An Unexpected End

Before my parents arrived to meet us in Southeast Asia, Yann and I had already been discussing our onward travel plans for several weeks. We settled on Sumatra and even got our visas in George Town. But as the heat beat down on us day after day, our keenness for two months of the same climate had waned significantly. By the time we had reached Singapore, we both agreed that we wanted to ride somewhere cooler. Several options were suggested, but we eventually settled on a fairly inexpensive flight to San Francisco. From there we thought we would ride up the coast to Vancouver and make our way across the Canadian Rockies as spring set in.

We flew with China Eastern Airlines, which, despite serving absolutely disgusting food, didn't charge us anything to transport our bicycles! As usual, our inexpensive flight was accompanied with a long layover. We spent 12 hours sleeping at the Shanghai Airport before boarding our connection. We arrived in San Francisco in the morning, found the "bike assembly station" at the airport and began the bag organization/bike reassembly process. It took Yann almost 4 hours to put the bikes together, but we were able to conveniently ride out from the airport on a bicycle path! If only all airports were so bike-friendly.   Doing his least favourite task at SFO: bike re-assembly

We were hosted by the lovely Martin and Heidi at their equally lovely home in Little Russia. We didn't get much of a chance to visit the city, we were busy stocking up on camping supplies and some warmer clothing than what we had dragged through Asia (we had actually tossed most of what we'd been wearing for the past few months, our cycling shirts were mold-encrusted and our cycling shorts had disintegrated). We still managed to discover the amazing network of bike lanes across the city while we ran our errands. We left the city after two short days, but we were well-fed, well-rested and well-equipped.   Leaving San Francisco

Since my parents visit, we hadn't been on our bikes for nearly a month, so we decided to enjoy the scenery and ride shorter distances every day. We also wanted to slow down so that we wouldn't arrive in Vancouver with snow still on the ground. We hadn't done a huge amount of route planning, and it wasn't until we purchased our map that we realised that the biggest North Coast city after San Francisco had a population of about 35,000 people. Typically, the towns we crossed had populations between 500 and 1000 people. As it was still the cool, rainy spring season, the highway wasn't busy with the hordes of summer tourists. The camp sites were completely deserted. Most nights we were the only campers in huge multi-site state parks. Other than drizzle on a few days, the weather was perfect for cycling and sleeping especially after months of Southeast Asian heat but I was beginning to feel pretty lonely on the empty highway.

  First night of camping at the deserted Samuel P. Taylor State Park

  North Coast, outside the town of Jenner

  We're the only campers at Stillwater Cove Regional Park

  On the way to Gualala

We slowly made our way up the coast until the small town of Gualala where we stopped to re-evaluate our plans. Yann had been complaining about a sharp pain in the back of his knee since getting off the plane in San Francisco. After more than a week, the pain had not subsided at all. He could still cycle, but he had difficulty walking. When he first mentioned the pain I had attributed it to sitting weirdly and had largely ignored his complaints, but it seemed unusual that over a week later he was still in so much pain.

We checked into a small hotel and called our insurance company to inquire about our coverage in the United States. After describing Yann's symptoms we got the instructions to "go to the hospital immediately", they suspected a blood-clot from the long flight. It was Sunday evening, we were in a town of 500 people, the nearest hospital was a three hour drive away. I felt pretty panicked, I had been totally downplaying Yann's pain to make him feel better, while simultaneously reading about scary blood clots.

Within minutes of calling 911, the local firemen and paramedics were in the parking lot of our hotel. Yann was pretty embarrassed as they carried him off in a stretcher. Even though his condition was potentially dangerous, he felt fine and the situation seemed somewhat absurd. We ended up at the local clinic, where the doctor concluded (as we already knew), that he'd have to get to a larger hospital where they could perform an ultrasound. The staff were incredibly kind, and even suggested that we load our bicycles and equipment into the ambulance so that we wouldn't be stuck leaving everything behind (we ruled it out pretty quickly though). It took us three hours on the winding highway, backtracking on the route we had ridden over the course of a week. The sheer cliff-side seemed a lot scarier in the dark from the front seat of an ambulance.

Hospital staff were waiting for Yann when we arrived at the hospital in Santa Rosa. Yann's ultrasound revealed a small blood clot in his leg, but since it was not in a major vein there was no danger of the clot travelling to his heart or lungs. It would just be painful until it would eventually dissolve by itself. We were discharged at midnight, relieved, but in a bit of shock. We had gone from cycling the coast, to sitting in a county hospital hundreds of kilometres away. Exhausted we checked into a hotel and made plans to get back to our bicycles the next day.   Last photo of the trip, sitting in Gualala waiting for the bus to San Francisco

It took a full day of public transport to get is back to Gualala where we spent another night. We had already made the decision that this would mark the end of our trip. We were tired and unenthusiastic and Yann was still in a lot of pain. We felt it was the right time to head home, about 6 weeks earlier than we had originally planned. It wasn't a particularly difficult decision, although it did feel like a pretty disappointing finish line. We travelled back to San Francisco, the fourth time on the same stretch of highway. A series of public buses connected us to the airport and we arrived in snow-covered Ottawa the next day, with our relieved family waiting for us.

Stats for SFO to Gualala, California:

Days of cycling: 5
Days of rest: 3
Kilometres cycled: 237
Metres climbed: 2916
Cycle-tourists crossed on the road: 1
Partially sponsored by Mountain Equipment Coop Expedition Support

Winding Down: Chandigarh, Delhi and Amsterdam

CHANDIGARH

Chandigarh wasn't a planned stop on our itinerary. It was Antonia who convinced us that we wouldn't regret shortening our time in Delhi in exchange for a day in the Punjabi capital.

The main reason for stopping in Chandigarh was the Nek Chand Garden, which we visited on our first morning in the city. The story is that Nek Chand, a public servant, spent his spare time collecting debris from demolition sites around the city. He used the scrap to build sculptures and figurines and scatter them in a maze of courtyards and walkways, also built from recycled material. His garden, on public land was discovered almost 20 years after Nek Chand had begun his work, and was slated for destruction. A public outcry saved the garden which is now a booming tourist attraction in the state of Punjab. With good reason, as the garden is delightful. Although nothing could quite soothe the effects of the stifling head, the park seemed to provide the best respite we could have hoped for. In the afternoon, we rickshawed between Chandigarh's other tourist attractions, most of them municipal buildings designed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Chandigarh is an entirely a planned city, conceptualised by Le Corbusier in the 1950s as a capital for the recently partitioned state of Punjab. The city is divided into rectangular numbered sectors (0.5 mile x 0.75 mile). The result is an organized although somewhat bland city, where even the rickshaws obey traffic signals. It is unlike any of the other cities we'd visited in India, and despite the lack of bustle, was a rather pleasant place to visit even in the 35C heat. After a long day of sight-seeing we treated to the comfort of our double room which the four of us were sharing after a hard-bargaining session with the hotel staff.

DELHI

Delhi is a terrible place to be in the heat. As our bus from Chandigarh approached the Indian capital, the passengers seemed to get meaner, the odors worse and the heat more oppressive. On the advice of other travelers, we had decided to reside in the Tibetan Colony, away from the city centre. This might have been the best decision we made on our entire trip. In addition to having an amazing restaurant and air-conditioned rooms, the Peace Hotel was a sanctuary from the noise and madness of Delhi. As usual, Yann's anti-air-conditioning policy was in effect. He agreed to have an air-conditioned room on the condition that all four of us share a room, which we did, and its 2 single beds (note that this arrangement was still more expensive than two separate non air-conditioned rooms)

The only disadvantage of staying in the Tibetan Colony is its location. Everyday we had to renegotiate with the rickshaw drivers who would originally refuse to take the four of us in one rickshaw and then proceed to give in to our request a few minutes later. The roughly 10km journey was never comfortable with the four of us piling one on top of each other.

We visited the Delhi sights: Red Fort, Jama Masjid (Great Mosque), Gandhi's Memorial. But my fondest memories of our few days in Delhi are the hours spent negotiating with rickshaw drivers and eating Indian fastfood in the comfort of our Tibetan hotel. This might be an indication that after 2 months in India and Bangladesh, we were all totally exhausted. So our morning visit of Amsterdam, on a stopover between Delhi and Montreal, should be considered all the more impressive. We had an eight hour stopover and we arrived in Amsterdam at 6am. By 7am we were downtown waiting for the first coffee shops to open. In just a few hours we took a boat cruise through the city's canals, strolled the red light district, drank our first real coffee in months, downed Heinekens and ate stroopwafles. We landed in Montreal completely drained, but grateful for an amazing, and pretty hassle-free trip.

Destination Bolivia

Having returned from 14 months on the road in last December, and securing our first full-time jobs, after about 4 months of work, we were dreaming about being away. To fill our precious month of vacation, I first attempted to surprise Yann with a trip to Russia, although he was grateful, he was also more realistic than I was, and quickly pointed out how much such a trip would actually cost. We ruled out expensive Russia and started searching for cheap flights. We quickly settled on South America, where return flights started at about 800$.

Although the flights to Bolivia were more expensive, but it seemed to us at the time to be particularly interesting culturally and politically. We departed from Montreal at the end of August, two days after we finished teaching our two summer courses.

We landed at the La Paz airport in the early morning along with one of our backpacks (Yann’s). The “lost baggage counter” consisted of one guy standing in the middle of the arrival lounge with a clipboard surrounded by an increasing number of people. With one flight arriving from Miami per day, I would only get my bag the next day, which didn’t put much of a dent in our travel plans.

Within a few minutes of filling out the baggage form, we were outside, hopping into a shared taxi that would drop us off at the door of our hostel in central La Paz for $0.50.
The descent from the airport (in El Alto) into La Paz provided us a few glimpses of the bustling morning life of residents of La Paz’s less-privileged neighbouring city. They queued up at steaming breakfast stalls or jumped onto one of the dozens of shared taxis heading into La Paz. The women clad in multiple layers of ankle-leg skirts, their hair in two long dark braids and a small hat perching miraculously atop of their heads. As we drove into La Paz, we admired the thousands of brownish, crumbling, square homes, lining the canyon walls and the white-capped peaks of the Andes towering over the city in almost every direction. It's hard to imagine how Bolivia's largest urban centre ended up here.

We settled into our hostel and slept for a few hours, in order to attempt to ward off altitude sickness. Any beneficial affects this might have had were countered by our evening’s first meal, “rack of sheep”.

Canada 2008

We have been back home now for exactly three weeks. We left Hong Kong on December 10th, flying with the budget airline Oasis Hong Kong (HK to Vancouver 384$ tax incl). We ended up with a 19 hour stop over in Vancouver Airport, which is a good airport to sleep in, although they charge for wi-fi, not the case in Hong Kong (see www.sleepinginairports.com). The stop over appears to have been a cure for jet lag, which neither Yann or I experienced. Amid Christmas and New Year's madness, we are slowly getting back into our lives here. Stay tuned for updates to our website, coming in the new year...