We are excited to announce that we are planning a new adventure, beginning in January 2012! This journey is called Trekking the Planet. It is a 400-day, around-the-world trip to raise geography education awareness.
Uruguay was the last country that we visited during our South American trip. Here we spent time in the historic city of Colonia del Sacramento and in the capital, Montevideo.
Yesterday, I received the latest (April 2009) edition of National Geographic Traveler. On page 76 a story caught my eye entitled Ecuador: Avenue of the Volcanoes. Two of the haciendas mentioned, San Agustin de Callo and Cusin, are the same ones we stayed in during our trip in November 2008.
We are now flying over the Atlantic in the midst of a 30+ hour odyssey home, which is comprised of four flights: first to Nairobi, then Brussels and Chicago, before the final leg to LAX.
Two days were spent in the Lake Titicaca region, including a home stay with indigenous Aymaran families on one of the islands. Getting to the lake was half the fun, via a 10 hour train trip over a 14,200 foot pass and through the beautiful stark altiplano landscape.
We have now been home for a little over four weeks. Lauren and Kristen have gone through all the questions that were sent and answered them.
Our last stop before returning to Tokyo was in Nagano, the site of the 1998 Olympic Games. In addition to visiting this city and large temple, we took a day trip to Matsumoto to visit one of the few surviving castles in Japan.
As most people know, Japan is a very homogeneous culture. An interesting contrast from the people who live here is the cars they drive.
Well, tomorrow we return to the U.S. So I thought I would take a few paragraphs to summarize my thoughts in a fun way. The 10 most surprising things I found in Japan were…
We left Beijing’s West Train Station at 12:45pm on Wednesday to begin our ten hour journey to Luoyang. We were able to get hard seats (for about $12 each) on a ‘K’ train, which is an express that makes very few stops.
