What the heck am i doing?

In January and February of last year i was in Peru and Ecuador.  Then two trips to China in the time since.

Now I’ll be in South Africa on Saturday.  I have a 12 hour layover there.  Pepper and Jordan will be meeting me there and then we’ll fly to Harare, Zimbabwe together.

I like my friend Orin’s stance on travel – no regrets about spending money to travel.  He’s right.  And I’ve got a honeymoon trip to Central America that we’re planning.

Anyway – this trip.  We’re meeting Brooke (a friend of pepper’s from the school in China) who has been working outside of Harare for a year.  In the last 10 years, Zimbabwe has transformed from the “breadbasket of Africa” to a country of corruption, runaway inflation, and food and fuel shortages.

Sounds like an adventure!  We’ll be visiting Victoria falls, going to a park where we can ride elephants and walk with lions, and seeing a bit of Botswana and Zambia along the way.

It is just a quick trip – but i’m sure it will be great.  It is a new continent for me, a few countries (I should be setting foot in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and Senegal)  and we have a new camera for the family to document our adventure – a Nikon D90.  Expect some far superior photos!

• Mesa Verde
• Yellowstone
• Grand Canyon
• Redwoods
• Pueblo de Taos
• City of Cuzco, Peru
• Machu Picchu, Peru
• Lima, Peru city center
• City of Quito, Ecuador
• Chichen-Itza, Mexico
• Banff & Jasper in Canada
• Great Wall, China
• Imperial Palace, China
• Temple of Heaven, China
• Longmen Grottoes, China
• Angkor, Cambodia

About 5 hours later we arrived in Luo Yang… home to the Longmen Caves UNESCO World Heritage site and the Shaolin Monastery – the home of Shaolin Kung Fu and Zen Buddhism.

“…brewed with selected natural materials. This kind of beer is very popular in USA.”

Employees plied the train cars selling soups, beverages, and even jewelry. People slept. Jordan read. Pepper and i talked about the wedding. I had a beer.

The tangle of trains that head to more rural areas of China… Rural is a very loose term here.

You know which train is leaving from which platform now? Yeah… this is what makes travel difficult in areas lesser frequented by foreigners.

In the afternoon of our second day in Xi’an we went to the train station and negotiated the masses. I have had bad luck at foreign train stations so i was on high alert… Here’s a glance to one side of the first floor of the station. We already had our tickets so we could avoid this mess. I took a panoramic set from here and will stitch it together later.

A pair of rickshaw drivers kept each other company in the fog atop the Xi’an city wall.