2024 World Tour Summary

For our final World Tour blog, we wanted to take a step back and reflect on our (highly privileged, yeah yeah) experience of our trip around the world. We talked about it as a sabbatical, i.e. “an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that’s not your routine job”. While a sabbatical, in an earlier form, was often a way for academics to learn something from another institution, we didn’t really do much deep learning. Our classroom here was “the world” and we learned a lot – mostly the hard way!  

The Power of Water

Even though we live by the ocean, and have each spent a lot of time in it over the last ten-plus years in Australia, our best days centered around water, and the extraordinary days found us in the ocean or sea. Swimming off a sailboat in Croatia, our SwimTrek in Milos, Greece, or kayaking in Resurrection Bay, Alaska or Lake Atitlan in Guatemala made us feel more alive and connected to nature than anything else, even mountains. 

Our friends took us boating around Coronado Island just South of San Diego, on Lake Travis in Austin Texas. We kayaked in Virginia and watched herons circle around us. Even our breathing-impaired swimming in a pool at high altitude in landlocked Boulder, Colorado restored our spirits and put smiles on our faces.

Croatia – Plitivc Lakes

The Mixed Impact of Tourism on a Country

Regardless of our own tastes, the Faustian bargain or Siren song of tourism was visible in every country. Croatian’s median incomes are on the rise thanks to the influx of visitors like us, but as the economy’s dependence on tourism grows, and their manufacturing capabilities erode, they are trapped and highly vulnerable to pandemics and global instability. 

Beautiful agricultural areas like Sa Pa in North Vietnam are now plagued with massage parlours and tourist traps, and the countryside is now lined with poor people trying to sell cheap Chinese-manufactured trinkets and clothing they are trying to pass off as local and authentic.

Tokyo’s efforts to make the city much easier for foreigners to navigate have also brought with it the need for local restaurants to cater heavily to foreigners to survive. 

We’re lucky to have seen all the things we have, but the impact of our “footprint” goes far beyond carbon. 

San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala
Guatamala – Road side mushrooms on our way to Lake Atitlan
London – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
Vienna – 2 hour tour of City centre with Felix
Split, Croatia
Vietnam – Not touristy at all…

The Clear Impact of Climate Change

Speaking of carbon, in case you haven’t noticed… the world is changing. Everywhere we went, we heard a consistent, unprompted cry from the locals: “It’s never been like this.” As skeptics, we dug deeper to make sure this wasn’t just nostalgia, and indeed, the data backs up their case. The climate is simply different, and changing rapidly. It’s hotter, or wetter, and consistently more severe decade after decade. Glaciers in Alaska are shrinking much faster than normal, and no one can rely on the past year’s weather to predict what’s coming next.

Not just the result of a warming atmosphere, “the fish are gone” from so many places. Fishermen are travelling farther and farther out to sea to find their catch. The water is too warm. The waters are overfished. The fish are gone.

Alaska – Wildlife Sactuary
Alaska – my first time on a glacier
Alaska – Glaciers receding 😢
Con Dao, Vietnam – Hiking trail
Sa Pa, Vietnam – Man vs beast

The Importance of Old Friends

It’s cheesy, but Ben Rector’s line “‘Cause you can’t make old friends” is a self-fulfilling truth. For the last two decades of her life, Kim’s visit’s home focused on family, but on the World Tour, Kim also reconnected with a number of friends she hadn’t seen for ages; Melanie was a friend since Kim’s earliest memories, and hiking and cycling with Melanie and her partner Dave was exceptional. 

As Bryan finds himself more and more withdrawn and socially awkward, he is most comfortable around those who have known him for decades. They have accepted that this is the Bryan they are stuck with 🤓. The people who knew him during his years of rollerblading, or who saw him in his ful metrosexual glory, for some reason still invite him into their homes, and he greatly appreciates it.

And we got to know each other better by spending time with those who know us the best.

Learning to be a better team

We heard the warning, “This trip will be a test of your relationship,” but we didn’t see it that way. We know our personalities reasonably well: we’re not volatile, we’re not drama queens, we’re not the exploding type. Yet we knew that this trip would force us to become a better team, even when that meant the team members needed some alone time. 

Bryan crashed a scooter in Vietnam, and it really affected his mental state. Kim came to the rescue and did everything right, getting Bryan’s confidence back to where he could get back on the scooter and get them safely to the bear sanctuary in Ninh Binh, Vietnam. 

Kim, on the other hand, has a love-hate relationship with cycling and was very much the weakest link on the bike tour (her words, not mine). Bryan, who is much stronger and more competent on two wheels, stayed patient and encouraging, never once making her feel like she was holding the group back—though she clearly was.

Then there was the infamous iPad incident. Kim left hers on a flight from Europe to Asia, along with any scraps of patience she had left by that point. Bryan stepped up, whisking her to the hotel lounge for food and a much-needed glass of wine while he dove into detective mode, relentlessly calling airlines and researching recovery options. After filing a lost-item report back at the airport (don’t get Kim started on that logistical nightmare), they miraculously got the iPad back seven weeks later in Hong Kong. Kim remains one of the lucky few who can say their lost item was actually returned, thanks to Bryan’s calm persistence.

When Bryan caught COVID, we had to separate: Bryan quarantined and recuperated at a friend’s pool house while Kim spent time with her dad. Alone time was something we had planned into the trip, and those weeks definitely made our hearts grow fonder. Those days or hours alone keep both of us out of straight jackets and excited about our time together. 

And as two type-A leaders who can obsess about any details, the hardest lesson of all was to to let the other lead – and be a good follower, when the time called for it. 

Boulder, Colorado
Alaska
Scooting in Con Dao, Vietnam

The Best and the Worst of our 2024 World Tour

No wrap up blog would be complete without a highlight of the highlights and a grieving of the lowlights! Without further ado:

Best Days of the Trip

Again, you’ll see that water features heavily in this list. 

  1. Adriatic Sea, Croatia. This day had it all! We awoke on a sailboat, hiked up and around a lake, jumped in the lake and swam, dried off and hiked back, swam back to the sailboat, and sailed to the next town, where we ended the evening drinking wine with a philosophy teacher.
  2. Seward, Alaska. There are few better ways to spend a day than Kayaking in Resurrection Bay. The sun came out and we are actually warm despite the water temps being close to 5 Celsius.  
  3. Milos, Greece. Day four of Swim Trek featured a gorgeous morning swim, followed by an afternoon of amazing cave swimming and diving through archways and hidden tunnels in warm, clean water.
  4. Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Our second day of cycling, along small back trails and in Vietnam, visiting a tofu factory, a brick factory, and seeing so much of the quiet life behind the busy scenes of roads and highways. 
  5. Crested Butte, Colorado: Kim had a challenging, spectacular cycling day while Bryan did a solo hike of Deer Creek. That evening we emulated Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride on a tandem bike ride to dinner.
  6. Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Kayaking on Lake Atitlan was an incredible hour. It should have been three incredible hours but our tour guide screwed up the day’s agenda. Still, a marvelous hour. 
  7. Kampong Cham, Cambodia. Visiting the primary school library dedicated to Bryan’s cousin Diane and seeing the kids at the school, and meeting a teacher who was a student the last time Bryan visited filled our hearts and taught us again, how lucky we are.
  8. Con Dao, Vietnam. We hiked along a long beach and  through a dense jungle to Dam Tre Beach, then swam to Secret Beach and back, and hiked back to town. Serene, boiling hot and humid, like an all day adventure spa.
Lake along the Adriatic Sea on our ‘perfect day.’
Homer, Alaska
Crested Butte tandem bike 😃
Milos Greece – SwimTrek
Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

The Best Meals on the World Tour

Being vegetarian / mostly vegan is easier in some countries than others. Vietnam was by far the best place for excellent vegetarian food, followed by London. 

  1. Katze Vegan and Vegetarian in Hanoi, Vietnam. We went three times. So good! The ‘free’ dishes (tofu in tomato sauce, banana salad, and rice) are already enough to fill you up. They’ll even teach you how to eat the food (including picking up the chopsticks and stuffing a bite in your mouth!). Vegan. “I am a Restaurant worker who desires to express my very personal journey from street kid to social entrepreneur”. 
  2. Madame Ha in Con Dao, Vietnam. We went twice! The menu has original dishes you don’t find anywhere. Vegan.
  3. Hum in Saigon, Vietnam. High end vegetarian food, with exceptional service, in a beautiful setting. The price fits the ambiance. 
  4. Unity Diner, London, UK. A non profit Vegan place in London that looks and tastes like casual well lit pub food.  
  5. Tokyo Shiba Tofuya Uka. Every dish here was a hit for Kim, and the setting—a stunning building steeped in tradition—was just as memorable as the food. They say a good meal is about the company, and sharing this experience with her mom and good friend Rohan made it all the more special.

The Best Decisions We Made

  • Packing only carry on luggage. We didn’t check a single bag on the trip. Kim fought valiantly to avoid having to check a rolled up painting in the Hong Kong airport. Qantas came to our rescue and the streak was intact! 
  • Swim Trek. Our week swimming in Milos, Greece was amazing. While it wasn’t an intense athletic experience, at that point in the trip we weren’t really ready for a training camp, and this was a great way to get a lot of exercise everyday in gorgeous blue ocean water. The Swim Trek company has great guides and good infrastructure to make sharing this experience with about 14 other people a fun adventure. 
  • Croatia. Another recommendation that came from several friends, the Adriatic sea is incredibly special, and the Croatian people are open and honest about who they are. 
  • Balancing self-guided exploration with guided tours. We don’t generally love organised tours, and generally not with other people, and not with professional tour guides. Wilderness guides are different – i.e. the people who keep us alive and help us get to the incredible spots are amazing. We didn’t mind the free guided city tours, because the guides were great at communicating. A private guide every once in a while was play, but the ratio needed to be heavily skewed towards unguided time.
  • Joint planning using TripIt, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, etc. Yes, we’re nerds, and these tools made it easy to plan, budget, check in, etc. 
  • AirFare Geeks. If you’re traveling from Australia, and you have a complicated journey (or a last minute one), or you’re seeing ridiculous prices for an international trip, this team pulls off miracles. Our round the world tickets were cheaper than a Sydney-Los Angeles round trip. 
Carry On… just don’t ask us to weigh them. 😳

The Worst Decisions We Made (a.k.a “Lessons Learned”)

  • Our flight pattern in the US. You would think our route was planned by a drunken sailor, but it was all time constraints (Bryan’s 35th high school reunion in Alaska, Bryan’s sister’s holiday in Scotland) that sent us back and forth and generated too many miles aloft.
  • Jumping between two many places. In general, we went to too many places. In hindsight we should have picked fewer places and done less transitions, but we were trying to visit so many different people.
  • We didn’t learn enough. We had high aspirations for our sabbatical including a deep dive into AI. Honestly, we mostly learned how to repack our backpacks every 48 hours. 
  • Sa Pa, Vietnam. Not a place we’d recommend. 
  • Too many guides. Our 11 day North Vietnam tour had too many guides (after we’d already heavily reduced the guided portion of the trip). We should have done more alone.
Sa Pa, Vietnam – Don’t go.

The World Tour Awards

  • Most offensive act goes to the waiter on the Halong Bay Boat Cruise, who rubbed the obese gentleman’s belly while saying, “I can see you enjoyed your meal.” 
  • Worst occupational choice goes to our tour guide in Sa Pa, Vietnam. She could not walk at any reasonable pace and was allergic to UV light. Maybe she should not have chosen to be a trekking tour guide? At one point Kim asked Bryan, “Are you trying to make her miserable?” And Bryan answered, “Yes, yes I am.” Here’s to a change in career. 
  • Most honest opinion that should have been kept to themselves was a driver in Croatia who admitted he was not excited about having two daughters until his friend had a boy with Downs Syndrome, at which point he was happy to have two healthy girls…
Bryan channeling his inner superhero to endure the last few days of travel… and even laugh at it.

What we missed most during our World Tour

  • Laptops. Mobile devices, even with bluetooth keyboards, are still not there yet as a total computing solution. Editing a blog using Medium’s app is horrendous. WordPress wasn’t much better. Making flight reservations on many airlines (especially those in Asia, surprisingly), filling out visa forms, etc. Some are the fault of the web page designer, some are the fault of the platform. 
  • A Kitchen. Kim missed being able to cook what she wanted instead of being in the hands of whatever restaurant we wandered into. Kim was able to cook in a few places (home with Mom, in AirBnBs, etc) but those were infrequent.
  • Porter, the Cavoodle. Kim missed Porter immensely, and would talk about him wistfully throughout the trip. Bryan didn’t seem to notice his absence, though he did feel at peace during so much of the trip… 
  • Consistent sleep. Bryan’s jetlag never really ended over the four plus months. His sleep ring chronicled his slow and steady descent into worse resilience day by day, and only now in December is he starting to see recovery. 
  • A laundry room. Traveling light meant at most seven days of underwear. So finding a place to do laundry and avoid exorbitant hotel laundry fees was a challenge. Deciphering instructions in a laundromat in Tokyo or washing clothes in Girdwood, Alaska weren’t that bad, but wondering how bad your clothes were going to smell the next day was always a question.
Porter!

Blogs Index

Have 20 hours to kill? Want to read every small detail of our trip from two different perspectives? Feast your eyes:

Bryan’s Blogs

Kim’s Blogs

Want to receive an email when there are new posts? 

By : Kimberly Tags:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *