Starting on January 30th we spent 8 days trekking 61 miles through Tasmania on the Overland Track. Google “top 10 treks in the world” and the Overland is likely to pop up on the list. It’s not the most extreme altitude trek in the world (the highest point, not counting side-trips is only about 1250 m/4100 ft), nor is it the longest trek – most people walk for 6 to 8 days covering a distance of 65 to 100 km (40 to 60 miles). What truly makes the Overland Spectacular is the scenery.
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by connal on February 15, 2010
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. 7 years ago, on that day, Anjel and I had our first date.
We had known each other for a just a week or two after meeting in our Level 1 Graphic Design class at CCA. On a Friday, the week before Valentine’s Day, I mentioned to a classmate that I was going dirtbiking the next day. Anjel overheard and said “You ride dirtbikes? I want to go!” Knowing enough not to pass up a opportunity like that I got everything ready and the next week the two of us drove down to Hollister Hills for an afternoon of dirtbiking.
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by connal on February 15, 2010
We’d been in Mongolia for about 36 hours and were sitting on footstools around a small, low table inside a ger. My wrist was starting to ache and Anjel had developed a blister on her right index finger from the large cleaver. We were getting tired, but there was a large pile of still-frozen mutton in front of us, and the dumplings weren’t going to make themselves, so we kept chopping.
We weren’t the only ones working. Mr. Ghambataar was sitting with us, going through his pile of meat like butter while his wife was preparing dough from scratch. There was a fire going in the stove and the Ger was warm, which was nice because on the other side of the felt walls it was -35°F. We paused to sip from the ever-present cups of hot Milk Tea – but not too much since after dinner we were going to have our last chance to go outside to use the toilet before the dogs were unchained for the night. “If you need to use the toilet at night,” our host warned us through the translator “wake me up. It is not safe for you to go by yourself.”
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We could be totally wrong, but there’s a good chance that we won’t have much internet time over the next 4 weeks (Jan 14 – Feb 14). We’ll be traveling through New Zealand, where we’re planning on camping as much as possible and don’t expect many wireless campsites. From there we’ll be heading to Tasmania to trek for 1 to 2 weeks, and also don’t expect much internet.
There are other parts of the trip that we though we’d be out of contact and it turned out that we had internet access almost every night – but if that’s not the case (which we don’t think it will be), we wanted to give a heads up ahead of time.
If you send us an email and we don’t get back to you for a week or two, that’s probably why.
Thanks!
Connal + Anjel
Today, as we fly from South Korea to New Zealand, we pass our 20,000th mile.
Back on October 11 we passed 10,000 miles and estimated that we would pass 20,000 “somewhere around Japan in January” – which is exactly where we are (at the time we thought we’d be visiting Japan – unfortunately we had to give it a pass on this trip).
The breakdown is as follows:
6794 miles by Plane
6311 miles by Train
2951 miles by Car
2065 miles by Motorcycle
962 miles by Boat
693 miles by Bus
218 miles on Foot
5 miles by Horse
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We weren’t in Seoul for long before Anjel’s family started teaching us how to play the traditional Korean card game of Min Hwa-Tu.
I’d seen the deck of small cards before, Anjel and I even had one around the house, but we had never played – until now. I am hooked on it and Anjel’s Aunt (or “Emo”) has done a great job of slowly ratcheting up the difficulty of the game as we start to understand more and more. The biggest hurdle is just learning to keep all the sets straight… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
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