New Years Letter 2011

Dear friends and family,

They say that Amman in Jordan and Rome in Italy are both alike in that they have ancient Roman history and 7 hills, but that’s where the comparison stops. 2010 began like any new year for the past 7 years for us, but that’s where the comparison stops.

Sipping and slurping up soba as the clock struck midnight at the start of the year, we welcomed in the new year with the tranquil traditions that are common in Japan. On the first day of the new year the feasts began and much of the adjoining days were spent alternating between lazing around and munching on delicious Japanese food. This year, however, we decided to visit a shrine like millions of other Japanese to welcome in the new year and make a few wishes. Before us lay a year full of uncertainty, adventure, and challenges the likes of which neither of us had ever seen so a couple of good luck charms from the temple put our minds a bit at ease. Yes, 2010 was shaping up to be a far cry from the life we were accustomed to in Koenji.

Almost as fast as we found our lips drying after all that soba eating and our heads clearing from the farewell parties, it was time to get to our first stop of the year – Hawaii. Halfway between the mainland US and Japan, it’s always seemed like the ideal spot for us to meet family. But it wasn’t until this year that we were fortunate enough to do so. In mid-January we met Sue and Bruce on the big island and spent a relaxing seven days amidst the lava flows, tidal pools, and dizzying heights of Mauna Kea. A good deal of rainbow gazing helped the two of us begin our transition from busy, Tokyo workers, to world travelers.

To bring those up to speed on where and when we’ve done things over the past 12 months, here are the cliffnotes. In early February we flew from Tokyo to Santiago, Chile with a very brief layover in New York where we caught up with friends and family on one chilly afternoon. From Santiago we narrowly escaped the tremors that rocked the poor city two weeks later and found ourselves hiking through the wilds of Patagonia for the better part of three weeks. Our overland travels began in earnest when we landed in Buenos Aires and preceded for the next 4 months to make our way lazily up through the center of the continent, swinging to the west to see Machu Picchu, before drifting for days from the coasts of Colombia to the ports of Panama. Our adventures took us through a majority of South America, but each turn left us longing for more time to explore and understand the diversity of cultures and environments we were passing through.

Five months after we had set out, it was time for us to recover for a stint with an extended stay in the United States, where we split time between New York, Pittsburgh, and Oberlin. After so many years in Japan, with little time to go home to see family and friends, we had a marvelous time catching up with both. We were spoiled rotten throughout our trip thanks to friends, uncles, aunts, sisters, grandparents, and parents and we owe everyone a great big thank you for all your kindness and generosity. For those that find themselves heading to Japan, you’ve all got a warm bed and multiple nights out of sushi waiting for you.

From North America we used Spain as a stepping stone towards the Middle East where we nearly evaporated in the intense August heat of Egypt and then replenished our thirst in the hard, but rewarding labor of ten days on an organic farm in Israel. A U-turn flight took us from Israel to Turkey (via Latvia) where we began our second long overland journey – Istanbul to London. Buses and trains took us through the great states of Bulgaria, Romania, and so many others on our way towards the chunnel. Our method of travel took a serious detour from our previously style when we dove head first into the land of CouchSurfing. South America was a land of affordable transportation and accommodation, but prices skyrocketed when we hit Spain. Subsisting on meager rations between bus trips and hostel stays taught us that we would need to find an means of saving some cash in Europe if we wanted to live through the experience. This led us into CouchSurfing and a new world of travel was opened up to us. Host after host showed us generosity beyond our wildest expectations.

Now at the brink of our last phase of our journey it’s hard to believe how fast it’s all gone by. We will fly to South Africa and spend about a month in the area before jetting off to India to finish our trip. While the trip has been incredibly varied and eventful, we thought it would be nice to take a few moments to share with you some of the highlights of our trip to date. Everyone always asks for a top whatever list, so here are a few lists that hang together with tenuous strings of extreme subjectiveness.

5 Best Foods:

• Bogota, Colombia – ajiaco
• Rio de Jenario, Brazil – feijoada
• Luxor, Egypt – eggplant moussaka
• Brasov, Romania – all the soup
• San Blas Islands, Panama – fresh speared lobster

5 Best Natural Sights:

• Southern Patagonia – Torres del Paine / Fitz Roy
• Sinai, Egypt – The Red Sea reefs
• Brazil / Argentina – Iguazu Falls
• Bolivia – Salar de Uyuni
• Turkey – Cappadocia

5 Best Man-made Sights:

• Peru – Machu Picchu
• Romania – Wooden Churches
• Egypt – Karnak Temple
• Israel – Jerusalem
• Turkey – Underground city of Kaymakli

5 Best Small Cities for Sightseeing:

• Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina
• Dubrovnik, Croatia
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Bogota, Colombia
• Santiago de Compostela, Spain

5 Strangest Moments

• Dead Sea, Jordan – Floating
• Amsterdam, Netherlands – Smoking in a coffee shop
• Manuel de Antonio, Costa Rica – Seeing a sloth in the jungle
• Egypt – Experiencing the summer
• Zadar, Croatia – Listening to the sea organ

So there is a small snapshot into our travels as well as our psyche. For those things that did not make the lists, fear not, the above was done in a short time span and we’re firm believers in valuing every experience we’ve had along the way.

The greatest thing that we have to take away from all these travels has been the huge range of people that we’ve met. Whether it has simply been for an hour or weeks on end, meeting people and getting to know cultures through them has been the most rewarding aspect of our travels. It also happened to be one of the most unexpected. Having spent so many years on packaged tours with a weeks worth of time and a list of sights to see a mile long, the ability to get to know people on our travels was a rather foreign concept to us. If you were to ask us what’s the biggest thing that’s changed about you since you started traveling, it would be that we travel for the people, not the places now.

In addition to discovering how amazing it is to meet so many different people along the way there have been a few other things that have – best read with Jack Black narrating it in your head – blown our minds. The shear number of world travelers we met (in South America especially) was hard to digest at first. While we won’t say it’s easy to find the time or money for such galavanting the volumes of traverlers we met were sending us a bit different message. That included families, which has given us hope that we might be able to do this once again in the future.

The world is also huge. I mean big! Of course, you say, but we both truly beleived that the world was a shrinking place due to the internet and technology. Skype, airplanes, e-mail, and websites like CouchSurfing have certainly changed the game and made it much easier to stay in contact even when we are halfway around the world, but nothing could prepare us for the vast wetlands of Brazil or the never ending deserts of Egypt. These distances continue to bulwark civilizations from around the world from march of “progress” and were a strong wake-up call for the two of us in terms of feeling the impact of geography on cultures. I know its romantic, but our most recent flight from London to Cape Town almost felt wrong after taking the slow route for so long. All of sudden we skipped over entire cultures and lands at 40,000 feet without experiencing the gradual morphing of one society into the next – like Turkish coffee being the same same, but different as Bulgarian coffee, Serbian coffee, Bosnian coffee, and Croatian coffee.

Being still in the midst of our journey it’s still hard to step back and say what it all means to the two of us, although we hope that the above has given some messy insight into that. There will be many more lessons learned, people met, and pictures taken before these travels are up, but we would like to conclude this letter with another big thank you to everyone. For some we may see you shortly and for others, years from now, and know that you are always welcome in Japan or wherever we might happen to be in this big, big world.

Last, but not least, here are 50 pictures from our travels that we hope you’ll enjoy.

A very happy new year to one and all and safe travels in 2011!
Joe & Hisako