We Wander — Mark & Meghan's World Travels

After a marathon, week-long journey north from Sumatra, we finally arrived at the Laos border in Northern Thailand. We covered almost 3000 kilometers in just over 7 days, on a bee-line up through Malaysia and Thailand. Our goal: to reach the border and have about 10 days to wander south through Laos towards the capital, Vientiane, where we’ll be meeting our friend Rachel. We crossed the border from Chiang Khong, Thailand, to Huay Xai, Laos, and were all set to begin an exciting new leg of our journey.

Our first destination in Laos was Luang Prabang, an ancient city built on the Mekong River, and a Unesco World Heritage site. We opted for the true “slow travel” option to get there: a two day boat trip from Huay Xai down the Mekong River. We were excited and happy to slow our pace down a bit, after the string of bus and train trips we’d recently been on.

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We had a great two weeks at HODR, but life as a volunteer wasn’t always a picnic. Showers were of the cold-bucket variety, food varied in look more than in taste, and cleanliness and restfulness were very hard to come by. We worked hard for those two short weeks, without much luxury to come home to at the end of the day. Kudos to all those long-term volunteers who are there for months. It can really take it out of you.

We felt that we deserved a bit of a treat on our first night on the road alone again, so we splurged for a fancier hotel in Bukittinggi. To be honest, fancy is a very relative term here, but in our case it meant hot water and a double mattress. To top it off, we decided to be really touristy and eat at Pizza Hut. After some delicious cheesy garlic bread, a Super Supreme pizza (sans pork of course — Sumatra is very Muslim) and a pitcher of Coca-Cola, we felt happy and sluggish, and were asleep by 8:00pm. At this point, we didn’t know for sure where we were headed next, and we definitely didn’t know that our next journey would be our worst so far…

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We left Singapore three days ago to begin our journey to Bukkittinggi, which is a city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. According to the guidebooks we’d read, the trip should have been an early morning ferry from Singapore to Palau Batam (45 minutes), then a ferry to Pekanbaru (6 hours), and finally a bus to Bukkittinggi (6 hours). We knew it was going to be a long day, but we set out at 6am determined to give it a try.

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Our 24 day cruise from Athens to Singapore is behind us now, and we are adjusting to life in hostels again. We had a wonderful time on the cruise, as I’m sure many of you gathered from our video. We relaxed, recovered, suntanned, swam, read, slept in, ate well, and met some really great people. We’d like to say a special hello to some of the crew and cruisers that made our time on board so enjoyable: Allison & Valentin, Ngawhira, Louise, Mia & Gustaf, Costa, Jonas, Michelle, Jerry & Marla, Jean & George, Lucy & Michel, Ed & Eleanor — we hope our paths cross again soon, and that your future travels are enriching and exciting.

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Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve made it safely through the Gulf of Aden, and are now past the most dangerous stretch of water. We are still traveling at night with the ship’s lights out, just to be safe. We are only two and a half days from Dubai now.

We heard something pretty funny onboard today. I met a man from California who, after commenting that we were probably the youngest people on board (something nearly everyone we’ve met has said to us), told us of a complaint he’d overheard recently. Apparently, while waiting to speak to someone at the guest relations desk, he listened to an old man complaining to the staff that there were young people on board! He’d apparently been told that no young people would be on this cruise. He was further upset that there had been ‘young person music’ playing on the pool deck, where he had ‘seen them’. Believe me when I say that none of the music we’ve heard so far is what I would consider ‘young person music’, unless Celine Dion counts. We couldn’t help but laugh when we heard that — age discrimination on a cruise, amongst passengers! We’d better watch out. And we thought the pirates were our biggest worry.

After leaving Alexandria, we set out for Dubai, which is over 9 days of sea travel away. Right now we are in the middle of the Red Sea, approaching the south end that lets out into the Gulf of Aden. We have Saudi Arabia to our port side, and Sudan to our starboard.

Two days ago we passed through the Suez Canal. That was really interesting. The canal is only wide enough for a single lane of traffic, so we had to anchor at one end and wait for oncoming traffic to clear out of the canal. When it was time, we entered the canal with a convoy of other ships (mostly container ships) and sailed slowly along. There was land within throwing distance of either side of the ship, mostly desert. About two thirds of the way along, we reached Great Bitter Lake, a passing point in the canal system. Here we waited again for oncoming traffic to clear, and then led the convoy through the final stretch of canal and into the Red Sea.

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We woke up this morning to a completely different scene than the one we woke up to yesterday. What a treat!

Yesterday: bunkbeds, hard mattresses, smelly blankets, room without heat, car horns honking, cold cereal for breakfast, instant coffee, 7 minute shower costs 50 cents.

Today: comfortable queen-size bed, clean sheets, waves outside our window, coffee delivered to our room, cozy bathrobes and slippers, hot and free shower, Crete on the horizon.

Over the last couple of weeks Mark and I have been doing a lot of research into the next big legs of our journey. It has not been a walk in the park. There aren’t many people doing what we’re doing and aren’t a lot of helpful of resources (except for the man in seat 61 whose site has been invaluable). There are oceans to cross, visas to obtain and countries to avoid. There are costs, non-existent timetables and websites in unfamiliar languages. The world is not open to us as it would be if we were to fly and we are struggling with coming to terms with the fact that we may have to miss out on some places we desperately want to visit, like Nepal. We are at the mercy of what mode of transport is A) available to us in a general direction of favour, B) leaves when we want to leave (+/- a couple weeks), and C) costs the least. With these factors in mind we have booked our next big leg: Europe to Asia aboard…(drumroll)…

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We made it! We woke up this morning to sun shining on white and blue buildings in Chefchaouen, Morocco. I don’t think it’s quite set in yet. Our journey yesterday was exhausting and full of obstacles, and we didn’t arrive at our hostel until well after dark. It was one of the best sleeps I’ve had in a while, which is good, because I think we’ll need our wits about us here. This is the story of our travels from Granada to Chefchouen.

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There’s oodles to see and do in the UK, but there are places to go and people to see and so it was time to move on, with or without sampling haggis. It also drains the budget very quickly and was getting a bit chilly outside, which also make for very good reasons to limit our time.

After our Ben Nevis climb, we carried on with our roadtrip past Glen Coe and Loch Lomond; both very lovely areas to explore the great outdoors. However we just drove on through and headed for Gourock which is a ‘wee town’ just to the west of Glasgow.

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