An extraordinary journey

That is it friends… we are back in the Netherlands.

It has been an adventure to the max. 23 months of new cultures, new faces, new friends in different places. A lot of fun and some really really unpleasant stuff. Loooooonnng trips in full minibuses with crying babies, dead chickens and my knees up to my ears.

Not so comfortable beds with unwanted guests, sweaty nights and cold showers. Freezing nights and cold showers… Waking up at night thinking where the bathroom is thís time. Losing track of what day it is, what date and even what month. Forgetting a visa actually has an end date…

Remember that time watching the milky way in South Africa, camping with 47 °C in the Australian outback, playing soccer with street kids in Madagascar. Remember when I sat in that bus seat soaked in piss in Mozambique for a very long time or ploughing through the thick mud in the Amazon. The absurd planet called Japan, the deserted beaches of Hawaii, the Seychelles, the South Pacific, exploring a shipwreck 47 meters under the surface. The freedom…

And then there were the animals, those lions around our tent in the Serengeti, watching orang-utans in the pouring rain in Sumatra, playing with sea lions and after many attempts we finally saw whales, not one time, not twice… A LOT. Every day, from our beach! Man, those animals are fantastic!

No bedbugs, no broken bones, no violence. Just earthquakes, cyclones and erupting volcanoes, we seem to have had and angel watching over us.

Safety where we didn’t expect it. Silence and solitude where we needed it.

Losing some weight, gaining some hair, did this adventure change us?

690 sunsets in 30 different countries definitely changes your perspective on life. What is important and what ‘s not. I realize that I don’t just exist, but that I live. Life has a much slower pass than I thought, and I intent to follow it.

May the coming year be as adventurous and free to you as our last two were to us!