Home In One Piece (Portland, Oregon, USA!)

Made it. Spent last week in Toronto visiting Mom and relatives galore, flew to Portland, and here we are. The exciting things about being home, besides seeing everyone I love, are the things I'm using to convince myself I want to stay. Tap water for instance is highly underrated. I missed it. And cell phones - wow. Driving, I like it. Lettuce and berries and things you don't peel - delicious. Not being robbed, or worrying about it constantly, is nice. I do despise the moneybelt so good riddance. Jeans are great and not exactly practical when your laundry is drying on a line in the dirt. Singing along to the radio, very fun and not really something you can do with the IPod on the bus when you're trying to keep a low profile in Africa for example. Mostly however, seeing people that know me is a pretty big treat at this point.

17 countries (18 including Bangladesh) in 328 days, not that I was counting. What a year. I can barely remember Mexico, let alone New Zealand. Without sounding horrifically cheesy, major thanks to those who supported this little 11 month endeavor. Visits - unbelievable, mail in Chile - amazing, regular old emails - vital, patience with my neurotic pre-departure chaos and encouragement just getting me out the door - well, obviously couldn't have happened without you. According to rough calculations, I slept in something like 150 different beds and on 27 various overnight buses/trains/planes/boats. I traveled by rickshaw/tuk tuk, motorbike, minibus/chapa/micro/combi, dhow, raft, rowboat, speedboat, yacht, cargo ferry, passenger ferry, canoe, kayak, macoro, safari jeep, pick up truck, horse, and elephant. As a passenger in these various modes of transport I killed at the minimum, several chickens, dogs, and one cow. I visited forests and mountains and altiplano and jungles and tropical paradise and every inch was beautiful. I had insane amounts of fun, had miserable moments of hellish frustration, had my entire pack stolen, managed to never have my camera stolen, got Giardia, got better, met incredible people, met crazy people, ate amazing food, ate weird food, ran out of air deep in the oceans of Mozambique, encountered a snake in Botswana, got chased by rabid dogs, zip-lined over the canopy in Lao, witnessed the wildebeest migration in Tanzania, sweated buckets in Cambodia, froze to death in the salt flats of Bolivia, swam anywhere and everywhere... This list could go on forever. I have some sun-credited blond streaks in my hair, a million mosquito bite scars, and one perfect circle singed into my calf for life from a certain Cambodian tailpipe, but otherwise no physical proof that any of it ever occurred. One day soon I'll get a select handful of decent pictures organized and that will be the summary. The rest will just replay itself in tiny snippets in my head for eternity.

Thanks for willing me home alive. Here's to TRAVEL! Love, Dara.

THE END.