I am off

This morning has been a flurry of activity including laundry, running around town to get a few last minute things, cleaning my room and of course packing. I have tried very hard to not overpack, but I am afraid that I have... This is a journey of mixed environments. I need nicer clothes for going out in Rio de Janeiro, but I need grubby ones for the boat trips up the Amazon River. The necessities for each portion simply become a space hog in the bag during the opposite part of the trip. So following my life's trend, I am going casual. Big surprise, I know.

Anyway... My plane leaves tonight at 10:00 PM. The next post will be from Brazil.

Take care,

Owen

The Path of Adventure

People wrote that they really liked the post that explained where I was going when I went to Southeast Asia, so I have decided to do it again. Below you will find a map that shows were Rebecca and I will be traveling. As is always the case with international travel anything I describe below is subject to change at a moments notice for an infinite number of possible reasons.

Rebecca arrives in Rio de Janeiro March 29th and I join her there April 1st. She has agreed to meet me at the airport, which is a really good thing since I will have been traveling for 32 hours straight when I arrive. We will probably spend 4 or 5 days in Rio seeing the sights and spending a lot of time on the beach allowing Rebecca to get a tan after her long winter in England.

After Rio we will be heading north to Salvador and to a place called Sacatar. Sacatar is an artist residency program similar to the one that my father runs in California. Mitch and Taylor, Sacatar's directors, and good friends of my dad, have agreed to put Rebecca and I up for a couple of nights. We will also be checking out the sights in Salvador as well.

From there we will continue north along the Atlantic coast stopping at whatever places interest us. Recife is supposed to have good scuba diving and there is supposedly a beach called Pipa to the south of Natal that has great surfing...

Turning northwest we will make our way to Belem, the major port city at the mouth of the Amazon River. After a few days there we will embark on a five day journey upriver to Manaus. We will hopefully have the opportunity to spend some time out in the jungle outside of Manaus. From there we continue farther up river to where Peru, Columbia, and Brazil meet. Tabatinga is the Brazilian city at the border and Leticia is the Columbian town. We will cross the border into Columbia and then catch a boat from Leticia to Iquitos, Peru, which is another day of travel upriver. In Iquitos we are going to get to meet up with colleagues of Rebecca's who work at Zoo Peru. From there it will be time for me to head home. Rebecca will continue to travel through Peru, Bolivia, and Chile for another five weeks until she heads home to Australia.

An Introduction

For this trip I have a very important introduction to make. I would like you to meet Rebecca. Many of you have heard me talk (probably too much) about her. We originally met in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in August of 2005 because we were both staying in the Okay Guesthouse (I highly recommend it.) near the royal compound.

We had both seen each other in the guest house common room, but finally met properly in an internet cafe nearby when we were both really annoyed at another patron who just let his cell phone ring and ring without ever answering it or turning off the ringer. Rebecca says I had one hell of a look on my face. She later confided to me that she thought I was going to kill him right then and there.

Fortunately my scary face did not send here screaming and we ended up hanging out and chatting back at the guesthouse for a good portion of the afternoon. She turned out to be a girl after my own heart when she asked me if I wanted to go and get ice cream with her. Me, get ice cream? Is the pope catholic?

We walked down around the corner to the big new grocery store that had a huge selection of ice cream. After much discussion and deliberation we selected ice cream (I can't remember exactly what flavors.) and headed out to the park across the street to sit around in the grass and enjoy the late afternoon. We ended up spending about 4 hours just sitting around in the park talking about anything and everything. It was a wonderful conversation and it left me with the feeling that we had only touched about 0.00001% of what we could have talked about.

Not long thereafter we went our separate ways. I to Siem Reap/Angkor and she to Vietnam. We stayed in touch via e-mail and made plans to meet up in Thailand. We eventually did reconnect on Koh Phangan for the full moon party. Rebecca, her friend Kym from Perth, and I had a wonderful time dancing the night away.

Rebecca is originally from Sydney Australia, but she has spent most of her life in Perth out on the west coast of the continent, where her parents and little brother still reside. Her life's passion, aside from travel of course, is environmental education and outreach. She was working on environmental education programs for the Phnom Penh zoo we originally met last year and she is hoping to return to Cambodia in September to do more outreach type activities in some of the more rural parts of the country.