It’s hard to put it all down in such concrete figures; our adventure was so much more than what these numbers say.  But here is what it looked like:

Total distance

John  21,545 km.  13,387 miles.

Emily  About 20,745 km.  12,890 miles.

*All distances calculated on a bike computer of dubious accuracy.  Emily’s distance is a little less than John’s because she went home for 2 weeks of December 2010 and John went on a solo ride in northern Thailand.

Duration

23 months.  We left Bend, Oregon on January 5, 2010 and returned to Colorado on December 2, 2011.

Dollars spent

John  $26,191

Emily  $25,204

Works out to $105/day.  These dollar figures include 100% of our spend on the trip.  Food, visas, plane tickets, bike parts, clothing, gifts, camping fees, guesthouses, shipping boxes back home, trains, scuba certification and dives, albatross sightseeing, paragliding, etc.  It does not include the start up costs before we left, such as the cost of our bikes, racks, panniers, and the gear that goes inside.

We started the trip figuring the cost would be ~$43/day.  We went over that in NZ and OZ but we expected that.  Asia was cheap, we lived on $20/day total for both of us the entire time we were there.  But add in flights, train tickets, bike parts, souvenirs, shipping, and all of the little expenses and we couldn’t fit that in to $20/day.

We used ATM cards to get money.  No travelers checks and no wad of cash in the bottom of our panniers.  We used Charles Schwab for our bank; they gave us interest earning checking accounts, refundable ATM fees, and no foreign transaction fee.  Quite a deal.

Photos taken

15,000+.  We would take the pictures off the camera card and in to our computer.  Then after leaving each country we would take the pictures off the computer and put them on a portable hard drive.  We’d also send home a thumb drive with our pictures from each country.  Even with all of that ‘insurance’ we still lost about 1/2 of our pictures from Australia and most of our pictures from Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  Grrr.

Countries visited

11.  New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, India and Nepal.

Time spent camping

Roughly half of the nights on our trip we camped.  We camped almost every night in New Zealand and Australia (8 months!), the exception being when we got to sleep in a locals house.  We camped a lot in China, India and Nepal; and a fair amount in Laos.  We did camp in every country at least once, I think Malaysia gets the token for only 1 night.  When we would stay in a hotel the average price we paid was about $7 per night, sometimes including breakfast.  With prices like that it’s kinda hard to sleep in a tent, but sometimes we would get fed up with the filth and choose our nice clean tent and sleeping bags even though we’d often have to deal with curious locals and a lack of privacy all night long.

Flat tires and other wheel issues

During the first 5 months or so of our trip we each had about 20 flat tires.  Then we got a new set of tires and we each had 2 flat tires each for the remaining 18 months!  Schwalbe Marathon Plus Tour tires are awesome!

We went through a total of 11 wheels, 4 tires, and lots of tubes.  The wheels are the surprising thing.  Reading books before we left I read about wheels splitting in half along the spoke holes.  That never happened to us.  What did happen was the rim would split around the perimeter where the brake pads rub.

Chains

2.  We rode with a spare chain for each of our bikes.  We swapped chains in Bangkok after 11 months.  We cleaned the old chains in an old water bottle with some gasoline in it, then carried that chain with us through the rest of Asia.  Somewhere in western Nepal we swapped chains again and donated the dirty chain to a guy along the road.  2 chains, not bad.

Brake pads

Lots, and they’re not as easy to find as you’d think.  If there was one thing we’d change about our bike setup, it’d be to go with disc brakes.  Less wear on our wheels is the primary reason.  Of course if we did this we’d need to carry all of our spares and know how to fit them.

Dumplings eaten

About 10 million.  Well that’s probably an exaggeration, but we did eat a lot of them.  Mostly in China, India and Nepal.

Tents

2.  We used Nemo tents and eventually both zippers failed on our first tent.  When Emily was back in the States in Dec 2010 they gave us another tent at no charge.  Both zippers on that tent failed as well…

Tata is a huge Indian company, similar to General Electric or General Motors.  But bigger- or at least more diverse.  Most noticeable to us was when we were in India and Nepal just about every large truck was made by Tata.  But then we’d start to see the Tata logo on cars, satellite dishes, diamond jewelers, cell phones, laundry detergent; they’re the worlds 2nd largest tea company, the 5th largest steel (they own British Steel), computers and IT companies, banks, electricity generation, chemicals.  Huge.

Sometimes when we’d talk with local people they would talk about American manufacturing, and that India needs to be more like America.  They would say ‘We have Tata, that’s all we have.’

Tata doesn’t have a huge presence in the US- at least not that I know of.  But if you buy Tetley tea, you will notice a Tata logo on that box.

Here’s a little story to make you all cringe a little bit.  You’ve heard us mention over and over about the honking in Asia.  It drove us crazy.  And you’ve heard stories about crazy drivers there too, doing high speed passes on blind corners and stupid things like that.  I guess there were crazy cyclists too?

Generally there aren’t bike lanes or wide shoulders over there.  If a driver coming towards us wants to pass another car, they don’t wait until they get past us to make their pass.  They’d pull out, floor the gas and run us off the road in their impatient efforts to get where ever they’re going faster.  To help combat this annoying habit, when I’d see an oncoming driver attempt to pass another oncoming car, instead of pulling over to get out of the way I’d pull in to the middle of the lane to say “I’m not moving for you”.  Almost always the drivers would pull back in to their lane and wait to pass until they’re behind us.  But every once in awhile I’d see a puff of black smoke come out of the exhaust pipe and know that this guy isn’t backing down.  Of course then I would pull over and get out of the way, maybe with a few gestures of protest.  Emily would normally be behind me and was never thrilled with stunts like this.

Maneuvers like this would happen several times each day.  My worst experience was in Nepal when an oncoming bus was passing another bus.  No shoulder for me, with a vertical drop off in to a concrete ditch.  I pull out to tell the speeding bus coming towards me to ‘Wait until you get past us’, I see the puff of black smoke and now I have nowhere to go.  Close call, and I had bad brakes at the time due to my wheel issues.  Emily has had her own close calls and she was much more flagrant in her gestures to these crazy drivers.

One story I read on Mr Pumpy’s blog (happy reading, this guy is a whacko) described the usual oncoming bus passing another bus- this also happened to be in Nepal.  But to make this story unique he experienced a 3rd bus passing the 2 other buses.  3 buses coming straight at him.  It turned out to be a near death experience for him.  Ahh the joys of world travel.

As the thought of our trip ending was approaching and we were talking to people about it, a common expression was ‘It’s time to get back to the real world.’  But we’d argue that point each time.  I guess there are several versions of the Real World?  But based on what we’ve experienced we see the real world as out there being with nature everyday.  Working in it, living in it, growing food, raising animals, riding a bike in it.  A pretty simple lifestyle but very also real.  Didn’t do your chores today?  The plants might dry out.  The animals will be hungry.  But being back here we’ve noticed things are so easy, abundant, wasteful, and often fake.  Chicken comes in a foam package.  So much energy is spent on the way things look; shiny packages, shiny cars, new clothes, gadgets, lawyers, money, fastest this, fastest that.  Wow.  It’s pretty overwhelming.

We’ve mentioned a lot that this trip for us was a life changing experience, and this change in our perspective is one of many changes for us.  We probably wouldn’t have had this change in perspective if we only rode in New Zealand and Australia.  It was 15 months in Asia.  It was spending so much time amongst Buddhists.  It was discovering patience.  Hunger.  Exhaustion.  Simplicity.  Poverty.  Happiness.  All of this is overwhelming as well, but these are all human conditions.  Very real.  We highly recommend discovering your own version of reality.

Before the trip I hadn’t eaten ramen noodles since college.  And they’ve never had too good of a reputation here.  But when we got to Indonesia we started to see huge billboards advertising packs of ramen noodles.  Lots of people eat these packs of ramen noodles as a major part of their diet, not just in Indonesia but all through Asia.  Poverty, and people’s health really suffers from it.

We’d usually travel with some emergency food in our panniers.  For awhile it was a few packs of ramen.  In Laos we had to eat our emergency food a few days in a row.  Not that we were in dire circumstances, we just happened to ride past a few nice camp spots along a river.  Anyway, after eating ramen for dinner 2 nights in a row we noticed a huge decrease in our energy levels.  This stuff just ain’t that good for you.

Gosh, what an unexpected experience.  Before we left on the trip, I was dreaming of a 5 year bike tour.  After Emily came along we shortened it to 2 years, then increased it to 2.5 years, and ultimately wound up back at 2 years.  As it turns out that’s a long time to be traveling!  After 6 months of travel or so- about midway through our time in Australia, we started to get the hang of how it all works.  Eat, sleep, ride a bike.  It was awesome.  Not having friends around, answering the same questions over and over, eating junk food, not really knowing where we are except as a dot on a map, living out of bags.  Not so awesome.  It gets monotonous and monotony can lead to boredom.  So we started to get a little burned out.  For Emily, she was also really missing the satisfaction of helping people every day in her work as an Occupational Therapist.  That coupled with travel burnout made for some hard times.  At the time we had 2 years ahead of us, we’d wonder ‘How are we going to do it?’  Travel burnout was a constant companion for us for the rest of our trip.  We found one of the best cures for it was change.  Changing countries, cultures, climate, food, anything to stimulate the brain some more besides the normal language barrier.  We also randomly ran into people who we were able to help, which also provided that sense of self-satisfaction.

It was great to do a trip for 2 years; it was a life changing experience.  And it’s great to have done a trip like that and know that it’s too long- for us.  When we plan future bike tours- and there will be more- we’ll plan shorter ones of 3 to 6 months.  3 to 6 months?  That’s 3-6 times more vacation in a year than most of us earn at work.  Yup.  I’ve done a lot of 2 week cycle tours and they’re too short.  The first 2 weeks of a cycle tour are the hardest.  After that your body starts to get used to the work and things get a lot easier; then it’s over.  But for sure, 2 weeks tours are better than nothing.

As outdoor junkies, most of us have heard about the cheap counterfeit gear that’s available in Asia.  The rumors are true!

One of dozens of counterfeit gear stores in Kathmandu.

We looked for counterfeit gear in Kunming, China.  They used to be there, and maybe they still are, but we couldn’t find them.  As we rode west towards Tibet, we came across a few places that had it, Dali and Zhongdian (Shangri-la).  The stuff is high quality and there’s really no way to tell it apart from the real thing besides the price.  I bought a nice ‘North Face’ thick windstopper fleece jacket for $20 US in Zhongdian; Emily also bought a nice windproof vest there.  The labels look good, quality is good, even the paper tags were identical.  One difference is the zipper.  YKK is a major zipper manufacturer around the world.  The zipper on my jacket looks identical but it says YRR.  Funny.

But the mother of counterfeit gear was Nepal.  In Pokhara and Kathmandu there were dozens of counterfeit gear stores.  We could get anything from sleeping bags to jackets to backpacks from North Face, Mountain Hardware, ArcTeryx, etc.  We’d even find stores that sold nothing but rolls of North Face, Mountain Hardware and ArcTeryx labels.  Prices were cheap but the quality was certainly iffy.  For instance a pair of gaitors for skiing- the zipper might be upside down.  GoreTex- forget about it.  Down- probably plain feathers.  But you could literally go to Nepal wearing nothing but a T-shirt & shorts and buy all of the gear you needed for less than $100 and go on a 3 week trek.  Quite a deal.  If only we had the money to buy stuff for ourselves.

A men’s large puffy down jacket would go for $30 to $40 (depending on our bargaining skills) in Kathmandu.  When we got back back to the US we saw a similar jacket on sale in a big box store for $140.  On sale.  Wow.

How do they get away with it?  You’d think North Face and other major brands would file major lawsuits to prevent this.  Corruption has to be the main factor.  Most of the places that make the gear are small shops.  If one gets busted it would shut down for a week then reopen in a new location.

We love the water buffalo.  These suckers are huge, they love to lounge in mud and rivers, and they’re mostly bald but with hair coming out in strange places to hold the mud on.  Their bodies are adapted to the water and their feet are the size of dinner plates.  They’re beasts of burden in Asia.  Mostly we see them pulling a plow in fields, sometimes in a muddy rice paddy, other times in a dry field.  Sometimes the farmers have them hooked to a wagon and they’re head down the road.  So they’re used as draft animals, and they’re also used for milking and meat.  Their dung is used as fertilizer and also dried and used as fuel.  They seem to have a very docile personality, they’re huge with huge horns, but they’re gentle and obedient.  They don’t taste like beef, the meat has a similar look and texture but its drier and gamier.  In Indonesia they were sacrificed during funerals.  The more buffalo that were sacrificed, the faster your soul would get to heaven (it was a Christian area).  Before this trip, neither one of us has ever seen a water buffalo before.  Same goes for yaks.  But they’re everywhere over there.

Yaks are a high altitude animal.  They’re cattle, but they behave differently.  They don’t moo, they grunt.  They have long hair, wool actually.  And when they run they look more like a horse than a cow (kind of like an American bison).  Everyone has seen the big, thick wool sweaters and socks from Nepal.  In most cases this is yak wool, not sheep wool.  Yaks don’t hang out in the water the way water buffalo do.  Duh.  They aren’t used as draft animals like water buffalo either.  But they are used as pack animals, carrying large loads on their backs over high mountains in the Himalaya.  In the Tibetan areas of western China yaks were everywhere.  More so than in the Tibetan areas of India or Nepal.  In that part of the world most of the human diet is yak.  Yak dumplings.  Yak soup.  Yak butter.  Yak cheese.  It’s very high over there and vegetables don’t grow.  So, yaks are used for meat, dairy products, and wool.  Their dung is almost always used as fuel, since they’re high altitude animals and trees don’t grow way up there.  Their severed tails are also used the way we’d use a feather duster.  In Shangri La we’d see a guy on the sidewalk combing bloody yak tails.  In Dali, also in western China, we’d see an entire fresh yak skin sitting on the road to dry/drain.  In this case it was dusk and it took us several minutes of staring and poking to figure out what it was.

A big difference between these two animals is water buffalo horns generally point backwards.  Nice and safe.  Yak horns tend to point forward, perfect for jabbing a curious cyclist.  But all the ones we saw were very gentle, especially the water buffalo.  And it’s true, they love to hand out in the water.  The muddier the better.

In the US we get so used to seeing cattle; holsteins, angus, hereford, etc.  On this trip we came to realize how specialized these animals are for what they do.  Do you want milk?  Beef?  We have a breed for that.  In Asia they get it all from the buffalos and yak.  Which reminds me of another tidbit.  Yaks are male, Naks are female.  So if you find yourself in Nepal looking for yak butter, be careful who you ask.

Travel is a great experience.  Before we left on this trip, when we saw a swastika we immediately thought of Hitler and Nazi’s.  But when we got to Indonesia we began to see them in stone carvings and as decorations on buildings.  What’s going on?

Above the door

It turns out swastikas are sacred images to Hindu’s, Buddhists, Native Americans, Iranians, Armenians, and the list goes on, going way back to around 4000 BC.  Wow.  Neither one of us had any idea before we set out.  If you’re interested you can read more about it here.

What an awesome trip! Gosh, the realities of the trip and of the trip being over are still sinking in to our thick little skulls. Before we left our friends told us “How awesome, you guys are going to change so much.” We heard what they were saying but it didn’t really mean a lot to us at the time. Having done the trip we can both honestly say that it really was a life changing experience.

The countries we rode through, in order are:

1. New Zealand, 3 months
2. Australia, 5 months
3. Indonesia, 2 months
4. Malaysia, 1 month
5. Thailand, 2 months
6. Laos, 1 month
7. Cambodia, 1 month
8. Vietnam, 1 month
9. China, 3 months
10. India, 3 months
11. Nepal, 2 months

11 countries in 23 months. This really isn’t that many countries and our 21,000+ km is really not that far, but we didn’t name our website ‘At Our Own Pace’ for nothing. We took our time, stopped wherever we wanted, took pictures, ate lots of great food (also lots of not so great food) and talked to lots of locals along the way. No consecutive 100+ km days for us folks. Only a handful of days over 100km on our whole trip actually, like 4 or so.

People always ask us the same general questions such as, ‘What was our favorite place?’. Here are our answers to those questions:

Favorite countries for cycle touring-

New Zealand. Specifically the South Island. Penguins, glaciers, tall peaks, fjords, dolphins, manta rays, deserts, blue rivers…
Australia. Friendly people, amazing animals and plants (kookaburras, cockatoos, stinging trees), safe roads.

• A drawback to both NZ and OZ is the expense. Not a big deal if you’re not on a tight budget, but we were on a tight budget for the whole trip. In fact being on that tight budget for so long is one of our life changing experiences.

Western China. The area used to be part of Tibet, so the culture there is more Tibetan than in Tibet itself or so we’ve heard. It’s all high elevation, yaks are everywhere, many women still wear traditional clothes, the food is good, and the people are friendly. Drawback is the constant language barrier and bad roads. We got engaged in China!
Northern India. Our most extreme riding was in Ladakh in northern India. Very high mountains and passes, barren deserts, and bad roads. But the amazing scenery more than made up for the difficulties we had.

Favorite countries for being a tourist-

Indonesia- Sulawesi island is absolutely fantastic. Exotic cultures, friendly people, mountains, diving, surfing. But it’s hot and steep, a killer combination on heavy bikes.
Nepal- There aren’t a lot of roads in Nepal, so we couldn’t be very creative in our route planning. But the people are friendly, the landscape is very diverse, and the food was good. And we’re talking about the home of the highest mountain in the world.

Least favorite country to visit-

Cambodia- It was a very depressing place and they are not looking after each other. But of course we’d go back in a second. The Siem Reap/Angkor Wat area is truly amazing.

Favorite things to do/have happen to us-

The short answer is any time we could really interact with the locals. Whether it’s a meat raffle at the bowls club in Australia or sitting down for tea with some road workers that we can’t speak to. Spending time with local people, seeing what and how they eat & drink, how they dress, how they laugh and joke, how they spend their days… It’s great.

Favorite foods-

Dumplings. We ate about 10 million of them. They’re known by different names in different countries, but the idea is the same. A nice chewy dough with a savory meat or vegetable filling inside. Yum. And if we were lucky we’d get a nice spicy dipping sauce to go with it. Dumplings were common in China, India, and Nepal; but some of the best were in a hole in the wall place in Melbourne, Australia.

Least favorite food-

Organ meats in their various forms. Most often it was in noodle soups in Laos. We’d always ask for ‘no meat’ in our soup, but I think they understood it as extra meat?

Funniest things-

• Riding along with some nice school kids on their bikes in Cambodia and one kid who was too busy texting on his phone, he ran face first in to the rear end of a large cow. Business end to business end. We laughed, he laughed but was clearly embarrassed- but it was really funny.
• Having to pantomime in order to communicate. The funniest was Emily trying to communicate that she needed a suppository type laxative. I’m sure watching us trying to communicate was also pretty funny to the locals.

Strange things-

• All over SE Asia men would gather in large groups with small birds in cages. It turns out these are competitions for the prettiest bird song. Neat.
• Hindu deities. There are a lot of them and they are quite bizarre to us. Smiling monkey kings that are half human, half ape with other smaller deities sitting inside their spread apart rib cage.
• Nepal’s Living Goddess. Aged 4-14 yrs old, treated like a queen- until she has her first period, then its time for a new Goddess.
• The Asian fascination with honking. Truck, bus, car, and motorbike horns drove us crazy! China was the most obnoxious, India & Indonesia were the most musical and everywhere else it was just plain annoying.

Heart breakers-

Of all of the animals we saw on this trip, dogs have it the worst of any other animal. In western countries it’s common for dogs to be part of the family. They’re fed proper food, have a bed to sleep on. In Northern Vietnam, we began to see ‘dog’ restaurants and in China we saw a ‘dog’ market. We never got used to seeing so many dogs having such a hard life.

In addition sterilizing dogs doesn’t exist in Asia. So dogs breed and have puppies in the street, then they live short hard lives.

Frustrating things-

Crappy education. In a lot of places public schools are staffed by illiterate teachers with no training. Especially India and Nepal.
Repressed women. This is a fact of life in many religions, Hindu & Muslim in particular. When we were fortunate to eat with a family, the wife and kids ate after us and separate from us and the other grown men. It’s normal in a lot of places but still frustrating for us to see.
Realizations of the many realities and consequences of Western aide and cultural influence.
A good example of this is Cambodia. All through Asia, just about everybody has a garden and they’re growing their own food. Not so much in Cambodia. Why grow food when it comes for free from NGO’s?
In Vietnam, sugar cane is squeezed in a small roller mill on the side of the road for drinking, these are powered by good ol’ fashion elbow grease. In Cambodia, a far poorer country, these same mills are powered by new Honda engines.

Self realizations-

• If we can do 2 years on a bike, we can do anything we put our mind to.
• The majority of people all over the world are good.
• We planned 2.5 years for our trip and did it in 23 months before our money ran out. Either way it’s a long time. Too long for us. 3-6 months of traveling is pretty good.
  We noticed 1 month in a country wasn’t enough, and by 3 months we were ready to leave. So for us somewhere between 1-3 months per country is pretty good.
• Money certainly does not lead to happiness.

Close calls/scariest moments-

We are very happy to say that we were never in any real danger at all on our whole trip. The fact is people are nice everywhere, even if you can’t speak their language. Twice we ran in to 15 yr old kids with bad intentions, but they were just stupid teenage kids (Australia & China).

Many Asian kids thought it was OK to practice their English by asking Emily for kisses or something more.

Our scariest moments were on the road; for Emily it was in Australia and for John it was in India. Em came close to a head on collision with a passing car and John got hit at slow speeds by a truck with a tall, steep cliff just off the shoulder of the road and no guardrail.

Best tourist towns/areas:

Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia. We made some wonderful friends here. The Torajan culture is fascinating and we felt like Indiana Jones here.
Shangri-la, Yunnan province, China. Formerly known as Zhongdian but Shangri-la is better for marketing. It’s a very Tibetan place with lots of strange things for sale- and there is dancing every night at 7 in the town square.
Coastal New South Wales. Bring a surf board and have some fun. But don’t go there in the summer. Jellyfish…
Rishikesh, India. The self proclaimed ‘yoga capital of the world’ and also a holy spot to Hindus; as this is where the Ganges river emerges from the Himalayas. Our favorite Asian city.
Chiang Mai, Thailand. A refuge amid the chaos and heat of SE Asia. We had authentic Neapolitan pizza here, made by Italians, for $2 per large pizza.
Ladakh, India. If you like remote places, this is your place. And you can do it on a rented Royal Enfield motorcycle! The Indian Himalaya dominate the landscape here.

Worst tourist towns:

Hua Hin, Thailand. The domain of sex-pats and the prostitutes who get their money.
Vang Vien, Laos. Young people come from all over the world to take drugs here. It really is in a pretty area but it is getting ruined.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Not really a tourist town but not a great place to spend 5 days in like we did. But if learning about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge is on your list of things to do, this is teh place to do it.

But the favorite part of our trip were the random small villages, towns, and cities that we came across where people went out of their way to be nice to us. Places such as Tan Chau, Vietnam; Duntroon, New Zealand; Makale, Indonesia; Guangzhou, China; and Manning Point, Australia; and literally dozens more.

As for our future, it’s all up in the air as to where we’ll end up. We are looking at property in Western Colorado and in different parts of Oregon. No matter where we end up, our plans are to start a small, kinda self sufficient farm. You know veggies, chickens, and maybe some sheep or goats. We’ll see. Throw a kiddo into that mix and we’re good to go for the next several years. We love cycle touring and we look forward to doing it with our kid in a few years.

On that note, again, Cheers, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Thanks and love to you all for playing your part in our adventure.

John and Emily