Well, I slept in my own bed last night. Mandy and I were on planes for ~17 hours yesterday. I didn't sleep for almost 48 hours. I stayed up once we got home to try to get back on schedule with the eastern time zone, I made it all the way till 9 o'clock last night. Have to watch the new office today I suppose!
Just doing some rough estimates, we spent about 52 hours on planes on this trip. We spent about 26 hours on trains. We spent about 31 hours waiting on planes and trains. That puts the major transport at 109 hours, or 4 days either waiting for or riding on planes and trains. I'm not going to guess how much time we spent in tuk-tucks, taxis, or scooters because it would be way too hard to guess. We took zero rickshaw rides, and walked what seemed like almost all of our waking time. We walked up and down thousands of stairs, in rain and shine.
Using www.webflyer.com to estimate, I figure that we flew around 47,224 miles. With the circumference of the Earth being 24,901 miles, that means we flew enough to fly around the world almost two times (in a little over 2 days, far less than 80). Using http://www.tsiindia.com/dindex.html to estimate, I figure that we rode the rail in India for about 935 miles. I have no idea how many miles we walked or how much we rode in tuk-tuk, taxi, or on scooter... but it has to be in the hundreds somewhere.
In all those travels we spent large amounts of time in 4 different time zones. We were both north and south of the equator. We were in and out of monsoon season. We were surrounded by people who spoke at least 6 different native languages, and countless other languages of tourists and non-official languages. We communicated quite well with everyone though, with most language difficulties arising from myself.
It seems the American southern dialect doesn't travel often, or at least to the places we went. I would confuse people by saying things such as, "Where abouts is the..." and "sure". Most of the people I spoke with didn't understand "sure" as being a positive response to something. Saying "sure" almost always brought any conversation to a grinding halt. As long as we spoke proper English, and did our best to leave out the "y'all"s and the "yonder"s, most conversations went very well.
Now that I am back home from this journey with my own computer and reliable internet connection, I'm going to do my best to update everyday. I say that because, I'm going to try to make these posts digestible and content rich. Digestible in keeping them simpler and shorter than my natural tendency to write long drawn out multiple page long updates. Content rich by sharing with you all some of the sites and sounds we saw while exploring south east Asia. I have so much to share, and so many experiences to write about. I do hope people enjoy this.
So, without further interruptions ... Here comes those blogs I've been promising and talking about for 3 weeks now.
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