Faces

One complaint I get about the blog is that there aren't enough pictures of people. So it was completely in character for me to publish a post thanking all the wonderful people I met and not show any of them.

Part of the reason is that it took me forever to organize all my photos. I was crushed to discover that some of the CDs I burned were corrupted. Some of my photos are gone. I have all the most important sets (Everest, Great Wall, etc.) but it's still a bummer. Even so, I came home with almost 11,000 photos. Let's match some of the faces with the names of the people I met.

I met Frida (Sweden), Anette (Sweden) and Paul (US) on my first day in Granada, Nicaragua. Here they are waiting for the ferry to Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua.


Two American college students, Ella and Kelly, getting me drunk on my birthday on the island of Utila, Honduras.

Frank (Guatemala), my dive instructor on Utila.


My Venezuelan friends Ana Cecilia (back left), Alejandra (back right) and Daniela (tongue) sightseeing in Morocco.


Francois (France), Kiyoshi (US) and Stephane (France) at the Yellow Blue Bus hostel in Moscow.

This hostel could have been a disaster. This is the entire kitchen. Behind where I'm standing as I take the picture is the one computer and the stove. There are 16 beds, one toilet and one shower. But I met some wonderful fellow travelers there, and the two Russians who ran the place, Olga and Jack, were incredibly helpful.

There was a large Dutch contingent in my carriage on the Trans-Siberian Railway heading to Beijing for the Olympics. The two couples closest to the window had children competing in the games. Pretty cool. I shared my cabin with Nelke, the woman in the front left. In the front right is my Swedish friend Kjerstin.


I also shared the cabin with a truly repulsive Russian couple. People enjoyed my horror stories about the Fun Couple and asked if I had any photos of them. I didn't think so until I was sorting through them and found this shot of him on one of the platforms (Krasnoyarsk, I think). It's one of the few times either of them left the cabin.


Appearances can be deceiving, but not in this case. He has such a large beer belly -- or is that vodka belly? -- it looks like he's pregnant. With quintuplets. They were noisy, rude and malodorous. It was like sharing a cabin with two wild animals. For 76 hours...

Kjerstin and I also hung out in Irkutsk. Here we are waiting to see the eclipse.


Katia is works at the hostel in Irkutsk where I stayed. She speaks English fluently, but it's her third language. She works as a French interpreter and translator. This shot doesn't do justice to how pretty she is -- and certainly gives no idea how sexy her combination Russian-French accent is! -- but it's the only photo I have of her :-(


Andrey, my divemaster in Listvyanka, shortly before we went scuba diving in Lake Baikal. I don't know who the fat, pasty guy next to Andrey is. Seriously, I'm paler than a Russian who lives in Siberia!


Elias and Sarah are a German brother and sister I met in Beijing. They took me to a night market where you can eat all kinds of crazy critters. Here he is eating a scorpion...

... and here she is deciding if she really wants to eat a bird's nest. It's a hardened ball of bird saliva, and tastes as good as it sounds!


Jade and Xan, Aussie sisters I hung out with in Kathmandu. I'm older than the two of them combined. Sigh.

Michal and Ricky, Israeli sisters I met rafting in Nepal. Here they are at the Peace Pagoda, overlooking Pokhara. In the background is the hill called Sarangkot with the Annapurna Massif towering in the distance.


I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the porters from my Everest Base Camp hike, Asharman, Lakapa and Dhana. It's humbling how much work these guys do and how they go about it with such good humor. They were always smiling, not just when they're getting their picture taken with what appears to be an x-ray of me. Look how much weight I lost on the hike!

Ngon, Jess and I, the day we met, on a boat tour of Nha Trang, Vietnam.


Luong at the airport in Danang, gorgeous even with "hat hair".


Lan and I at a coffee shop in Hanoi. I don't have any pictures of her smiling!


These are just a few of the people I met who made the trip so wonderful. Thanks the wonders of 21st-century technology it's easy for me to keep in touch with them.

Now that I'm getting over the post-travel blues I hope to continue the blog with posts from my next adventure, which I hope will start soon... Stay tuned.