The Travails of Traveling

The other day we decided to make a list of the hardest parts of traveling:

• Sewage smells everywhere
• Spending 24-7 with a new spouse for endless months - you can imagine
• Traveling with no home base indefinitely - sometimes it's nice to "be home"
• LOUD talking, snoring, etc. of random people when sleeping in random places, especially on sleeper trains when they board at 2 am and you're getting off at 6 am
• Vipassana meditation - you have NO IDEA how hard even ONE HOUR is to focus and not move ANYTHING even to scratch or adjust or ANYTHING - then try it 10+ hours / day for 10+ days (it was really 10 days plus 2 half days)
• Getting Kelsi to bungee off of a 500 ft suspension bridge!
• Kayaking lessons as a beginner with low safety standards (straight to class 2+ rapids)
• Climbing a vertical ice wall at 20,000 feet (with no supplemental O2!)
• FREEZING your butt off for months straight, but especially over 18,000 feet trying to sleep
• Jostling for a place in lines... we have met some of the most incredibly audacious line cutters we have ever encountered!
• Hand washing our clothes in the shower or a sink more frequently than not
• Alternating between only two outfits of clothes; sometimes you just feel like wearing something different!
• Sleeping in the back of a station wagon in Australia and New Zealand for two weeks... sleep deprivation hurts!
• Bus rides - esp. over night and in the bounciest part of the bus in the back - why did we land the back seats?! I wouldn't call this a sleeper bus. But that's not the end - even during the day time it can get difficult when more people squeeze onto and off a bus than imaginable, shoving and bumping all the time, and your ride is 12 hours long
• Nasty toilets - don't think anything can top Mt Huashan in China where the "squatter" was overflowing and sewage spilled under your feet as you added to the pile - but there were no other options!
• Scheming taxi drivers - highlighted in our scam post
• A man's NASTY STINKY feet removed from his shoes and put up on the bench next to where you're sitting
• Our stink after not being able to shower for a week
• Cold showers for 2 months straight
• Poor sleep - esp. with bad beds, back aches, putrid hostels, noisy neighbors and animals, rats, too many nights in a row on sleeper trains . . .
• Constant indigestion from poor food hygiene
• Communication barriers between languages and cultures. For example: getting a dish that you didn't intend to order (nor especially want) when you're STARVING
• Alternating between which of us runs to the toilet next and hoping that our sudden and explosive urges don't happen at the same moment
• Hacking our lungs out for weeks after catching a bug from who knows where
• Lugging around all of our bags and stuff... which somehow keeps expanding?

These are some of the hard parts of travel we thought we'd share. Although our travels don't go without travails, we definitely wouldn't trade places with anyone!