Last Post: Final Trip Thoughts

Posted on October 15, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Our flight to Cincinnati landed 10 minutes early – this kind of sums up our trip! We couldn’t have asked for more as we saw virtually every item we set out to see three months ago!

Thanks to the 125+ of you who signed up to follow our blog (who viewed our content over 8000 times!) We know that many more read via Facebook links and stopping by the site itself. We hope that something we posted along the way was enjoyable and interesting. If not maybe we provided you a nice distraction from time to time!!

We are headed back to work tomorrow (yes, tomorrow!) so it is time to rejoin the real world!

This will be the last blog post. We plan to keep the blog up for the foreseeable future in case there is something interesting you might want to reference. This blog is also our personal journal of what we saw and did for the day we don’t remember anymore! 😉

People always ask what your favorites of the trip were and what it was like to be outside the US for almost three months. Here are our thoughts:

Trip Stats:
-Days Traveled: 89 (including international date line days for you travel geeks out there :))
-Flights delayed: 30 minutes over 22 flights!
-Countries Visited: 20
-Miles Flown: 37,500
-Miles Driven: 8,316
-Unique Hotels Visited: 54 (Maybe I shouldn’t have counted that one!)
-Trip Cost vs Budget: Over by $2 (stupid expensive Cincinnati taxis! Thanks to Emily the forecaster ;))

What it is like to continuously travel?
-The first two weeks you feel like you are on vacation.
-Then, you start to realize that this is your life for 3 months…you must take time to monitor the normal aspects of life like your bills as well as do dreaded laundry!
-Slowly, you have no idea what day of the week it is, but you do know the date (otherwise you might miss a flight!). You start to say things like “I know that today is Sept. 1, but I have no clue what day of the week it is. A few days ago was Tuesday, right? So, today must be in the Thursday-Monday range.” We had breakfast with one of Ryan’s coworkers in Geneva and did this. We felt like retirees!
-Now this feels like our day to day life. That means going back to work will likely be an adjustment!!

Best practices:
-Plan, plan, plan! We are crazy planners and had a 126 page itinerary. Ok, that is probably not for you, but the more you can plan ahead of time the less decisions you have to make on the fly. Changes early in a trip of this length can snowball into later scheduling disasters. Minimizing surprises is key when possible.

Full Disclosure: Given our crazy nature we did plan in free time 🙂

In the end we had virtually no issues over 90 days which was our goal!

-Do your own research: Only you know what you like so don’t always trust the top 10 lists sight unseen. Some of the top 10 lists have some uninteresting sites (to us at least!)

-Make restaurant reservations: People think we’re crazy, but we almost always got to eat at places known to be really good. Getting recos from other people and hotels can be dicey. Also, we noticed that in many places people don’t make as many reservations so being an international diner with reservations often resulted in the best table in the house.

-Register all your stops with the US State Department: There is a program called STEP. Hopefully you don’t need any help, but we appreciated the emails we got for any activity in the country. We also wanted to make sure the government knows where we were in case something happened to us or something went awry in the country!

Our Favorite Stops:
-Bora Bora (Natural beauty and relaxation)
-Japan (Historical sites, Amazing customer service)
-France (Paris: Food and museums, Brittany: Natural beauty and food, South France/Monaco: Luxury and natural beauty)
-Swiss Alps (Natural Beauty)
-Australia (Perth and Sydney)
-New Zealand (Natural beauty)
-Bolivia (Better understand how developing nations live and how we can help)

That’s all for now! Thanks for being part of our journey!

Ryan & Emily

Last Stop! Stop 50: Lima, Peru

Posted on October 14, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Hola from Lima, Peru!

Wow, this is our final stop on our three month globe trot! We only had one day to spend in Lima (we actually need to go back to work!) so we made the most of it. We found a great small tour company that offers an all day private tour of the major sites in the city. Here is a recap of the great sites we got to see:

Barranco Bohemian District: This is a neat area near the Pacific Ocean. We got to see the famous Bridge of Sighs, the Mirador, and the main city park.

Miraflores: This is one of the major sites of the city. We got to see several beautiful parks with lots of flowers as well as walk past several neat European Houses. The Love Park looks very similar to the Baudi architecture we saw in Barcelona, Spain!

Plaza San Martin, the Main Plaza, & San Francisco Church: These plazas are the two most important in the city. The Main Plaza of Lima is surrounded by several major building including the Government Palace, City Hall, and the city’s Cathedral. The day we were there was crazy with every group possible sharing views on religion, being a Vegan, or home cooking.

Parque de la Reserva: We capped off the tour with a visit to Parque de la Reserva, the biggest fountain park in the world. We timed out the tour to finish at dusk when a pretty light show occurs on the fountains. It was neat!

A Taste of Lima: Lima is known as one of the dining capitals of South America. Unfortunately our only night here was a Sunday, which is when many restaurants are closed. We did manage to find a great restaurant that was open, Huaca Pucllana, a restaurant overlooking Inca ruins!!

Our tour also took us to local markets to try things like Inca Kola (tastes like bubblegum soda and to see local vegetables)

Mmmm…guinea pig!:)

Pacific War: it has been fascinating to hear about the Pacific War from the perspective of the Bolivians, Peruvians, and Chileans. Each side has its own story which is quite interesting. In the end Bolivia lost its land on the Ocean. Bolivia hasn’t given up as the still celebrate an ocean day even though it has no ocean! Additionally, Bolivia has a navy….just for Lake Titicaca!

The End
Wow, our world journey is complete! We have had a blast and have so many memories that we will remember for a lifetime. Thanks so much for coming along with us on our trip! We loved hearing from several of you and hope that you enjoyed the journey too! We now need to head back to the real world. 🙂

If you ever need any travel recos or are crazy enough to travel around the world, let us know. We’d love to help!

Adios for now, and we hope to see several of you again soon! (Tuesday morning for those of you at work :)) A final recap post will be posted Tuesday morning for those interested!

Ryan & Emily

Stops 48-49 La Paz/Lake Titicaca & Altiplano

Posted on October 13, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Hola from Bolivia!

Wow, it’s been a great week!

Our mission trip officially started on Sunday, but we had to arrive in Bolivia on Friday evening. Unfortunately, OneWorld only has flights from Santiago to La Paz every other day so we had to come in a bit earlier than needed. While we were sad to miss seeing Santiago, the extra time in La Paz ended up working out well!

We read that about 60%-70% of people experience altitude sickness when arriving in La Paz. Emily was fortunate to be in the 30% of people who don’t have any issues, but I ended up with several symptoms – headaches, shortness of breath, and tiredness. Our first full day in La Paz involved walking to the grocery store (where we found lots of Western food including Nutella and OralB Toothpaste :)), watching college football, and catching up on reading. In fact, we got to see the OSU vs. Northwestern football game thanks to our SlingBox! I was thankful for this low-key day as it allowed for further acclimation to 13,000 ft+.

We also had a chance to venture out for dinner our first night in the city. The hotel arranged a taxi and had the taxi wait 1 hour for us to finish before driving us home. This cost a total of $5 – quite a difference from Bora Bora!

Sunday was the official start of the trip as our four other team members arrived from the US. We spent the day getting to know the local team leader as well as the rest of the team over lunch, dinner, and shopping in the old town market.

To the Field
On Monday we left bright and early for the altiplano region, our home base for the next 5 days. After dropping off our bags, we headed out to homes of two families to start digging!

Landscape of Altiplano

Home base where we stayed

Another spot where we washed clothes 🙂

Water Wells!
The focus of our construction work was digging water wells for 4 families. Prior to Samaritan’s Purse putting in these wells, the families had no clean water source and were drinking from streams that were often contaminated. The water is particularly toxic to infants who don’t have built up immunity so Samaritan’s Purse selected families with small children to serve.

So… how do you dig a well?
On the first day we were both surprised to see that the water well was entirely dug by hand! The wells were often around 30-40 feet deep, and the wells were literally dug out with shovels, picks, and buckets.

The neat part is that the family has to commit to helping dig the well, which helps ensure they are vested in the project and exposed to the work of Samaritan’s Purse.

Our team of volunteers were spread out over 4 different wells and worked right alongside the families with the digging. Some of our team actually went into the wells to dig, which was quite a task since you only had a rope to get in/out of the well! Emily and I spent much of our time working bucket duty. We lowered bucket after bucket (mas baldes! in Spanish) down to the person digging and then hauled up the mud by hand. Many of the buckets were around 50 pounds so we definitely got a workout!

Much of the actual digging was also done by the families and friends of the family. We were amazed at how long several of the people could dig! One man spent 4 hours digging! Those of us from the US were all panting from the higher elevation!

Emily and I also had a great time interacting with several of the children. Samaritan’s Purse focuses on relationships with the families in addition to digging the wells. I spent two days at the same well and spent a lot of time playing soccer with two children, and Emily spent a lot of time playing volleyball with one of the girls at another site.

After the Digging + Concrete Rings
Once the well was 6 feet below the water table, the digging was finished! At this point our work changed to putting in concrete rings. Emily actually had the opportunity to help build the concerte rings on a 5th well site on one of the days. Samaritan’s Purse provides the families use of concrete molds, steel rebar, and concrete mix to help make the rings. Building the concrete rings is actually a very early phase of the well (before digging) so that the concrete has time to cure. If you ever need to help making concrete rings, Emily is now experienced!

These concrete rings lined the well so that clean water could seep into the reseviour and allow for continual fresh water. Samaritan’s Purse had a pulley system on a metal stand so we all worked together to lower in the rings. This was an exciting time as this meant the well was almost done! After each ring was lowered, someone went into the well to straighten the ring, cement the seams, and place rocks outside of the concrete to act as a filter for the water.

Seeing the joy on the families’ faces when the last ring went in was absolutely incredible! Although many of the families were very poor (earning < $2 per day), many had food because they were farmers. The major outage for these families was clean water. They were so incredibly grateful!

Family after last well ring was placed!

Other Activities
In addition to digging water wells, there were several other events. Here is a quick recap:

– Youth Activities: One night our group helped with a local youth activity, and several members of our group gave gifts to the children. On Friday we had the chance to meet with local students and play games. One member of our team brought balloons which were a huge hit!

– Llamas: On Friday, our group helped for a short time with Samaritan’s Purse’s Agricultural Program. This program helps to provide livestock, parasite treatments, and veterinarian education to local farmers. Our job was to help with vaccinations. I am not a big fan of animals so Emily and I were assigned the job of marking the heads of the llamas that had received the vaccination treatments. 🙂

– Music!: Wednesday night the local staff of Samaritan’s Purse shared their music with us. It was a wonderful evening! They even let us join in – I got to try my hand at the drums, and Emily played a tambourine that was made of sheep toenails!! (Mrs. K – Have you played sheep toenails before??)

– Salt Mine: The altiplano region has lots of salt so one day on the well we stopped by to visit a local salt mine. It was interesting! You’ll notice in these pictures that the clouds seem really close to the ground. This happens when you’re at 13,000 feet!

– Lake Titicaca & City Overlook: After returning from the field, we spent our last day in Bolivia doing a fun excursion to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. The lake is also known for the reeds that grow on its shores (which we happened to also see on Easter Island – the only other place our guide said you could see them!). We got to see reed boats being made and took a boat ride out on the lake in one (although… the captain used a motor vs. rowing! ;))

Favorite Memories:
– Seeing the faces of the families who received a well for the first time
– Getting to see the staff at Samaritan’s Purse in action. We were absolutely blown away by the humility, kindness, love of people, and passion for Samaritan Purse’s mission that each of these people showed.

We’re almost back to reality! We will spend one day in Lima, Peru, on our way home. We’ll be back to work by Tuesday!

Adios for now!

Why Take A Trip Around The World?!?

Posted on October 11, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Many people have asked or wondered – why are you taking time off without pay to take this crazy trip? We could have taken a 2 week vacation and might have been further ahead in many ways. Well…here was/is our thinking:

1. Saves Money!

Traveling on a Round The World (RTW) ticket is actually much cheaper than visiting your top 5 places in 5 consecutive years. Here is an example:

-We have always wanted to go to Australia and New Zealand.
-A round trip ticket to Sydney is generally around $1,200.
-If you want to see a lot of Australia and New Zealand, you have to buy additional in country flights. These can often be a few hundred dollars per city/stop.
By the time you do that you at talking about $2,000 – $2,500 or more per person!
At this point you are approaching 40-50% of a RTW ticket in just one trip!

2. Cultural Comparisons

We had not thought about this prior to the trip, but it has been one of the highlights! On a daily basis you get to experience new cultures and compare/contrast. When you visit just one spot, you experience that culture versus your own only (or what you remember from other trips years/months ago). While this is great, we could compare many cultures in a short time span!

It is awesome to have a small understanding of many cultures and countries when you hear media reports on a country. Maybe the report is 100% correct or maybe not…but once you have some insights, you can now draw conclusions.

3. Visit A Spot That Makes No Economic Sense

You can visit a lot of places that sound interesting but don’t seem worth a full vacation. We wouldn’t have wanted to pay a fortune to visit Easter Island, but when you can essentially stop for no added cost why wouldn’t you stop?!?

4. Jet Lag!

When you travel around the world, you generally don’t switch more than 4-5 hours at a time. Unlike most Americans we felt great on our first day in Australia vs acting like zombies!

You also save a lot of in transit days vs. taking several individual vacations. For example, visiting Hong Kong cost us a 2 hour flight. Flying from home would likely burn up to 2 vacation days to fly there and back.

5. Better Understanding of Those Visiting America

After living outside of the US for almost three months, we now have a better understanding of what it is like to be far away from home. Those that were unexpectedly kind to us will never be forgotten. We will go out of our way to help those who look lost while traveling even more than before!

6. Personal Reflection/Time to Relax

We all know that it takes about two weeks of work (in one week) to prepare for a one week vacation. Once you make it over that hump, it is nice to have longer than a week to decompress. We have been on 24/7 since we started grad school in 2010. It was nice to be most worried about our next blog post or whether the next chef truly deserved two Michelin stars…you know…the huge worries of life!

We also took the opportunity to read multiple books recommended to us over the last three years!

7. Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)

You only live once. How many times have you heard people say “I always wanted to go to X, but now I am too old, I am too scared to go, etc.”?

Taking such trips is expensive (we don’t argue that), but if you have the financial means and potential flexibility (as we fortunately did!) – why not? If there is something you really want to do (it doesn’t need to be traveling), put the goal on paper and ask anyone you know that can help make it happen! We are forever grateful to our management for giving us the opportunity to pursue this awesome experience!!

Plus….we don’t think our money comes along with us once we die!

If anyone has questions on our crazy journey or would like tips/help, let us know! Just leave a comment on this post, and we will respond via email privately.

Stop 47: Santiago

Posted on October 9, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Hola!

This post will be about as short as our time in Santiago! Our flight from Easter Island arrived about 9 PM, and we flew out the next morning. With just one night in Santiago (unfortunately) we made the most of it! We had hoped to stay in Santiago at least 1-2 days but irregular flights to Bolivia (our next stop) limited us to just one night.

Off the Plane and Running!
With only carry on luggage, we can get out of airports quickly. We were staying at a hotel at the airport so we were checked in about 15 min after landing and back on our way. We grabbed a cab and headed for one of Santiago’s top restaurants – Astrid & Gaston.

The Restaurant
The original location of this restaurant is in Lima and has been ranked in the world’s top 50 restaurants. It will be closed the day we will be in Lima so we tried it in its Santiago branch! We first heard about this restaurant last year when working on an MBA project on Brazil restaurants so we were excited to try it!

Our dinner was great! Since people eat very late in Chile, we were right in the heart of the dinner time at 9:30 PM. Here are a few snapshots of our great dinner:

Ceviche… Raw fish cooked in lime juice (Emily wasn’t up for trying this :))

And the finale… Carrot cake with passionfruit covered bananas!

We were greeted in the morning with beautiful views of the Andes Mountains from the airport. While it was a super short stay, we enjoyed our one Santiago outing!

Stop 46: Easter Island

Posted on October 7, 2013 by EmilyGlobeTrotter

lorana from Easter Island!

Where on earth is Easter Island? It is the world’s most remote inhabited island! It is located about 2,500 miles from both Tahiti and Chile in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

We took this photo from our iPad:

The Flight
There is only one flight a week from Tahiti to Easter Island so this flight was tricky to book! Thankfully we got a ticket… and the flight was on time! We’re not sure what the airline does with you if this flight gets cancelled… maybe you wait until the next week? We’re glad we didn’t have to find out!

The interesting part is that the flight leaves at 1:55 AM! We have no clue why a flight would leave at this time, but it does!

Where to stay?
Finding a place to stay on Easter Island was an adventure! There was a place that looked great… until I saw it was $1,000-$1,500 per night. My goodness!! There were a couple of other very very expensive options… and then it dropped instantly to not nice at all. I hunted and hunted and finally found a new eco cabin. It is actually great! It won an eco design award and is complete with solar panels on the top for heating the water.

The cabin had a full kitchen, a flat screen TV, and was super clean. It was very nice for the island! We were even greeted at the airport with a flower necklace…and our own flock of wild roosters and hens!

Driving – An Adventure!
The island is about 50 km around so we definitely needed a rental to get around. While some roads are fine, lots of the roads here are an adventure to say the least!

The rentals are almost all SUVs with 4 x 4. Even with a 4 x 4, the rental car representative told us that there was a “bad” road we couldn’t go on as it could be unsafe for the car and the people. They also showed us specifically where the spare tire and toolkit were… hmmmm….

We understood the road restrictions and spare tire when we saw the “good” roads! While there are several paved roads, there are lots of roads with huge rocks, red mud, and massive ruts.

There are wild horses all around the islands so they are sometimes on the roads… as well as cows, dogs, and roosters. This little SUV was also a manual. The whole experience was an adventure!

What time is it?
Our friends at Apple certainly don’t know!

Normally the airline announces the local time when you deboard the plane, but it didn’t seem to happen on our flight in. The rental car clock was also several hours off, and the cabin has no clock. To get the current time we updated our iPhones via the local cell carrier and went on our way. In fact, all was well for our first half a day here as we started exploring the island.

On the morning of Day 2, we got up to see sunrise. We had looked up the sun time table on http://www.timeanddate.com and saw it was for 7:55 AM. When we woke up, the sun was already up!

Ryan (forever the time manager) was of course very distraught that he could be operating 1 hr off for half a day and have no clue. It took him a while to figure out what was off, but it turns out Apple hadn’t programed in new Daylight Savings Times for Easter Island! While DST begins in mid October next year, last year it was in early August. This year DST happened in September. What?!

Thankfully we figured out in time that we arrived for our main tour of the island on time!

The Crazy Statues & A Brief Overview
Why go to Easter Island? It is know for the Moai statues that are all over the island. These statues were carved by the islanders between 1000 – 1600 AD in honor of ancestors. Each statue took about a year to complete and often weighed several tons! The really crazy part is that the statues then had to be transported to their chosen resting place… which was often several kilometers away! This transporation process often took 1 – 1.5 years!

Things were ok for the islanders for several hundred years, but then they ran out of wood. Much of the island’s wood had been used for transporting statues and had left the island barren. This resulted in intertribal fighting in which tribes likely knocked down the moai of other tribes.

Eventually, the tribes started to settle disputes through what was called the “Birdman Competiton” in which the tribal leaders competed to see who would be the overall head leader for the year.

Things forever changed on the island when raiders from Peru came to the island and forcibly took many islanders as slaves. Only 15 were ever returned to the island, but these returned slaves brought back smallpox which decimated much of the remaining population. At one point the population was just 111 people.

With Chile winning a war over Peru and Bolivia, Chile took over control of the island. After a disastrous move of turning the whole island into a sheep farm for 40-50 years, things have finally turned around. Many statues were stood back up, and Chile is investing in the island. Tourism has gone from 6,000 visitors a year a decade ago to 60,000 a year today.

Don’t step on the statues!

Touring the Island
To understand these people and the statues, we took a great tour led by a New Zealander who had moved here. This allowed for an English tour and lots of kiwi humor! We had a great day visiting all over the island and getting some fun pictures!

I have been working on my long jumping skills!

While in Easter Island an exciting discovery occurred…two additional moai were found! Archeologists are coming from around the world to research.

We also saw the main quarry where the moai were carved. There were hundreds of moai in various stages of construction left there.

We also ventured out in our 4 x 4 to see the island’s main dormant volcano as well as see the remnants of the Birdman Competition huts.

On try #2 we also saw sunrise since we overrode Apple this time! 🙂

After a fun stop at Easter Island, we will spend the night in Santiago before moving on to Bolivia for a very exciting part of our trip! We will be volunteering with Samaritan’s Purse on a mission trip. We will tell you more about the mission work soon, but until then we appreciate prayer for our team and the work that will be done!

Bolivia Mission Trip

Posted on October 5, 2013 by EmilyGlobeTrotter

Hola!

We wanted to take a moment before entering the last portion of the trip to update you on what we’ll be doing. One thing that we have wanted to do for several years is to serve on an international mission trip. When planning this sabbatical a mission trip was top on our list to include.

Our mission trip runs from Oct 6-12, and we will have no Internet access most of this time. We have scheduled our last blog posts from Easter Island and Chile to post over this time for your reading enjoyment. 🙂 We will blog on the Bolivia work once we have Internet again.

What is Samaritan’s Purse?
Samaritan’s Purse is a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. The organization serves many missions, including medical missions, water/hygiene improvement, disaster relief, and church constructions.

We have been blessed to be a part of Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child Shoebox Program for several years. As part of this program, individuals from all over the world pack shoeboxes full of small toys, school supplies, and hygiene products that are dispersed with Christian literature. This work is near and dear to my heart so I really wanted to volunteer internationally with this fantastic organization!

Bolivia Water Well Project!
We were very excited when we learned that there was a mission trip to Bolivia over a time that could work. For this particular mission, we will be helping to install a water well in the Bolivian mountains at about 15,000 feet.

This work is important because many here suffer and die from contaminated water that could be fixed with a clean drinking source. Learn more about this work here from a recent trip and a short video:

A Well of Love

http://video.samaritanspurse.org/player/?vid=k2f4w3y2&c=16&title=give-clean-water

Meeting the Team
We’re very excited to meet the rest of the mission team! We will be serving with 4 others from a church in the US. We’ve been exchanging emails and had a phone call, but meeting at the hotel in Bolivia will be our first in person introduction.

Help Needed
We certainly feel blessed to be able to serve and are excited to see what God will do over the next week. We appreciate any prayers for our work and the people with whom we will interact.

If you’d like to learn more about Samaritan’s Purse or to volunteer, check out their website at: http://www.samaritanspurse.org/

Interested in putting together a shoebox? Let me know. I absolutely love putting the boxes together and could help you still do one this year!

Stop 45: Bora Bora

Posted on October 3, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

la Orana from Bora Bora!

We read that Bora Bora is known as one of the world’s most beautiful places so it hit our early list of places to visit. The downside is that it is also one of the most expensive places to visit. Accommodations at many of the hotels can run $1,000 per night… seriously! You also have to take a flight from Tahiti to Bora Bora which never changes in price since they have a monopoly on the route.

Needless to say this was not exactly in our trip budget, but my co-worker Jessica K who has been to Bora Bora said we had to go here because it’s literally amazing. 🙂

We also wanted to fit it in because flights to French Polynesia are often 40% of the cost of an entire Round the World airline ticket (if you can get it to work). This flight alone really proves the value of the RTW ticket, but the airlines make you work for it!

The Adventure of Booking & Arriving in Bora Bora
We spent hours and hours working through the flight patterns to fit in flights from Auckland – Tahiti – Easter Island – Chile. Most RTW tickets tend to go from Sydney to South America which makes stopping in New Zealand, Tahiti, and Easter Island very tricky. We found one special type of Round the World ticket that lets you stop here – One World Global Explorer. After hours of research, looking at travel blogs, and deciphering flight schedules (for example, some of the flights we are taking happen only 1 time per week), we finally got it to work!

With the flights set, we then had to find accommodations that were both nice and economical. I let Emily take this one! 😉

After ruling out hotel after hotel either due to cost or poor reviews, she turned to Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO) which we have used for prior skiing vacations. There were very few VRBO options on the island (3-4 in total), but one was a studio and was within our budget. It also met Emily’s picky standards. 😉

Given our rather Type A personalities (ok… maybe Super Type A :)), the one part that made us nervous was getting to the condo. It is located in one of the most picturesque areas of the island that’s known to have amazing sunsets, but it’s a 15 min drive from the main town.

The condo owner arranged the logistics – but the logistics simply said… a guy named Bruno who only speaks French will be waiting at the dock when your plane arrives. We decided it was worth a shot since it was savings hundreds/thousands of dollars and was a stop for us vs. our full vacation. Thankfully, Bruno was waiting there with a sign in hand and was very nice! He drove us back to the condo and hooked us up with a car that Emily had arranged with the condo owner (getting a car here is another work of art! There are almost no rentals so ours was a 15 year old Ford Escort :)) The only surprise was that the car had a manual transmission. I was really glad that Emily knew how to drive a manual thanks to her mom and dad!

The Island
What makes Bora Bora so unique is that it is comprised of motus. There is a main island that is about 12 km around. Surrounding this main island is a ring of little individual islands called motus. In between the motus and the main island is beautiful turquise water. The water is incredibly calm and beautiful because the sand is white and the motus break the water coming from the ocean. While motus exist in a few other areas of the world, Bora Bora has some of the most in the world. The area is absolutely beautiful!

The Four Seasons!
One of the nicest restaurants in Bora Bora is at the The Four Seasons hotel, which is known to be one of the best hotels in the world! I found that it had a breakfast buffet that was supposed to be amazing so we emailed for reservations.

The only tricky part was getting to the motu. The Four Seasons runs a shuttle but not until the afternoon. To get to the motu, Emily spent almost a month working every couple of days emailing and calling to secure a taxi boat. Since we’re not fluent in the local Polynesian language or French, this was a fun task! Emily finally found a boat that picked us up at the dock at sunrise (6 AM!) to head to The Four Seasons.

Here is the view from breakfast:

Stargazing

We set up our camera to do some extended shots of the Milky Way – pretty cool!

Relaxing from the condo and a little American football
On our off days from hanging out the resorts, we enjoyed relaxing at our condo and doing some activities around the island.

Our condo had absolutely beautiful sunsets and views. We acutally found out that Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando used to live in the huts right by our condo!

We even enjoyed watching the OSU vs. Wisconsin football game from the deck! Since we crossed the international dateline between Auckland and Tahiti, we went from 16 hours ahead to 6 hours behind… which made the OSU night game on during our Saturday afternoon. It finished at sunset. Great timing!

Dinner at La Villa Mahana
I had heard about a French chef who opened what is considered the top restaurant in Bora Bora. This of course interested me! It only has 7 tables so we made reservations over 6 months out. The dinner was a neat mix of polynesian and french cuisine – here are a few shots:

Jet Skiing
We also had a great time taking out jet skis one afternoon. We went around the whole island!

We also stopped at a motu that the tour guide’s family owned (seriously… he lived there!). He opened up coconuts that had fallen to the ground, and we had coconut milk and slices!

Exploring the Island
Since we had a car (which most people who come to the main island don’t have), we got to explore the island. Lots of people who visit Bora Bora take an ATV, bus, or van tour around the island… but we could just drive ourselves which worked well.

We also experienced the local life firsthand as when we stopped at the local grocery store. To save some money (and calories), we made about 2/3rds of our meals in the condo which worked out very well!

Next stop – the most remotely inhabited island in the world…

Stop 42-44: Mt Cook, Lake Tekapo, Christchurch

Posted on October 1, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

Hello again from New Zealand! After our short stop in Queenstown, we continued the tour!

Mt. Cook National Park
Our next major stop was Mt. Cook. While we came across Mt. Cook while planning the trip, we ultimately decided to stop here based on a reco from one of my co-workers (George J gave AWESOME recos all throughout Australia/NZ!!). It was a fantastic reco as we loved our time here!

Mt. Cook is the highest peak of the range of mountains known as “The Southern Alps.” The peaks are very striking, plus the mountains are 40% covered with glaciers. These glaciers create streams and beautiful turquoise lakes that almost look fake. The drive into the park was along one of the lakes so we had lots of photo opportunities!

We enjoyed a 3 hour hike through the mountains to two more glacier lakes. At the end of the trail you could actually see the glaciers, which is neat since each year the glaciers are receding.

We were also very happy that we found another great place to stay (brand new apartment like rooms that just opened 6 mths ago) at the base of the mountain. It’s great to have places like this to stay near national parks!

We imagine that this is Freddy the Falcon and Frieda coming to check up on us!

Lake Tekapo
My co-worker had also mentioned Lake Tekapo, and this was another great reco! This lake also has the turquoiseo blue waters set at the foothills of the mountains. There is a chapel and collie dog statue located at the edge of the lake that are frequently photgraphed so we got a few shots ourselves. 🙂

There is an observatory located above the lake which provides fantastic star-gazing and views of the lake. This is known as one of the clearest places in the world to see stars, but it was very cloudy so that didn’t work out. However, we could still go up to the top of the observatory for some great views of the lake and some warm hot chocolate!

The other great part of our stay here was Lake Tekapo Lodge where we stayed. It was fantastic!! The lodge overlooked the water, the owners had just renovated the rooms, and there was local New Zealand art throughout the lodge. It was a bit chilly outside so the lodge was a perfect spot for seeing the lake and relaxing. The best part was that the owners had been chefs and made a wonderful dinner for us! We had local merino lamb, fresh salmon, and a lemon tart that were outstanding!

Here are some shots from the awesome lodge!

Christchurch
We finished off our time on the South Island with a quick visit to Christschurch. The city was hit by a massive earthquake about 3 years ago that leveled much of the downtown. We were amazed at the level of destruction and surprised to see how much of the city is still destroyed and under construction. In fact several hundred buildings were closed just this past week after finding structural integrity issues.

We also enjoyed a quick stop at the city’s botanical garden which was filled with springtime blooms such as cherry blossoms and rhododendrons.

Auckland
We finished up our tour of New Zealand with a quick stopover in Auckland. As you’re probably not surprised… we used our time to try out a restaurant! We found a ratings system similar to Michelin that uses chefs hats instead of stars. We hit up one of the top-rated restaurants in the city and had several wonderful dishes including lamb, salmon, scallops, and duck. It was delicious!

We also stopped by a trendy cafe that serves only cookies, milk, milkshakes, and tea/coffee. Think Sprinkles Cupcakes for cookies. 🙂 The warm chocolate peanut butter cookie with a gooey filling was amazing!

Other Random Thoughts…
I can’t end our New Zealand posts without telling you about the heated beds. While I’ve generally found buildings to be kept a bit chilly in NZ, three of the places we stayed had awesome bed warmers. They aren’t blankets like we used to see in the US but instead are like a full mattress cover with heat. This just might go on my purchase list when I get home!

Two other random things we noticed is that all of the electrical outlets in both New Zealand and Australia have switches. We learned our lesson the hard way when we didn’t flip the outlet switch on overnight when trying to charge electronics. After about 3 weeks of seeing these switches, we aren’t sure why they are really that useful!

After a great time in New Zealand, we’re now off for the warmth and sunshine of Tahiti and Bora Bora!

Stops 39-41: New Zealand: Dunedin, Milford Sound, Queenstown

Posted on September 28, 2013 by EmilyGlobeTrotter

Greetings from Kiwi Land!!

We’ll start with a quick test. Which team just won America’s Cup? Any idea? Do you know what America’s Cup is?

We had no idea, but Kiwis love America’s Cup (it’s sailing/yachting for those not aware). Here’s a quote we saw in NY Times that sums it up: “The Cup is a niche attraction in the United States but it is a major event in New Zealand and has been drawing television audiences well over 1 million in a nation of 4.4 million”

At nearly every place we have stayed and at lots of restaurants people have been asking us about Team Oracle (which is Team USA). We had to read up to find out what was happening! The race has been the longest in history and has stretched out over 17 races. The intensity feels like an OSU vs. Michigan game spread out over 2 weeks! Team New Zealand orchestrated one of the biggest chokes in the history of sports by losing a best of 17 tournament when it was once up 8 points to 1!!!!

Trip Reshuffle!
Our trip to New Zealand started off with a substantial trip reshuffle. Apparently New Zealand had been pummeled with one of the worst storms of the last 25 years just before we arrived, and two Canadian tourists were killed when their van was swept off a mountain pass in a mudslide.

This resulted in the pass being shut down for +10 days. The scary part was that we were set to go over that same mountain pass after visiting glaciers on the west coast of the island. While disappointing to not see the glaciers, we were very grateful to not have been hurt or massively delayed with the road shut down.

In about 1.5 hours in the airport, we made a quick decision to cancel our glacier portion of the trip. With the help of Trip Advisor and several websites, we quickly changed our hotel, remapped out the next two days, and set off for the Southeast Coast of New Zealand. It turned out to be a fun change, and we had a great time!

Moeraki Boulders
Our first stop was to look at the Moeraki Boulders as we headed down the coast. These are unusual, large boulders that are spherical shaped. There are all over a beach and look quite strange!

Dunedin Area
Our next stop was in Dunedin, a neat Scottish heritage town spread over hills and a valley that overlooks a harbor and peninsula. We were fortunate to get the last apartment at a beautiful complex overlooking the city (whew! we much prefer having things planned out vs. last second shuffles!). It’s a college town with several Scottish buildings, beautiful views, and the world’s steepest street! Here are a few pics:

Green Pastures & Lambs
On our drives across New Zealand we saw lots of the green pastures and sheep that are signatures of the country. Since it is spring here, we also got to see lots of new lambs. My grandfather and aunt always had sheep which I loved to hold as a child. Seeing lambs running around the fields brought back lots of wonderful memories!

Nugget Point
We finished off our shuffled plans with a visit to Nugget Point. This point is on the Catlins Coast and is near the southern tip of New Zealand. The real treat of stopping here was that we saw the rare migrating albatross birds. There are only 25K of the Shy Albatross in the the world and are considered “Near Threatened” status. We happened to be at Nugget Point during their migration so we saw lots of them. These albatross weigh about 9 lbs and have up to an 8 foot wing span so they are huge. It was a great unexpected surprise!

Milford Sound & Fiordlands
From Nugget Point we headed to Milford Sound in Fiordlands National Park. Milford Sound is one of the best known destinations in New Zealand, and we happened to hit a fantastic weather day! It rains 2 out of every 3 days and is known as one of the wettest places in the world.

The week before we arrived there had been terrible weather – and the road to Milford Sound was actually shut down due to over 20 avalanches. In fact about 15 tourists were stuck at the sound for 5 days (see link for some interesting aerial photos)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/9154681/Milford-cut-off-by-massive-slip

We were fortunate that road had reopened and the weather was sunny and warm for early Spring. We expected about 40-45 degrees with rain. The trip and the views were fantastic!

This is where Kiwis jump in the lake before the Michigan game

One of the 20 avalanches a week before our visit. Wow!!

And another…

We even got to see seals and the 2nd rarest penguin… although they were tricky to capture in pictures!

We also stayed in a great B&B near the park entrance. It’s often hard to find places that are nice near parks, but this B&B was great! Here is the view from our room:

We finished off our day by driving to Queenstown and eating at a gourmet burger shop. Ryan had a huge lamb burger!

We’re now off to explore more of New Zealand!

Stop 38: Sydney Part II

Posted on September 25, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

We’re back to Sydney for a busy 1.5 days. We know…we are crazy to fly this much!

The Bridge Climb!!

Climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge was one of the things Emily really wanted to do in Sydney. We wanted to go on the climb at sunset which can book up so we reserved over 2 months in advance. The only bad thing is that the climb isn’t exactly cheap – and the climb occurs rain or shine…

We really hoped the weather would be good, and it turned out to be wonderful! There were sunny blue skies and 75 degrees.

For those not familiar the climb involves hiking the outer structure of the bridge to the top to see amazing views of the city, the harbor, islands, and the ocean.

It’s actually an easy climb as long as you don’t mind heights. You have a safety tether that moves along with you as you walk up a series of ramps, ladders, and steps. Apparently the Sydney government smartly required strict controls on anything falling off the bridge so you are given all sorts of gear to fully secure all items. You’re not permitted to take anything other than your sunglasses – and they are fully strapped on. You’re given a radio headset, handkerchief, rain/fleece gear… everything you could imagine! Everyone also has to wear the same gray suit, apparently required so that climbers don’t distract drivers below since the gray suit blends in with the bridge color. You will see the suits aren’t too stylish!

You can (for a fee of course!) buy a CD with 8 shots of your climb so a few pictures are below.

Our guide was absolutely fantastic, and the views were incredible! This one can be checked off the bucket list now! 🙂

The Sydney Opera House Again – South Pacific Musical
We think we might be the first people who have speed walked from the Sydney Bridge Climb straight over to the Sydney Opera House in 15 min to catch a show!

The timing worked, and we were able to see the South Pacific Musical. The first time I saw this musical was in 1st or 2nd grade when my Dad conducted the high school pit orchestra for this show!

We were excited we had a chance to go to the Opera House twice as we actually saw it in a different part of the opera house. We’re almost regulars now!

Dining
We had two last fun dining experiences in Sydney. One was a raspberry passion fruit tart at a great cafe recommended by Kristen S that was amazing (thanks so much Kristen!) as well as a nice lunch at an area called The Rocks. The Rocks is a really neat part of Sydney as it’s the original settlement so you can see lots of historical houses and a historical church. We ate on the pier by this area and had a great view.

The only other observation we have on dining in Australia in general has been the time it takes! We generally try to keep meals moving, and we’ve had lunches last 2 hours on weekdays! We were shocked that lots of working people went out for lunch and seemed perfectly content that it took that long.

Now off to New Zealand!

Stop 37: Western Australia & Perth

Posted on September 23, 2013 by EmilyGlobeTrotter

Greetings from Western Australia!

When planning this trip we debated a lot on what areas to visit as we had more places we wanted to see than time available! Ryan had read that Perth was rated as one of the top places to live in the world. Our final tipping point for trekking to Perth is that we realized it was wildflower season in Western Australia. I love flowers so I was really excited!

Western Australia isn’t visited nearly as frequently as the east coast because it’s quite a long trek across the country. In fact, we talked to a couple of friends/classmates from Australia who said lots of people in Australia (including them!) had never been to the west coast. You can’t really drive across the country due to a lack of roads (no interstates here!), and it’s like flying from Ohio to California!

After having explored Western Australia, we are SO glad we bought an extra plane ticket to go here! We had an amazing time! Here are our top 7 reasons:

1. Averages 8 hours of sunshine a day… some say the most of anywhere in the world
2. Strongest economic growth in Australia (thanks to an explosion of the mining industry)
3. Wildflowers in the Spring – amazing!
4. Wild Australia – we ran across wild kangaroos, went miles without seeing cars… wow!
5. The seafood is awesome!
6. Gorgeous beaches
7. It takes approximately 1 minute to walk from the Perth Airport arrival area to the car rental. When you return the car, it takes about 1 minute to walk to the departure gate. 🙂

Here are a few highlights from our visit:

The Pinnacles
When you’re at The Pinnacles, it looks eery and makes you think you’re on another planet! In the middle of a desert landscape are wild rock spires surrounded by yellow sand dunes. The rocks stretch for a 10 km loop and then disappear as suddenly as they appear. Apparently the rocks are made mostly of shell and date back to when the area was beneath the sea. The really crazy part for us was that this park wasn’t discovered until the 1960s. How is this possible?! Wow!

We had a particularly wild weather day at the Pinnacles. Although rain isn’t typical in this desert, the main road into the park was closed due to flash flooding! Thankfully most of the park could still be walked so we set out hiking. In the course of 1.5 hours, we had 2 downpours, 60 mph windgusts, and 2 periods of sunshine. It was nuts! We have to give a shout out to our awesome umbrellas (soon to be mentioned in our Tips & Tricks!)! Every other person’s umbrella was flipped inside out while ours withstood the wind. The only issue was that the handle of mine actually bent in the wind and had to bent back. Crazy!

The only small issue we had was making it into another national park we planned to drive through. The park entry was down a red clay road that turned into complete mud. Our little rental Hyundai seemed to be swallowed in mud so we had to turn back. This made for an interesting time cleaning up the car before returning it to the car rental… which may have involved a rather interesting paper towel and squeegee clean at the local BP station by the airport!

Indian Ocean
To reach The Pinnacles you drive along Indian Ocean Drive. This is similar to Pacific Highway 1 and offers fantastic deep blue water views and cliff overlooks. We also saw crazy dunes of white sand located hundreds of meters from the beach and across the road. I guess the winds must be a little strong here!

We stayed right on the Indian Ocean and had a great view! This was our first time putting our hand in the Indian Ocean.

Beautiful Wildflowers
Western Australia is known to have some of the most spectacular wildflowers in the world – and we think it’s true! We managed to put almost 1100 km on our rental car while driving several hours north of Perth.

Western Australia has over 1800 varieties of wildflowers, 60% of which are native to Australia. We spent a full day stopping to hike and driving down highways filled with flowers. We didn’t see any other cars for miles and miles so it was easy to pull of the road to look at the flowers and take pictures. We kept finding new varieties even after several hours of driving! Here are some of the different varieties:

The area is also know for having flowers that literally carpet fields and red rock areas. Here are a few pictures of the fields of flowers (can you tell I like flowers?):

Even sheep and cows got to graze in fields with flowers!

Kangaroos!
I wasn’t sure if we would actually see kangaroos, but we definitely did! Our final count was 11! When driving down a small dirt road to look at flowers early in the morning, we actually came across 4 female kangaroos and their joeys. Thankfully we didn’t hit them (we saw several more that were roadkill!), and I scrambled for the camera to get a couple of shots. They are fast!

We also found that the kangaroos aren’t very exciting to local Western Australian farmers. They can be quite a nuisance!

Cottlesbeach, Perth
Once back in Perth, we took the opportunity to see Cottlesbeach, the most famous beach in Perth. This beach is know for its sunsets as you can see!

King’s Park, Perth
King’s Park is the nicest city park I have ever seen. It is set on a bluff overlooking Perth and hosts a wildflower festival every spring. We timed out our visit to be there during the festival and loved it!

Everlasting flowers are a signature of Western Australia

As are Kangaroo Paws! I loved them!

There were so many great flowers to see!

We found a cafe in the park that had awesome mango smoothies and snapper with a great view over the city.

Dining in Perth
We got to try even more fish in Perth. At one point I realized I had had different types of snapper for 4 meals in a row! We also had an amazing dessert – a warm rhubarb almond tart with passion fruit ice cream on top and a light dusting of chocolate cookie crumbs beside it. It was such a yummy combination!

We are now returning to Sydney to finish off a few activities before heading to New Zealand!

Updated Tips & Tricks

Posted on September 22, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

We have updated our Tips & Tricks page!! All new items are marked with **

Take a look: https://mbaglobetrotters.com/ryan-emilys-tips-tricks/

Stop 36: Sydney

Posted on September 19, 2013 by RyanGlobeTrotter

G’Day from Sydney, Australia!

This is the first of two stops in Sydney for us. Why two stops? We wanted to go to too many places in Australia/New Zealand 🙂 Our OneWorld ticket only covers 4 Oceania stops so we have had to use Sydney for our base for another stop in Australia (Perth). For now, here’s our first of two posts on Sydney.

We have had a fabulous time in Sydney! Here are a few highlights from our time here:

Sydney Opera House – The Proms
We were excited when planning the trip that our timing worked to see The Proms concert at Sydney Opera House. The Proms is the same concert series we saw back in July in London.

Given Australia’s link to the British Monarchy, Sydney often hosts a finale concert at the same time as London. The finale concert is extremely popular, and the concert consists of British patriotic music (think US 4th of July Boston Pops concert).

We were surprised to see the level of excitement for the concert! Concertgoers dressed up in British colors and several wore British flag dresses and shirts. In fact, we sat in front of the Queen. 😉 Also, people brought in their own streamers and confetti to throw during the concert!

The entire second half of the concert became a singalong to British songs. I was quite surprised to learn there are words to Pomp and Circumstance, and everyone knows the words! Rule Britannia was also sung several times – I have heard the song before, but didn’t know the words:

“Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!”

We have to say this was the most enthusiastic and ruckus concert we’ve seen in an opera hall! It was a blast!

Taronga Zoo
While we often don’t head to zoos on vacation, we heard that Taronga Zoo is really nice and had a huge exhibit of Australian animals. Locals may not be as interested in the local Australian animals, but we certainly were! We actually skipped over most of the typical zoo animals and spent all of our time in the Australian area.

We couldn’t believe how close you could get to the animals! There were areas where you could go directly into an area with kangaroos, emu, and wallaby – with no gates between you and the animals! The kangaroos here were very calm, but we have read that kangaroos in the wild have been known to attack if they are surprised or scared. The emus were crazy – they paced constantly around the area!

There were koalas – and one was actually awake and moving around so we got some pictures.

We also got to see Tasmanian Devils, which are rapidly dying due to the spread of oral cancerous tumors. We also saw crocodiles (yikes – the ones here can be 10 feet long!), black swans, local penguins, and lots of colorful birds.

The real Tasmanian Devil!

The zoo has a really nice design and reminded us of the San Diego Zoo. You take a ferry across from Sydney and then catch a gondola that runs above the zoo to the entrance. The zoo then runs downhill so you have beautiful views over the Sydney Harbor as well as an easy walk down the hill for your visit!

Bondi Beach
Bondi Beach is one of Sydney’s most popular beaches. Since it’s early spring in Sydney, we weren’t expecting the beach to be very busy. We were surprised to see lots of surfers out in the water! We enjoyed a great lunch at a historic beach club and restaurant called Icebergs that opened when the beach first became popular in 1929.

The views and the food (more seafood!) were both fantastic! We finished off our time with a few kilometers of a popular coastal walk that had a series of rock cliffs and more beaches. It reminded us of La Jolla, California. I also believe that this is the inspiration behind Apple’s Bondi Blue iMacs of the late 1990’s 🙂

Food!
We’ve continued to enjoy the food in Australia! We have both been eating lots of seafood and have had several types we’ve never had before such as King Fish and Rock Fish.

We have also loved all of the passionfruit desserts. We’ve had a passionfruit banana cupcake as well as an awesome dessert called passionfruit Pavlova. It’s apparently a local favorite and consists of a meringue crust with cream that’s covered in passionfruit puree. It was delicious!

After our quick stop in Sydney we are heading to Perth in Western Australia to see the wild flowers and one of the fastest growing parts of Australia.

Stop 35: The Outback: Uluru & The Olgas

Posted on September 18, 2013 by EmilyGlobeTrotter

G’Day Mate!

Our next stop in Australia allowed us to utilize the beauty of the Round the World airline ticket. The ticket is fixed price and allows you to fly anywhere that a OneWorld code share flight is available. As a result you can fly into out of the way, small airports that are expensive to reach for no extra cost. This worked out really well as we wanted to go from Cairns (Great Barrier Reef area) to see Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in the Outback

Getting to the Uluru can be difficult as the most economical city to fly into is located about 5 hours away and involves a long desert drive that is only recommended for daylight hours due to lots of wildlife you can hit on the way! With our Round the World ticket, we were able to fly directly into Ayers Rock, a tiny airport with only 2 gates located about 10 minutes from Uluru. This saved us tons of time and driving!

So what is Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park?
In case you aren’t familiar, Uluru is a huge monolith in the middle of the Outback. The surrounding area is completely flat for hundreds of miles so it’s particularly spectacular to see this huge monolith in the middle of the dessert. It looks like it was just dropped into the landscape! The color of the monolith is also quite intriguing, particularly at sunrise and sunset, because the rock is red and seems to glow as the sun rises and sets.

PB&J
There were no extravagant meals here! There is only one small town area (and by small, I mean really, really small) so the food options are quite limited and not known to be very good. So…. our first stop was at the local IGA grocery store to pick up food for the next 4 meals. We enjoyed classics like PB&J, apples, and granola bars. 🙂

Kata Tjunta
Kata Tjunta, also known as “The Olgas,” is the sister monolith of Uluru. While it is lesser known, we had read that it is often more preferred than Uluru (and we now agree!).

It was unusually hot when we visited so we were worried the trail might shut down as it closes at 97 degrees. Thankfully it was *only* 95 degrees so we just made it past the cutoff! Our favorite hike was the Valley of the Winds, which is an 8 km hike that takes you up through the rocks of the Olgas and provides some great views.

We were also surprised and happy to see that there were wildflowers still blooming! It is early spring in Australia so we were treated with beautiful yellow, red, white, and purple flowers throughout the hike. It was great!!

Flies, Flies, and More Flies
The less exciting part about visiting Uluru-Kata Tjuta is that it is notorious for having horrible flies. This isn’t exactly advertised on the tourism website ;), but Ryan discovered it while reading forums about visiting. Thankfully, we read there is a perfect solution – Fly nets that you could buy at IGA! Although these nets look terrible, they were a complete lifesaver. The flies go straight for your eyes and ears so it was quite unpleasant without them. With the nets it was great!

In fact, we paused only a couple of times while hiking to take off our nets for pictures. Once we had the nets off, we took the pictures as fast as we possibly could to get the nets back on ASAP!

Sunset at The Olgas
The Olgas are known for being particularly striking at sunset so we staked out a spot and enjoyed a magnificent view!

PS from Ryan: While waiting for sunset, lots of tourists were standing on this post and jumping off to take pictures. Emily joined in this fun… and this picture makes me laugh 🙂

Here are a few pictures of the rock leading up to sunset

And then here is the rock at sunset – notice the change in color!

Monopoly Pricing 101
The hotels for Uluru-Kata Tjuta were the most maddening of the trip. Our hotel night had the dubious honors of being one of the worst rooms and most expensive rooms all in one!

It’s interesting – one resort company owns all of the properties at the park. It seems that development has been limited and the nearest towns of any real size are hours away so this one company has a complete monopoly on pricing. This results in options that range from Really Poor –> Poor –> Fair –> Average, with average being almost $1000 PER NIGHT!! In fact, the Ritz Carlton in Japan was significantly cheaper than our night in Uluru-Kata Tjuta. 😦

We sprung for the dorm style option that had its own bathroom. Unfortunately these only came in 4 bunk bed rooms… so we could have invited in several friends! Ryan wasn’t too thrilled when he realized that he was too long for the bed but the good news is that the room was decently clean (my priority). They even had a can fly/mosquito killer there for you! Not exactly a value… but hey… limited options gives maximum pricing power!

Uluru
We kicked off our morning bright and early to see sunrise at Uluru. Here are a few shots:

We spent the rest of the morning hiking around the base of the rock and looking at wildflowers. It is not recommended to hike to the top of Uluru for several reasons – It’s an aboriginal sacred ground, you have to hold a chain all the way up the steep face, and the rock becomes dangerous with wind or rain. Today access was fully blocked due to high winds. We were quite content with our base walk!

After a great morning exporing Uluru, we headed back to the Ayers Rock airport. We were limited to 200 km before a per km surcharge kicked in on the rental car (seemed to be the norm for every car rental here!). We were proud of our utilization… 196 km driven!

We’re now on the way to Sydney!

Ryan & Emily – The Globetrotters

Follow us on our sabbatical around the world!