When I got back to Germany, the weather put on its best behavior to greet me with a sunny day and heaps of fresh snow. So beautiful!
Unfortunately, I wasn't used to the cold anymore. At all. So for a week or two I sat around indoors wearing two pairs of pants, long thermo underwear, a t-shirt and two fleece jackets, all the while still being cold. Luckily, the body can acclimatize to pretty much anything, so this phase passed, too.
In total, my trip lasted 16 months. Here's the list of the fifteen countries I visited and the time I spent in each of them:
Cuba: 30 days
Argentina: 57 days
Bolivia: 43 days
Chile: 43 days
Peru: 35 days
Ecuador: 64 days
Colombia: 25 days
Costa Rica: 23 days
Guatemala: 8 days
Mexico: 23 days
Philippines: 21 days
Vietnam: 28 days
Laos: 13 days
Thailand: 46 days
Cambodia: 30 days
In total, I traveled 95.000 kilometers (I had a perl script add the distances between all pairs of subsequent pictures I took - possible thanks to my GPS-enabled camera - so in reality it was probably even more than that). Of those, 54.708km were done in planes:
| Frankfurt - Holguin | 7.902km |
| Habana - Panama - Buenos Aires | 6.939km |
| La Paz - Rurrenabaque - La Paz | 478km |
| Lima - Easter Island - Lima | 7.534km |
| Guayaquil - Galapagos - Guayaquil | 2.346km |
| Barranquilla - Medellin - Panama | 1.083km |
| San Jose - Guatemala | 856km |
| Mexico - Los Angeles - Hongkong - Manila | 15.327km |
| Manila - Puerto Princesa | 584km |
| Coron - Cebu - Manila | 1.035km |
| Manila - Ho Chi Minh | 1.614km |
| Bangkok - Frankfurt | 9.010km |
The remaining 40.000 kilometers involved countless long-distance bus rides, some trains, some boats, several bicycles, a few cars, my own two legs, and on one occasion even a horse.
I shot 17.000 pictures totaling 78 gigabytes of data. Of those, I picked 410 to appear in the 365 project (the map of which gives a really nice graphical overview of my trip), and used another 1.692 in a total of 409 blog posts. 502 of the pictures were shot at an altitude above 4.000 meters, with the maximum altitude being 5.000 meters above sea level at the Pastoruri glacier in Peru.
I seriously doubt that I'll ever look at all 17.000 pictures again - so it's lucky that I have already selected the best ones on the go :-)
Taking my Kindle on the trip was definitely worth it: I read 51 books on it (not including travel guides), which is an average of a little more than three books per month. Yes, I do like to read. Here's a list of the books, if you're interested.
A comparison that I was really keen on making was the average number of words in my blog posts. Why did I want to know this? Simple: I wrote on my phone with Swype for the first nine months, and on a laptop after that. I suspected that being able to type quickly on a keyboard would lead to more wordy posts. And I was right: as my perl script tells me, the average phone-typed post has 273 words, whereas the laptop-typed posts average 382 words. This is a difference of about 40%! The delights of speed typing ;-)
Now I only have one final bit to share: the crime statistics. This is rather boring - and rather pleasant at the same time. There was one incident of theft (but I got everything back, so no harm done). Other than that, there were no robberies, no assaults, no disappearing luggage, no credit card abuse. Nothing. Very nice :-)
So, this is it! Big trip done. It is kinda hard to wrap up this big an adventure in a sentence or two. I've seen and experienced and learned so much it seems almost surreal. Most certainly it is an experience I wouldn't want to miss and would wholeheartedly recommend to everybody! Money, jobs and relationships are just excuses - if you really want to do a big trip, there will be a way!
Since I've already started a new adventure - involving a new country and a new job - I'll keep blogging here, albeit not in a daily frequency. So stay tuned and see you soon!
