The End

From the banana and sweet potato hills of Uganda to the banana and sweet potato hills of Papua New Guinea, my round the world adventure has come full circle. Now, at the end of it all, I am struck with an overwhelming warmness and appreciation for all the folks who gave me a place to stay and lent me a helping hand along the way. Amazingly, I have traveled for the better part of a year and rarely had to find my own accommodation. So whether I stayed with you for one night or one month, thank you so so much for your generosity. It has meant much more to me than affordability. You wonderful people have given me the reassuring comfort of kindness that sustained me all the while. And now, I am slightly obliged to extend the same courtesy to you. If you ever need a bed or a tour guide in California, or wherever I end up for that matter, I'm your man.

How about a short logistics recap on the trip. It all started in August of 2008 with Engineers Without Borders in the village of Nkokonjeru, Uganda. We partially successfully made mud stoves for more efficient and cleaner cooking, amongst other things. I rafted the first few kilometers of the Nile getting washed about in several class 5 rapids. November was spent exploring the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania where I lazed about with white sand at my feed and coco palms over my head. This was a mellow time for me where I observed others fasting for Ramadan and managed to read all 1,136 tiny print pages of Atlas Shrugged as well as doing a scuba course. October I crossed Tanzania below Lake Victoria to reenter Uganda where I spent a week on the exotic lake Bunyoni with its terraced hills and unstable canoes. The rest of the month was spent between Nkokonjeru and the capital, Kampala, where I attempted to contribute to a university hybrid vehicle project without much success. Never the less I enjoyed some dusty bars and plenty of televised English football matches. Go Arsenal! I heard they play Man U. in the Champions League semifinal. What a match that will be. Relief in the form of fermented grains came my way in November when I relocated to Belgium and joined the boys at Group T in Leuven on their electric vehicle project. It was winter in Europe and beautiful and I had a blast. I also joined my friend Jason from California in Holland for some fun and exploring. We did Amsterdam, Den Hauge, Delft and later we became the tourist and made that ridiculous music video in Copenhagen and Sweden. Some where in the mix I made my pilgrimage to Gelderland and acquired the secret recipe to spinning bitches (translation from Dutch for a French toast like food). I spent Christmas eve in a Moscow airport on my way to India for a wedding engagement party and to be reunited with my good friend from Australia, Kartini. India was India showing me amazing ancient cave temples, providing delicious foods, and generally being a trip and a half. I got Chicken Pox for some silly reason in Mumbai then beached it up in Goa where I happened to learn to para glide and picked up fire dancing. Then Some time in February I made it to Nepal for a brief visit, crashing Mike and Corinne's pad and discovered an ancient (10 years old) battery powered public transportation system to compliment the cacophony of temples. To kick off the Buddhist new year 2136 I hiked to over 12000 feet into the yak and Tibetan Himalayas. Before leaving I treated myself to some sick threads fulfilling my wildest paisley fantasies. I only gave Sydney 10 days but they were very important ones containing my 27th birthday and heaps of nostalgia from six years prior. Finally, mid March, I zoomed off to Papua New Guinea where I kicked it with Sally, the coolest person ever. We built an industrial fruit dehydrator, hung out in some villages, did some snorkeling, and read a pile of books which frankly could have been better. Echart Tolle, whew.

Thats it. Now I'm home in California. And California is home. It is my friend, it is my mother, it is my community. Leaving home and looking back I realized that everything I am looking for is here. So many times I had the privilege of answering the question of where I am from with a proud and resounding, “I'm from California.” Oohs and aahs inevitably followed but not always for the right reasons. Most foreigners just think about a sunny, beachy Los Angeles and want to hear stories of movie stars. But that's not what makes California a great place. The photo above is a picture I drew in my notebook to describe where I am from when people asked and didn't know. Here we have it all, geographically, culturally, economically. Find the life you want in California. California isn't just great it is also where my roots are at, something I have learned to value recently. I know the language here, have a phatty social network and a mastery of fun things like transportation and shopping. So yeah, California, or Oregon possibly, is where I want to be for the foreseeable future.

With that said, I now have a new network of friends and acquaintances around the world which only invites more business and pleasure abroad. Being away I have fallen in love with California all over again but I am far from being bored with travel. On the contrary. The things I have experienced and seen in the past several months have only whetted my appetite to see more because, of course, there is so much out there and all of it is interesting. In due time I will be traveling again.

Finally, I must share the one thing stands out as the most important experience of this adventure. In a word, grief, the grief of loosing the affection of a girl I love, a girl who I left in August expecting to forget about but never did and who, bless her heart, managed to let go of me and find beauty elsewhere. It is a bit embarrassing to admit to this emotional lameness but avoiding the subject all together would be like describing the contents of a room without mentioning the massive elephant taking a dump on the carpet. Being me, I would have to mention the elephant. This experience of grieving lost love isn't one I am able rationalize very well. A bit of grief seems reasonable to me but consuming grief that overshadows every day of the last however many months strikes me as a bit wacky. The important part isn't why or how but simply that it happened - real emotions, real pain, really surprising. I had fully anticipated this round the world trip to be an extroverted experience, one where my time would be spent soaking it in and causing a ruckus. Instead, it has turned out very introverted. I still soaked and ruckussed but I also found myself on a heavy introspective quest to resolve my pain that has yet to bear fruit. Don't worry, I am still a very happy person by any measure, but just one who has been taking a serious emotional ass whipping for a while now. So what can I take from this? Well, pain is an awesome teacher. I doubt I'll be running away from a happy loving relationship anytime soon. Perhaps this has just been a serious case of the lonelies and reintegration into a social community, perhaps meeting a new girl, will solve everything. Then again, maybe I have some nasty deep seated issues with attachment to be dealt with internally, or something heavy like that. Its hard to say. At any rate, I don't think I am a very good loner. What I have learned, in a substantial way, is that life is not necessarily a straight line. This lesson has been a long time coming for me and I have a feeling it is something everyone gets to learn sooner or later. Now is my time.

Back when I was a teenager the motivation for this round the world adventure was born. It came from a fear of quiet complacency, of taking the path laid in front of me and ending up being quite unremarkable in my own terms. So I vowed to myself that I would strike out into the great wide world with absolute freedom for an entire year and give myself every opportunity to imagine what my life could be like, no strings attached. In doing so I hoped to squash my fears of not living my life to its fullest and gain the confidence to choose whatever path is most me. To this end I have succeeded. Ironically, it has been through humility, not the cockiness I showed up with, that I realized how I can be whatever the heck it is I want to be. The trick is just to pay good attention to that inner me and not get distracted by some fantasy identity I cook up. Easier said than done but I think I've got a good start.

So what is next? Well, I have a whirl wind May and June reconnecting with old friends, going to my brother's wedding (Yay for Tom and Kendra. May you live happily ever after.), and continuing my early retirement with a fun filled retreat to Kauai. Hey, why not? Afterward I will finally, regretfully, have to come out of retirement and find a job. I have my sights set on Bay Area or Portland, engineering for a greener tomorrow, or whatever pays the bills. I know, I know, the economy sucks. Lets see what I can come up with.

Boom Shakalaka Gaia and thanks for reading,
EVG

Potholes New Guinea

Suddenly, the whole ritual of the Easter Bunny, chocolate, and a painted egg hunt didn't make much sense with respect to the resurrection of Christ when I tried to explain it to Sally's uncle, Sally, on the porch of his jungle village bush house. Us Westerners sure can be weird. Sally, the uncle, definitely knows about Jesus, most likely better than I do, and eggs and bunny rabbits to boot but I found myself fairly completely unable to make any sort of connection. Can someone please help me out here? Anyhow, it was a happy Easter. We visited a beautiful jungle village where Sally, my friend, has relatives. I spent a couple days there earlier in the week and got a taste of the simple life. Lunch is usually a pile of plantains, still in their skins, barbecued wherever one might happen to be. Anyone got a match? A dip in the lazy river afterward seemed to be a requirement. If I was thirsty there were plenty of coconuts at hand to drink from and everyone carried a handy coconut opener aka bush knife aka two and a half foot saber for just the occasion. Thankfully I am fond of coconut juice. The family I stayed with had an amazing garden with rice, sweet potato, bananas, plantains, yams, kasava, taro, coconuts, and lots of cocoa. Everything was for their own sustenance but the cocoa which they sold in town for good money. I got to help harvest some rice which was surprisingly fun. I guess the novelty of seeing rice coming from the ground and not a bag was enough to get this city boy excited. Afterwards I had the privilege of getting high on buai (beetle nut). I had tried it a few times before with no effect but for whatever reason I this one time I was feeling wicked. Check that one off the list. Locals chew buai more than they drink water. Its pretty fun because you get to chew a big fresh seed thing then dip some stem bit in crushed coral powder and add it to the mix which turns bright red. Just chew and spit, don't swallow. If you have good ingredients and get the mix just right the high should be something like tobacco. There are some fantastically frightening grins waking around all red lipped with black stained teeth from all the buai chewing.

I also fulfilled my snorkeling fantasy. I had been psyching myself up for this moment since I was a kid pretending to be a seal by swimming about at the bottom of our pool in Fresno. I can remember how it felt so lovely to zip around weightless under water. I have been snorkeling many times before and found that not much is more interesting to look at than tropical marine life. My father was an exceptional swimmer and when he went snorkeling he would ditch the snorkel and dive deeper than I could comprehend to look for shells. I wanted to do the same, to dive deep deep deep and be one of the fish, to look around as if I lived there too, like a scuba diver without the bulky gear and noisy breathing. I had a good go at it in Zanzibar but the coral I found wasn't quite the spectacular scene I was looking for. Anyhow, I found what I was looking for. We took a small taxi dingy out to a small island preserve to have a swim, a picnic, and spend the day. I had heard the coral in PNG is some of the best in the world and since most of it is scheduled to die soon (something about climate change) I was eager to get a look. It was the spectacular scene I dreamed about with sprawling plates and people sized barrels of coral. Squigglies were everywhere with the most delicious bright colors on the funniest of shapes all swaying and swimming about in the weightless underwater world that is the ocean. I got to take my time and deep breaths, one after the other. It is a fun game to play, skin diving. Just as you are running out of breath you spot something you just have to come back with more oxygen to have a look at.

While its sea gardens and village life is quite fantastic, Papua New Guinea also has an ugly side, the towns. There are only three or four places worth calling a town in the whole of the country and they have all turned into centers of crime and pestilence. Its not that Fresno or even SF doesn't have similar criminals, we all lock our doors and plenty of neighborhoods have barred windows, but here in PNG they define the towns. People from the bush, mostly men, migrate to the towns looking for work and when there is none they turn to crime - robbing houses, holding up cars and buses, dirty deeds for hire. A fantastic tension develops between the the jobless locals and the wealthy expats cruising about in new trucks running construction and mining companies and the like. A major industry in Papua New Guinea is security. Fences and armed guards are found everywhere. My friends fairly rural dwelling, just outside of the mountain town of Goroka, recently acquired full time security guards after some sketchy incidents. A house Sally and I were house sitting was broken into while we were enjoying the beaches in another town. The security guard was tied up. Two of the thieves were caught and are in jail awaiting trial. Apparently the robbery was a drunken operation and not a very tight one at that.

In the midst of it all I managed to get some engineering done. Sally has a fledgling dried fruit export business, bananas and pineapples, and I got to help her design a drying chamber for the new coffee husk burning hot air blower she got from Brazil. We spent a week and a half building the furnace with a prototype drying chamber getting sidetracked every which way with electrical issues. Can you believe that after a masters degree in mechanical engineering I didn't know the difference between three phase and single phase electric motors? But now I do. I'll never be fooled again. So that was fun being useful and learning a bit.

Now it is time to come home. The flights are booked, an insane four day blitz of seven flights to get from point A to point B, Port Moresby, Cairns, Guam, Tokyo, Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco. Credit card sky miles aren't all they are worked up to be. I have got a day in Guam and a day in Honolulu to kill so maybe I can get some more snorkeling in.

Next blog will be written from Fresno, the exciting finale. It will be time to make up all sorts of far fetched conclusions about my adventure so I can derive some meaning from it. So stay tuned!

Its been great PNG. I'll be back some day, hopefully before all the coral is gone.