The End, 324 Days and About 9000 Kilometres Later

The trip has come to an end.

In September last year, the River Crew left Chesterville, Ontario, in Adrian’s veggie-oil-converted car Tucker and drove to Chicago.

Our before-dawn departure from Chesterville, all packed up and ready for adventure.

Since then, Tristan and I have canoed 2262 kilometres down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, sailed 3100 kilometres from North Florida to Puerto Rico, and cycled 3500 kilometres from Medellin, Colombia, to Iquique, Chile (without counting the distances ferried, flown—Puerto Rico to Medellin—hitchhiked and bused). Over the 324 days, we each spent a total of 6017.00 $, which per day works out to 18.50 $ and per month is 560.00 $ each—the amount that many people spend on rent alone (it comes to 492.00 $/month and 16.40 $/day if we don’t factor in the cost of our flight home). We visited 8 countries (the United States, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile; 9 if you count Puerto Rico, which I sort of do). We discovered the beauty and the freedom of river travel, the excitement of the sea and the horrors of seasickness, and the challenges and rewards of cycle touring. Everywhere we went we found out, again and again, how shockingly kind human beings can be.

Some Colombian kids helping me with my bags after we got a ride on their school bus.

It’s difficult trying to find simple ways to sum up the past 11 months. I think that part of the trickiness of it has to do with the fact that for most of that time, we were on the move—constantly arriving in new places and then leaving them, figuring out new environments, interacting with new people—which means that we haven’t had the time or mental space to think much about what we’ve been doing and how we feel about it in less of an immediate sense than “GOING UPHILL IS HARD” or “This empanada is amaaaaaazing.” Another challenge, when picking through my thoughts about it, is that like most things in life, this trip was a mix: both difficult and wonderful, satisfying and frustrating, commonplace and thrilling. Now that it’s over, it seems to be time to try to sort through the memories of it and to figure out ways of explaining it and understanding it.

Eating breakfast along the road in Ecuador.

One thing that I have definitely learned is that long-term travel is hard. When I have traveled in the past, whether it was for a week or a couple of months, the end of the trip tends to feel just a bit too soon; there is always more that I would have wanted to do, and I have daydreamed about open-ended, no-return-date types of trips for years. I never seriously considered how difficult it would be to go for months and months without being able to make friends that will stick around, or without staying rooted in one place for longer than a couple of weeks. There are strangely simple things that I missed very intensely, like sitting in a familiar living room drinking a cup of tea with milk.

Bolivia’s altiplano.

I think that part of the challenge came from our style of travel, where our home was the road (or the river, or the sea), and so although we often took rest-days or even weeks, the norm that we were always returning to was one of movement. In a lot of ways this was wonderful, because it allowed us to see an incredible amount of things and gain perspective quite quickly on the differences between the regions we were passing through. But it was also exhausting, and made us both crave stability and familiarity.

Calm waters.

Since getting back, one of the big questions that people ask is what our favourite place was. I find it hard to answer this question, because over the course of almost a year we have passed through so many different places and they have all had impacts on me in different ways and for different reasons. For instance, in terms of landscape, our time in the States was probably the least interesting; but some of the most memorable moments of the whole trip came from the encounters that we had with people along the river. And in Colombia, it was amazing to be in such a wildly different part of the world for the first time, but it was also a difficult period because we were adjusting to being on our bikes every day while trying to cycle through the Andes. Like in any part of life, there were ups and downs in every part of our adventure. Because it’s fun looking back on the ups, here are a few that stand out for me:

The beginning.

– Our very first day of canoeing. It began with a warm send-off from our Chicago host Joel, followed by the surreal experience of canoeing between the high-rises of downtown Chicago. In a few hours we were out of the city and into what felt like the wilderness, accentuated here and there by the strange, dystopian industrial structures that followed us all the way down both rivers. That afternoon we discovered that we could rig up a sail using our tarp and extra paddles, and I remember that afternoon as a warm, lazy, glorious introduction to life on the river. That day was full of all of the excitement that comes at the beginnings of things, and it was absolutely perfect and magical.

Happy birthday girl.

– Another great day on the river: my birthday, when we camped by the beach, made a huge bonfire, went swimming in the dark, and had perogies, sausages and champagne for dinner wearing New Years hats that we found at an abandoned restaurant.

T’ien Hou.

– When we moved onto T’ien Hou, the sailboat that we crewed on. Our captain David anchored her just off-shore in Pensacola the night before we set off on the sailing trip, and Tristan and I got to stay on the boat just the two of us, extremely excited about the fact that we had managed to find a sailboat to take us south, and blown away by how gorgeous it was. When we woke up in the morning we climbed out of our tiny bed in the focsle, made ourselves some tea, brought our sleeping bags up onto the deck and watched the sunrise.

LOOKING AT FISHES IS FUN!

– Snorkelling. As someone who goes nuts with enthusiasm every time I watch Blue Planet, it was overwhelming to be able to jump into the water in the Caribbean and within ten minutes find myself floating a foot or two above all sorts of bizarre and lovely creatures, swimming around happily in their natural habitats. I remember one spot in Puerto Rico where Tristan and I went in search of sea turtles, and instead I found myself directly above a spotted eagle ray, with a wingspan of a couple metres, gliding slowly through the water several feet beneath me.

Oh, bicycle, how I love you.

– The feeling of getting back onto my bicycle in Puerto Rico after being on the sailboat for a month. It was like flying.

Looking down on beautiful Colombia.

– Seeing Colombia from the window of the plane as we flew into Medellin. It was so green and lush and mountainous, and it looked like nothing I had ever seen before. After being on islands for a couple of months, the awareness of the immensity of the continent that we were arriving on was daunting and thrilling.

Mountain-climbing.

– Climbing Huayna Potosi, in Bolivia. Mountain-climbing is not something that I have ever thought I would want to do or enjoy doing, but it was such a lovely trip. This was due in large part to the fact that we got to spend a lot of our time there drinking tea and socializing with wonderful people, something that we had been starved for. The climb itself was also a really valuable experience for me, because it made me realize that I am often more capable of things than I expect to be, and that doing things that are intimidating can be (and usually is) very rewarding.

Johanne and I on a bike-friendly road in Bolivia.

– Getting the chance to bike with others after staying at the La Paz Casa de Ciclistas. It gave us so much fresh energy to spend even just a couple of days travelling with new friends; although Tristan and I love each other very much, after being together literally all day every day with almost no one else to talk to for months on end it was very refreshing for both of us to have someone else to chat with and bounce ideas off of. It was also a wonderful way to wrap up our experience of cycling in South America.

Beer and a tow from some very friendly strangers on the Illinois River.

There are so many more, but once I start thinking about it all I could go on and on. One more highlight that I want to bring up though is something that I have mentioned many times when writing about the trip: the kindness of people. Everywhere that we went on this trip, whether it was American towns or the middle of the Andes, the helpfulness and generosity of the people that we met was incredible. Complete strangers would be willing to stop what they were doing to answer our questions, give us advice, invite us into their homes, feed us, or ask us about our experiences. Having grown up in and lived mainly in cities, I’m very used to human beings ignoring one another. Every time someone that I don’t know freely decides to share their time or energy with me, part of me is shocked; and afterwards I always come away happier, knowing that it is always worth it to try to connect with others. Our trip was the rich experience that it was directly because of the people who we came across on the road and those who we met using the internet (with sites like couchsurfing, warmshowers, cruisersforum and helpexchange).

The Casa de Ciclistas crew in La Paz.

Since we’ve been home people have been curious about the dangers that we experienced on our trip. After travelling for so long, we must have gotten into some sketchy situations, right? I was entirely expecting to—we travelled in places where there is a lot of poverty, and where foreigners are said to be targets for the people who live there. I braced myself for theft and aggression, for resentment, and for the possibility of uncomfortable situations.

Or, you know, the possibility of GIANT GUINEA PIGS.

The weird thing is, nothing happened. Despite the fact that we were on our guard, there was never a moment where I felt seriously uneasy. The only time we had anything stolen was on a ferry in the Caribbean, when I left my hiking boots on the seat in front of me while I slept (which was a foolish thing to do). While we were cycling, every evening we were either asking permission to camp on someone’s property or we were finding an out-of-the-way spot off the road to set up our tent. Sometimes we worried that we might be visible, that someone might have seen us come off the road—but nothing was ever taken, and as far as we could tell, no one ever even approached our tent (and considering the fact that I woke up when even a light breeze rustled our fly, it would have been hard for someone to do so undetected).

One of our many camp spots under the stars.

And this is what I have taken out of this experience: people, in general, are kind. I know that there is a lot of bad in the world, and that often self-interest can propel people into harmful or aggressive behaviour. I think it’s very important to be careful and to take precautions, and to do what one can to protect oneself; but I also think that it is equally important to approach other human beings expecting the best from them. You can feel it when someone expects good from you—and you can also feel it when someone expects to be hurt by you. We all tend to play into the expectations that others have of us, to some degree. I would rather spend most of my time giving others the benefit of the doubt, and occasionally being let down, than always waiting for something bad to happen. When the bad things do happen, I’ll probably be more equipped to handle them if I’ve got all of my positive experiences behind me to pick me back up.

Rather than danger, the main challenges that we encountered on this trip were the unexpected ones. Something that I found very difficult was coming to terms with the fragility of the human body. I was taught that I can decide to do something, but my body might just say no. And there is very little, short of damaging myself, that I can do against my body’s will. Our insurmountable seasickness and my knee troubles were both circumstances that forced me to acknowledge that I can’t always be in charge; sometimes, my body will be. And although it was hard to wrap my mind around this, in the end we learned that as long as we were willing to be flexible, we could work with our limitations without being defeated by them.

After giving my knees the rest they needed and starting a stretching/leg-lift program, we were back to cycling alongside the mountains.

Something else that people have wanted to know is, where are we going next? Already, we have ideas for future trips: canoes on the Paraguay River, motorcycles in Patagonia, bicycles in Ireland and the Mediterranean, a river trip up to the Arctic Ocean. But first, we are very happy to be back in Canada and we plan on staying for awhile, working on the things that we couldn’t work on while we were on the road. I imagine that the next time that we do set out, we’ll plan to be gone for less time. We know now the value of giving ourselves just enough to satisfy our wanderlust, while still leaving us wanting more.

Exploring some Puerto Rican ruins.

For now though, there are other things to look forward to. I look forward to being able to wash my hands and find a flat, clean workspace before working on a drawing. Tristan can’t wait to gather up his tools and set up his workshop to start building new instruments and developing other projects. I am excited not to be so exhausted from biking and worn down by the elements at the end of the day, and to have enough energy to play my ukulele. It will be nice to sleep in a bed every night, for awhile, and to wake up inside a house that doesn’t belong to a stranger. It will be incredibly nice to see some of the same faces every day, and to get the chance to visit others that we haven’t seen in ages.

Huaquillas, on the border of Ecuador and Peru.

There will be things that I will miss. I didn’t realize how much I got used to smiling and exchanging calls of “Buenos dias” or “Buenas tardes” with everyone we saw until I was walking around in Ottawa and remembered that it’s unusual, here, to say hello to a stranger. It will be strange, as time goes on, to look back on this trip and remember all of the things which, at the time, seemed entirely commonplace but which after the fact come across as bizarre and outlandish: men driving horse-and-carts down the streets of small cities; tiny, wizened indigenous women walking down the side of the road carrying improbably huge, brightly coloured bundles on their bent backs; children on dusty roadsides pointing and yelling “GRINGO!” as we fly past; mud-brick homes with thatched roofs and no electricity; towering mountains and immense valleys.

The valleys of Peru.

I think that there are a lot of things about this trip that will sink in very slowly, over time. Someone said to me that we won’t know how we feel about this trip until long after we are home, and I think that in some ways, that’s true of any experience. Little pieces will resurface and suddenly have a whole different meaning; one memory could gain significance, and another could lose the weight that it had at the time. All of it has made me more aware of myself, of my faults and strengths and weaknesses and abilities, and more aware of other people. I know more clearly what I want, both from my day-to-day and from my life in general. It gave me the time to think through my priorities and make resolutions, while I was away from the rush of normal life. It taught me how lucky I am to be able to freely choose the way that I want to live my life, and reminded me that I should consider very carefully how I use that privilege, because it is rare. It showed me how important human relationships and interactions are, and the way that they have the power to change and improve life immeasurably. It reminded me to be generous—with my time, my efforts, friendliness, curiosity, and with the means that I am able to offer. It made me appreciate the satisfaction that comes with familiarity and the little bits of beauty that are tucked into everyday life.

Our home for the past year.

Now it’s time to see what new kinds of adventures life has coming for us.

– Avalon