after the area invited us to camp there next time we visit.
It's a bit of a challenge to get to - the roads are narrow where they exist (the rest is just a rocky path). We hired a Taxi driver (Dan - 090-535-86095) to take us around for the day for around 4000 Pesos. We visited the beach at Barcacay, Vera Falls, and the rest house 1/3 up Mayon Volcano - but the falls were the highlight for me.
Finally we have arrived at the final post about our trip last year. It seems to have taken me almost exactly a year since we returned to get them all done. But I hope you've enjoyed them despite the lag. I sometimes still can't believe that we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to go on such a grand adventure. Almost everyday I remember some part of it, and cherish the memories. We got to see so many interesting places, and meet up with friends and family along the way! Thanks to all of you who gave us encouragement, suggestions, a place to stay, or met up with us!
We left off in Barcelona, where we caught a flight to Sweden. It wasn't on our original itinerary, but while we were in Morocco, we got an email from Kim, telling us that she would be arriving to live in Sweden about a week before our flights home. So we flew from Barcelona to Stockholm on November 1st of last year, arriving at the airport only and hour after Kim! Aaron had already been there for a while, and so picked us all up and took us to the apartment, where much catching up and eating and merriment began.
The next day after an excellent homemade breakfast, Aaron took us all on a tour of Uppsala where they are living. We visited a really interesting church which had a unique Scandinavian feel to it. There was wall paper, sculptures, logs of carved wood, and ornate crests like this one.
The town was really interesting, with lots of neat little shops and stuff. We picked up food for dinner at a farmer's market, had an afternoon snack and coffee at a little shop, and then had our mental clocks thrown into confusion when the sun started setting around 3:30 in the afternoon!
That evening we had another great meal of reindeer sliders and a veggie mix from the farmer's market. We tried Fishshot (a liquor that tastes like menthol), which I did not enjoy at all... And we spent the evening in the apartment's sauna, experiencing the fun that has to offer, over beers and tales of our adventures.
The next morning we took a train to Stockholm to stay for a few days. We played many games of Tichu on the train. We arrived at a little hotel just outside of the city, dropped our stuff off, and took another train into Stockholm itself.
On the recommendation of one of Kim and Aaron's friends we had dinner at Bla Dorren, which was really tasty and fun. They had homemade schnapps there in lots of different flavours which was really cool. We tried quite a few of them, my favourite being the horseradish one, that I was jokingly dared to try! The downside, was that the price ended up being by the ounce, not the glass as we had thought, so they weren't quite as awesomely cheap as we originally thought. The food was great too, we all had tasty things, Jerome opted for the very traditional Swedish meatballs with lingonberries!
The following day we explored some more, and went to the Vasa Museum. It was really interesting. It contains a ship that sank in the 1600's on her maiden voyage, but that was preserved because of the salt water and cold temperature. They were able to salvage it in immaculate condition, and study why it sank so quickly. One of the interesting things about it, was that the two halves of the ship were made by different groups, who each had a slightly different measuring system, so the two halves were different lengths! If you're in Stockholm it is worth the trip. It is one of the few museums I've gone to where I've read every single panel of text because it was so well put together, and the story was told in such an interesting way.
For dinner we went to a bar recommended to us by the bartender the night before. They had a huge beer selection. We were lucky and got the last table for dinner! We tried all sorts of beers, and they had excellent buckets of mussels. We were about to head out, when we realized the stage was all set up for live music, and so decided to see what it was all about. Turns out Chip Taylor was playing. We weren't really sure who he was at first, but turns out he wrote Angel of the Morning, and Wild Thing, so it was pretty cool.
The next day we headed back to Uppsala, and just hung out with Sven the cat, made and ate some food and played games. Much fun was had by all. Jerome also made a friend out of Tomtar!
We said our goodbyes to Kim and Aaron and headed back to London for a few days before flying home. And we had to take a picture of the giant Ikea we saw on the way to the airport.
We arrived in London, and made our way to our Airbnb place. It was a room in an interesting housing complex known as Peabody houses. Our host was very nice, and gave us a cup of tea upon arriving. We had made arrangements to meet up with some of my friends from school, so we headed out, taking a bunch of cool night shots of the City along the way.
We met with Christianne and Dave at the Anchor and Hope and had a great dinner with them, catching up on old times, and their adventures living in London for a year.
The next day we spent buying tea. We went back to Twinings and Harrods to get tea that we'd made notes we liked 3 months ago. That night we had an exciting event that we'd been looking forward to for weeks. Jerome happened to find a dinner experience based on Fawlty Towers which is one of our favourite shows. It was amazing and hilarious! Three actors portrayed Basil, Cybil and Manuel, and they recreated the highlights of the show while interacting with all the diners. The lady next to us got false teeth in her soup, and Manuel's "pet hamster" got away in the room. It was quite wonderful. Here's the link to the video Jerome took of part of it.
The next day we turned in our Oyster cards, took a last look around London and grabbed a train to visit and stay over at Jerome's cousins house. His Aunt Kat and Uncle John picked us up and brought us to their daughter Joelle's house. I got to meet Joelle and her sister Lisa and all their children for the first time. We had a great dinner all together and had lots of fun playing with Susie, Paige and Lukas and got to briefly say hi to Emily who was off to Brownies. It was a bit of a whirlwind stay as we had to leave the next morning. But it was wonderful for me to meet all these cousins I'd heard so much about and for Jerome to get to see them again. In the morning we said goodbye to everyone, Kat and John took us to the airport which was fairly nearby. On the way though, they took us to get a famous British Christmas Pudding to bring home for Christmas!
The flight home was long, but direct. We took an interesting arc over the Greenland and the Canadian Arctic and saw some interesting scenery there. We spent the flight making our last journal entries, and talking about what our favourite things were. Our path took us right over the Golden Gate Bridge, so we snagged this one last picture just before we landed. We arrived home on Friday afternoon, spent the weekend unpacking and recuperating, and then headed back to work and reality on Monday! I really hope you've enjoyed hearing about our great adventure, we've appreciated all the comments and encouragement we've gotten along the way and enjoyed sharing it with you.
I realize I have forgotten to give timing perspective the last few posts. So this post takes us from October 21 to 24th, 2012. So almost a year ago... I'm doing my best to finish all the posts before the year mark comes by! So hopefully you'll get quite a few over the next month!
So we left off from Cabo del Gato which is at the bottom corner of Spain. The next place that we both had really wanted to see from our pre-trip planning and research was San Sebastian. The downside is that it is at the very top of Spain! We decided to take a day and drive almost all of the way, and stopped in a little town called Alfaro overnight, and then went the rest of the way. The total distance of the drive was about 625 miles or almost exactly 1000km!!! We had some books on tape and saw a lot of Spanish scenery!
Jerome got very accustomed to the Smart car, and did a great job driving most of the way. My only complaint was when we came extremely close to running out of gas! You can see here, it shows no bars and 2.5L! I was a bit less than calm at this point, but we found a place last minute, so all ended up okay!
The scenery all across Spain was really pretty. We saw a lot of really interesting old towns, some really weird cloud formations, and drove through a rain storm on the plains. Which if you've seen My Fair Lady, you'll know required some singing along in the car! We even saw a sweet rainbow over the mountains.
We stopped overnight in Alfaro, which is a small town about 2 hours from San Sebastian. The next day we headed out early, and took a route that led us through Getaria, as we had read it had good lunch restaurants. While the first place we tried happened to be closed that day, we had quite an adventure at the next place! We ordered Goose Neck Barnacles, which are a delicacy in this part of Spain. They are the weirdest looking things I've ever eaten. They have a sort of fabric like sheath over half of them, and the other half looks like a barnacle! They were reasonably tasty - a bit like other shellfish.
Apparently they were first called goose neck barnacles because before people had realized that birds migrate, they would see these barnacles on the beaches during the time of year when the geese weren't around. They therefore concluded that these must be what baby geese looked like!
We drove the rest of the way to San Sebastian, which is a small town on the coast with a beautiful bay that is protected and is great to swim on one side, and on the other is a less protected beach where everybody surfs. It also is rumoured to have the highest per capita number of Michelin star restaurants! It does in fact have three 3-star ones which is a lot! We didn't go to any, spending our time eating around the plentiful tapas bars!
The hotel we got was quite nice. It was up on the hill overlooking the city which made for great views, and cheaper rooms. We had a bit of a hike down to town, but found a good path to take. We also found a funicular which you could take, and mastered the bus system so that we didn't have to walk back up the hill after an evening of wine and tapas!
We spent 3 days here hanging out in the town and the beaches. We went swimming quite a few times, ate a lot of food, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly! We were conveniently there for Restaurant Week and so one of the nights instead of eating at all the tapas places we went to a place that had a fixed price menu that was very tasty, for a fraction of the price it would be not during restaurant week. We took lots of pictures of all the tapas as well as the dinner which you can see in our full album.
This little guy gave us quite the adventure. We were exploring this really old and bizarre amusement park that was up at the top of the hill beside our hotel, and where the funicular ran, and which had great views. We were walking along when all of a sudden Jerome grabs my arm and yells "Watch out!" Assuming there's something ahead I haven't seen, I immediately stomp my foot down in place without stepping forward, and proceed to step on this thing! It didn't' squish, it had a hard sort of shell, and after I stopped being surprised, we watch it for a bit. It looked like a worm shaped snake. It had a little tongue and everything, but was super slow, like a worm. It was the most bizarre creature. He slowly slithered away and seemed no worse for our meeting gladly. We looked it up and found out it was a "Slow Worm." Who knew!
One of the days we were in San Sebastian we took a day trip into France to Hendaye, where Jerome had read about a great beach and little town. It was very pretty, and had neat caves and cool rock formations. Turns out it was also a nude beach, so it was an interesting experience. We also found a cool hiking trail which led us unexpectedly to this castle. And all along it were these driftwood people doing various things. It was really cool! All in all San Sebastian had quite a few fun and memorable adventures packed into a few days, it was great! Next time we'll take you along to our next stop which was Carcasonne, France, and to stay at a B&B inside a winery!
