96 days, broken down into 2304 hours or 138,240 minutes (give or take). Packing, looking at how little I was taking and how much I was leaving, it seemed like a lifetime; now that we’re home it seems more like the blink of an eye. I still wake up, some mornings, not knowing where I am – the familiar fall of watery winter light onto my own red walls resolves reluctantly into reality. I wish it wouldn’t.
Only once while we were gone did I wake up to the panic of disorientation, that frantic scrabbling for reassurance. Oddly, or perhaps prophetically, I awoke in a state because I thought I was home. After an apple flavored water pipe and a whirling dervish, I slept poorly, dreaming that I was anywhere but Istanbul. The persistent theme was that we were home already, and I woke gasping, filled with disappointment that my journey was over. My eyes popped open to the faded glory of the Ottoman empire and the roar of city traffic and I laughed with relief. There were still months to go, I reassured myself. Now, here, resolutely and firmly home, I have no such easy comfort.
With some distance from the reality of travel, the mechanics of it fascinate me, and I’ve been asked, more than once, for specifics: how many pairs of pants did you have, how many airports did you go through? This question holds more weight, more immediacy, than open ended explorations of what Cambodia was really like, or how the sun in Egypt felt. Facts and figures are concrete, people feel safe exploring them – and maybe that’s what they’d really rather hear anyway – I’m not sure my adjectives don’t run away with me anyway, carrying people into a never-never land of armchair travel. Today, then, to start the year off, I’m going for facts. If the truth is rarely pure and never simple, numbers don’t lie – and the numbers are pretty extraordinary.
Countries Visited: 14
Countries where we were in the airport but didn’t stay: 2
Places that used to be countries (more or less) but are now Special Administrative Districts: 2
Hmmm – does that mean we went to 18 countries? 16? Only 14? Are facts more fluid than previously suspected?
Airlines Flown: 18
(United, Lufthansa, South Africa, Air Tanzania, Precision Air, Coastal Aviation, Austrian, Turkish, AtlasJet, Swiss, Egypt Air, Air China, Sichuan Airlines, ANA, Thai, Bangkok Airways, Singapore, Air New Zealand)
Airlines that fed us food that shouldn’t qualify as food: 3
Number of random but much appreciated free upgrades: 1 (from Cairo to Frankfurt)
Number of painfully tedious flights: 2 (Singapore to Sydney in coach, San Francisco to Frankfurt in business with two very loud and not at all sleeping women behind us)
Number of flights missed: 0
Number of flights we should have missed, we were so late: 2
(Note to self: do not try and navigate in rural Turkey without a map)
Pieces of luggage: 2
Carryons: 2 (one camera bag, one small duffle)
Bags lost: 2
Bags found: 2
Number of items stupidly lost: 1 (a flashkey at our ryokan in Kyoto)
Number of items forgotten in the Campa: 1 (large bag of blackcurrant licorice)
Boxes sent home: 10
Number of those boxes that contained alcohol: 7
Miles Flown: 65,519 (not including extra miles spent circling airports with delays)
Miles Flown on 11/30/06: 14,626
Consider that last fact for just one minute. The circumference of Earth is 24,901 miles. That means that in one day, thanks to jet engines and time travel generously provided by the International Date Line, we flew 3/5 of the way around the world. Ponteuf’s arms were tired.
Number of hotels: 35 (36 if the apartment in Italy counts)
Nights spent in a tent: 3
Nights spent in a Campa: 7
Nights where an airplane or a train stood in for a hotel: 7
Number of nights Aimee said “no way” to the airport lounge as bed and got a hotel room: 1
(Cairo. Sensing a theme?)
Number of times we ate fast food: 4
It should be noted that with one exception, these were cultural forays. McDonald’s in Xi’an, Tokyo and Bangkok. Tell me you would be able to resist the lure of a menu all in characters (Xi’an), an Ebi-Shrimp sandwich (Tokyo) or a Pork burger on a sticky rice bun (Bangkok). No, I think not. Burger King in Stuttgart was just pure desperation – it was late and we had no car, so walking distance from the hotel and open were our prime deciding factors. Oddly enough, “Have it Your Way” extends to paying for a burger in Germany with American dollars, if you so choose. We used Euros.
Number of bathrooms without the option of a toilet: 2 (Turkey and Italy, actually)
Bathrooms that offered only one real toilet, hiding behind a handicapped sign and boasting scuff marks indicating that people were standing rather than sitting on the seat: countless
Bathrooms that had no toilet paper: countless
Bathrooms with toilet paper for sale at the entrance: 4
Number of times I forgot to carry a wad of toilet paper in my pocket: 1
(never let it be said I don’t learn from experience)
Number of times we said “I want to go home”: 0
