Back in the u.s.s.a

Our return to the United States, entering through Phoenix on Thursday the 12th of January, was highlighted by President Bush’s remarks to the nation regarding Iraq, which we caught on an airport TV just before our flight to Portland. It was apropos, and thought-provoking in the extreme, as many of our intercultural interactions have centered on the role of the United States in the world. As a nation, we appear to have more of the same to look forward to, with a desired outcome that seems as mysterious to me now as it did when the U.S. entered Iraq. A “free” Iraq as a goal of the U.S.? I fail to decipher the meaning of that. The great sadness, I believe, is that our nation has no other option than to stay in Iraq, while those that initiated the war move on to corporate boards and wealthy retirements, perhaps hoping to continue profiting from the outcome.

This subject is the talk of the “town” – if you consider the “town” the entire world, and our greatest learning is that we, as individuals, are as powerless to change our painful circumstances as any of the citizens of the countries we’ve visited. Is that our own vaunted “freedom”? It is difficult to render criticism to my own country, especially given the blessed circumstances that I now find myself in, many of which are a direct result of my nation’s wealth and security. But we believe that we are being hurt by our own government, our security and wealth threatened. We believe we can be better.

But before we go there, lets digress from the weighty subjects of foreign policy, and look at the fun stuff.

We’ve used our time in Portland to relax and enjoy Sandra and Sean, marvel at Sandra’s growing belly, re-organize our travel kits, and purchase some new clothes and goods. I also found the opportunity to finally upload all of our photos from every leg of our trip to our photo gallery. Additionally, our website now links directly to our video archives on youtube.com. When you follow the “Video Archive” link on our website it shows you ALL of our posted videos to date. There is a new video posted using some of the clips from our bike trip. We lost all of our videos from the north part of the trip to an Ipod meltdown, but had plenty from south of Monterey to put together a nearly 7 minute short. Find it here.

Phase 3 of Hitched and Away drew to a close last week when we arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, made our way through customs and immigration, and re-entered the United States. Now we have only to marvel at the procession of sights, sounds, thoughts and smells that have inhabited us since we left San Diego on October 25th. In preparing ourselves to board a plane in Mexico City we found a mixture of excitement for what we are moving on to (The 4th part – SE Asia!), and a dose of relief to be leaving the over-insistent taxi drivers, clouds of diesel exhaust, and the ubiquitous tragedy of central american poverty. But overall we feel a sense of a trip half-done, with much more to see and learn of the region, riddled with gratitude for what we’ve been offered.

We are, essentially, engaged in the briefest survey of just a few of the globe’s regions. We could easily have passed our year in any one of the places that we visited in Mexico or Central America. We likely would have found in that travel strategy rewards that we can only imagine, measured in friends made, perspectives contemplated, language learned and experiences treasured. This constant effort to determine the best way to pass a year of travel is, I believe, the single greatest difficulty of the trip. Our friend Rosie wrote us encouraging us to include some of the “bad” in our blog. A traveler herself, she mentioned that if we did so it would help her to battle her own constant desire to hit the road again. We’ve tried to include some of the challenges: Who could enjoy gut-tweaking, out-of-both-ends gastrointestinal distress, or a taxi robbery in Managua? Overall, though, these “bads” of this journey rarely are worth dwelling upon. We are accompanied at every step by the realization that we are fortunate beyond any reasonable expectation to be able to even conceive of a journey like this. That being said, though, I find the biggest source of apprehension to be the constant struggle to believe that we are selecting the right way to travel. We are blessed and cursed with the ability to go and do nearly anywhere. Are we using our time rightly?

This applies perhaps most obviously to language acquisition. We find that language is the first key to unlocking culture and we both have set, as a primary goal for this year, to learn language, especially Spanish. Our learning curve has been steep and, while Christine still struggles with her numbers and I with comprehension, we can now call ourselves Spanish speakers, if only novices. More time would bring us greater degrees of fluency, but we are leaving, at least for a time, that pursuit of spanish, traded for a hoped for interaction with other cultures, other landscapes, and other histories. It is, in the end, a surprisingly difficult choice to make. A year seems such a long time to see and learn, but we find above all, that the world is immensely vast.

It is better to leave, though, with a feeling that there is more to be done, than one of good riddance. We are happy to find that we are the type of people that would find it hard to leave no matter the length of time we passed. We must take and cherish what we’ve already acquired, and hope for more time later in our lives to expose ourselves to this region. What we’ve done is travel overland some estimated 4000 miles, visiting west coast beaches, cloud forests, coral reefs, and colonial cities older than any in the U.S. We’ve engaged in discussions to compare and contrast politics and culture in various countries. We experienced parts of two contentious elections, learning from each details of public will and democratic involvement that we believe would never have been reported to the U.S. We were reminded, once again, how the U.S. is viewed both as a welcome ally AND as a force of economic and military imperialism to be distrusted, with a history of untoward intrusions in the domestic affairs of other countries.

I have often been accompanied on this trip by the question, “Why do we do this? Why do we spend the money, and give up our comforts and the “knowns” of our life to expose ourselves to this?” We travel for two reasons. First, we do it simply because we have the capacity. We are fortunate to enjoy the strong currency and money-making potential that allows us, while unable to afford good health care in our own nation, to take a full year off to travel around the globe. Two, I believe that we travel because we find that we can’t trust those that feed us information to always feed us the correct information. Thus, if we want to learn lessons, about cultures, countries and perspectives, that we might use to improve ourselves and our own society, we must GO and try to learn it firsthand.

We also travel so that we may carry with us lessons offered by other people. We discover that our nation is not always at the forefront of the world, as hard that may be to believe. We find that we wish to apply elements of other country’s advances in health care, public aesthetics, public knowledge of global politics, maintaining strong family connections, building effective and inexpensive transportation systems, promoting democracy through strong voter turn out, and the power of a stroll in a park. All of these are recommendations to us to improve our own society. We live in a time when our society, despite projecting power around the globe, makes stunning little effort to learn from the world. We hope that our experiences, however small, might somehow become further fuel to the flame of cultural improvement in our own society.

With that, we come to the end. We arrive in Bangkok Thailand on the 20th of January, at a perky 1 am in the morning. From there, we have little planned. As always, though, you can expect our constant recounts.

Our best to all...Ian and Christine