There is a first for everything

This week was fantastic. We saw a shark bigger than my dad! We went to a place called Crabby. We stayed one night but then decided to go to a place near it. It is not an island but you have to take a boat to get there because it is surrounded by big intense cliffs and boulders. It's called Relay beach. We stayed there for 2 nights then moved on to an island nearby. It is a lot bigger than Relay beach. I loved it, not quite as much as Relay beach but I still loved it. The first day we were there we went for a scuba dive. The visibility was incredible.  The variations of fish expanded every time I turned my head.  We saw a turtle twice, and 2 lobsters. The person I did it with was perfect. I had no trouble with my ears. After that we rented a kayak and paddled out to some cliffs with a fishing pole hanging out the back of the boat. We had no luck but we were still satisfied by the beautiful orange sun setting behind the thin clouds. We got to the beach and got a drink at a bar.  Sitting next to us was a guy drunk as heck with an old guy with LONG dreadlocks, and a lady singing along to a Bob Marley song. We decided that tomorrow we  would move to another place. A place with dugongs!  Super excited!  

Mira

Friendship

One of the best things about this trip is that, in addition to making new friends en route, we are seeing "old" and dear friends along the way.  Friends we made a year ago, ten years ago, and even 30 years ago.  Friends from past lives and childhood.  Friends from various countries in which we have lived and worked these past 30+ years.  We are seeing some friends in their home countries, joining others in countries of their latest postings, and meeting vacationing others in alternate countries.

Seeing old friends, REAL friends, is like a pit stop or a beautiful sunrise.  True friends nourish my soul.  They lift my spirits.  They fuel my zest for life.  Thank you my dears.

Nadia

Things to Eat Once in USA:

• Chocolate chip cookie dough
• Del's Lemonade
• Blueberries
• Whipped cream
• Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream
• Kingston Pizza
• Cheese Its

Maya

When I Realized

This week, not one day I didn't go swimming. I also got my diving license. I am going to talk about When I Realized.

It was a windy Saturday. The waves were huge and the tides were high. I jumped on a small blue rubber boat, and put on a soggy orange life jacket. We drove for about 2 minutes, and arrived at the scuba boat.  We hopped on and handed our life jackets to the guy on the smaller boat. I turned around and saw dozens of scuba tanks.

That is when I realized that I was about to learn how to breath under water!

I know it sounds silly, but this is the only time I really thought about it.

After that, while diving, it felt different.  It felt much different. It felt like I was flying in a slow motion video, like I was in space with coral, and fish. It felt like I was an alien on my zero gravity planet. It felt, AMAZING!

Mira

Travel is Fatal

Nadia

Enjoying Thailand

Hi All,
After a few weeks of continuos travel we're now relaxing for a week on the coast of Thailand, about 100km east of Bangkok in a place called Pattaya. The kids are currently enrolled in a week long scuba certification class which they're enjoying. Tomorrow we'll do our first dive as a family, it should be fun. The food here remains some of the best in the world and the Thai people are oh so friendly. It's no wonder more and more people from Europe and the US are retiring here. Below are a few pics highlighting our past week in Laos and Thailand. Enjoy.    Cheers, Rob

Butterfly in Laos

Yummy

Vang Vieng

Buddhist shrine in cave

Not a bad mode of transportation

Koh Lanka Thailand

Early morning, Luang Prabang Laos

River life, Mekong tributary 

Rooftops, Vang Vieng Laos

Serene waterfalls

Start of kayaking trip

Adventure

This week was an adventure. In Laos on Wednesday, we kayaked on the mighty Mekong. We paddled and paddled until our arms were practically noodles.

We pulled to shore and started walking along the beach. I look up from the sand and saw what looked like a moving rock. We got closer and I realized that those moving rocks were elephants! I ran to see if what I saw was true and it was!

After that we got to ride the elephants, on the way we saw some interesting fruits and decided to taste them. There were some good ones and some not so good ones, but in all, it was an unforgettable experience.  Then after we rode the elephants, we bathed them. It was a blast, however it felt like 2 minutes but really was hours! You know what they say, time flies when you're having fun!

Then we went to some water falls and saw butterflies.

The day after that, Friday, we traveled some more. The day after that we went tubing. The day after that, we traveled ALOT, and then we finally arrived here in Pattaya, Thailand! We relaxed by the pool. We went out to dinner, but that night was an eye opener to the whole world - every piece was put in its place, but I am working on forgetting about it.

Mira

Learning

When we first started thinking about taking a year off formal work to travel and homeschool the kids, we spoke with a family about their experiences with a similar trip several years earlier when their two daughters were similar ages to my girls now.  The one thing Rhonda, the mother, said (which really stuck with me) was that it was a great bonding time as a family and that they had really gotten to know their children during their year of travel together.

We have only been traveling for three weeks - shorter than the typical length of our annual home leave and holiday to USA and Mexico.  Despite this, I feel like I've already gotten to know my daughters better than I knew them previously.  I have learned so much about my girls in these three weeks!

Mira, for example, loves babies.  I knew she liked little kids, but I didn't realize quite how much she loved them - and animal babies too.  Where ever we have been, there have been lots of babies and toddlers.  And plenty of baby animals.  She never fails to stop to say a few words or play with them or pet them - whatever the species of babies!!

Mira loves little babies!

And any kind of animal, but especially little ones!

And Maya loves to eat and try new foods.  I knew both girls were easy eaters, but I didn't know that Maya absolutely loves eating everything - no matter whether it is a new fruit on a tree we are passing, a spicy mystery dish in the back of beyond in Laos, or an insect that is considered a delicacy wherever we happen to be.

Maya eating the delicious and ubiquitous Thai noodle soup

She loves dragon fruit (but not bananas)

And humor.  Boy do they have a sense of humor!!  We spend more time laughing each day than most people do in a week!  We laugh at and with each other, whether it's the mishap of finding ourselves in the red-light district of Pattaya, Thailand, or an unusual tattoo of a European backpacker, or one of us having a major cultural or language misunderstanding along our journey, or one of the girls tagging a total stranger while the family was playing tag while tubing on a Laotian river.

Both girls are incredibly easy-going.  We've been hot and lacked sleep while we lugged backpacks on and off tuktuks, taxis, subways, buses, and trains.  We've used the toilet in roadside bushes, less-than-clean toilets at highway rest-stops in the middle of nowhere, bug-filled latrines 60 meters up in treehouses, and the bushes in snake-infested forests deep in the juggles of southeast Asia.  We've been woken by ants in our hair, had leeches latch onto our feet, and had mysterious bites on our legs in the middle of the night.  We've eaten street food and furry fruit and insects.  And yet, despite all of this, I have not heard a single complaint from the girls.

They are also empathetic and have a strong awareness of how lucky we are.  Maya's recent blog is a good example - without us ever talking about it, she thought (and blogged) about being poor and living in a hut in a rice field.  On our long bus rides and treks through the forests, Mira often raised the topic of "what if we had been born here" instead of in the privileged life that we have.  She recognizes that our good life is a virtue of luck in being born where we were born - and nothing more!  Both girls think and talk about ways in which we can contribute to a more fair and just world (and as our trip progresses, we will be doing service to work on this!).

My girls also have a lot of respect for other people.  They know there are other ways of doing things (and that the "other" is also "right").  In these three weeks, I have seen Maya and Mira instinctively, with no prompting, learn and use the local greetings and expressions of thanks or gratitude.  The girls are now in the habit, whenever we walk up to a person or a stall or into a shop or cafe, of pressing their hands together in front of their hearts, nodding their heads, and saying hello in the appropriate language - just like the local people - regardless of the socio-economic status of the person they are greeting.  Incredible!

I find myself astounded by the girls on a daily basis.  I am thankful to have this year to get to know my lovely monkeys even better.

Nadia

Travels in Laos

Hi All,

The weather continues to cooperate even though the monsoon rains should already be here. We've been enjoying the hills, mountains and rivers of Laos. Today we went 'tubing' for 3 hours on a river in Vang Vieng and tomorrow we head to the capital Vientiane.  Cheers, Rob

Nadia and Mira

have elephants, will travel

Karen hill tribe woman

Maya bathing new friend

The Rain that Brings Summer to an End

As the sky clouds over
The rain pours harder,
Coming down in buckets,
Spilling down my living room chimney,
Days and nights at a time.

No light.
No sun.
No color.

There is nothing to do,
And nothing to say,
As roads flood behind the kitchen walls,
and water rushes and beats against the rickety door;
My roof crashes,
KABOOM!
Water gushes down the rusty stairs;
My summer dreams melting away.

But eventually,
One by one,
The droplets stop dropping
On the tarnished roof,
And the sky starts to brighten.

With the light,
The sun,
And the color,
The remaining wintery wreck, is blatant.

Another storm has passed,
Leaving behind a mess.
My broken roof unfixable,
My flooded road inaccessible,
What a place, what a place.

Even though mud dries,
and puddles evaporate,
the damage to my summer dreams,
is too great to be healed.

Imagine living on a riverbank at the start of the rainy season...

Maya

Week of Wonders

This week was an adventures one. We went treking through the jungle, saw a few bugs that are out of this world. We ziplined to tree houses and were visited by some tree rats who very much enjoyed eating my sock. The 12 hour bus ride from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang. By the way, on that bus I and everyone else could hear the 20 people vomiting over and over again. Here are the pics!

~Mira

Laos

Hi All,

Greetings from Luang Prabang, Laos.

We’ve been on the road now for a couple of weeks and the trip is living up to expectations. After a bit of early excitement in Abu Dhabi on Nadia’s father’s boat, we arrived in Bangkok where we explored the city for a few days. The highlight was taking a bike trip through the back streets, alley’s, markets and temples of the city. We then took an all night train north to Chiang Mai where we explored the city before departing for a two-day trek to visit a Karen hill tribe. We spent a night in a village, bathing in a river and sleeping in a wood and bamboo house while also enjoying a delicious meal prepared by our guide.  The next day we took a 3-hour bamboo raft ride down a winding river through the forest. Although water would come through the spaces in the bamboo when we went over small rapids, for the most part it was a scenic and relaxing trip. After living in Jordan for so long, seeing lush green everywhere is food for the soul.

We then continued north to Chiang Rai where we visited an amazing temple constructed by a group of local artists and then visited a hill tribe museum. From Chiang Rai we traveled across the border into Laos where we spent the night along the Mekong River in a small border town called Huay Xai. We specifically traveled to this location to enjoy three days of zip-lining through the forest canopy and sleeping in specifically engineered houses built high up in huge trees. The trip started by taking a two hour drive, most of it on a rutted dirt road, to a village where we started a two hour trek into the forest. Along the way we met our guides, received our zip line harnesses and continued on to our first of many zip lines. Wow, what an experience literally flying through and over the jungle and at speed. At night and in the morning we would hear gibbon’s calling out to each other along with a symphony of insect noises but we didn’t actually see any gibbons. The kids had a blast zip-lining spans of over 400 meters and so did we.

Once back from the forest, we spent one more night in Huay Xai before taking a 13 bus trip to Luang Prabang, a beautiful and historic town on the Mekong River with a mix of Laos and French architecture and culture. The town is sandwiched between two major rivers, is ringed by dramatic mountains and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The town is loaded with young travelers/backpackers, street food stalls, massage spas, travel agencies, adventure outfitters and more. We’ve been here for three days now and have slowed the pace down. Days have included walking around the town, eating great food, and just relaxing. We’re always eating because the food is so good.

Today we picked up the pace a bit by kayaking on a scenic river, where we also stopped to ride and swim with elephants before visiting a cave full of Buddhist statues.

We’re all starting to get into a groove of living out of a backpack, learning the best means of transportation (i.e. boats, buses, and trains), sourcing accommodations nightly, and researching things to do at our next destination along the way. The kids have been real troopers and enjoying the adventure.

This is my first post so apologies for the long blow by blow of the trip so far. Hopefully, going forward, I’ll post more regularly. I’m also learning how to use my new Nikon camera and have taken lots of photos. Here are some (quite a few actually). Enjoy.

Cheers, Rob

White Palace, Chiang Rai 

Trekking near Chiang Mai

Receiving blessing at temple in Bangkok

Nadia zip lining into tree house

Rob's kit for trip in one backpack

Soap carvings at night market, Chiang Mai

Tree house we stayed in on first night in forest

Nadia making friends

Scenic Bangkok

Monkey Mira having fun

On boat in Abu Dhabi

Karen hill tribe woman

Kids swimming at amazing waterfall in Thailand

Majestic

Tree house we stayed in the second night

 Aka hill tribe woman

In tree house with fellow travelers

Nadia enjoying bamboo raft trip

Biking in Bangkok

Mira on sleeper train

Tandem sunset zip

Bathing in river in hill tribe village