Baders on tour are officially BADERS BACK HOME!

So our journey is over and a new adventure begins.

We've met so many lovely people around the world: local people and people on journeys both around their own countries and abroad, many of whom we'll be keeping in touch with.  

We've been fortunate enough to experience how incredible nature is - at times harsh, fragile, adorable, deadly, vast, inspiring, awesome, frightening and beautiful.

Louis and Frankie, in particular, have been learning, not so much from a formal curriculum, but more from the experience of exploring and adapting to different places and situations along the way. They've learned things about people, about geography, about history, about language. They've been adventurous with food, both eating it, sometimes cooking it and - when it came to a fish-market in Borneo where people choose their own 'live' dinner - avoiding it. They've learned a lot about making choices and the implications of sticking to a budget (not that they've always liked the outcomes!) both our family budget, and spending their own hard-earned money. 

They've met some wonderful children in village schools in Brazil, Ecuador and Fiji and learned about what it's like for those children and their families to grow up in these places.  They've realised that children can be happy, friendly, welcoming and prepared to share, regardless of their background.  

They've picked up a whole bunch of mementos along the way, from Louis' not-so-portable sand board, a nevertheless very thoughtful gift from his instructor in Uruguay, to a boomerang from Oz, wood carvings and pottery that the boys made in Nepal and blowpipes in Borneo.

As a family, we have an abundance of memories of shared experiences that hopefully our photos, videos, journals and our blog will help us remember more vividly.

Our trip has been everything we wanted it to be, and more.  And finally, after approximately:

• 67,000 kilometres by air
• 25,000 kilometres over land and sea, (by bus, car, train, pick-up, lorry, motorbike, horse, bicycle, rickshaw, zip-line, motor-bike, sand-board and on foot, and by big boat, rowing boat, long-boat, jet-boat, surfboard, canoe, raft, rubber ring and swimming)
• 350 days away
• 119 blog entries
• 110 different locations slept in, including hostels, hotels, B and Bs, estancias, log cabins, inns, mountain lodges, buses, jungle camps, friends' houses, planes, a farm, an RV, a car and an airport lounge
• 70 km by train (A Brazilian mountain train with free alcohol, arriving nearly 3 hours late, best train journey ever!
• 35 take-offs
• 34 landings! 
• 12 countries
• 5 foreign languages
• 5 overnight bus journeys (longest was 33 hours in Argentina!)
• 3 village schools attended (excluding the Bader Travel school, the boys' least favoured option!) 
• 2 huge spiders on pillows
• 1 orang-utan adopted

Baders on tour are officially BADERS BACK HOME!

Thank you for your many comments and messages over the last 12 months, it's been really good to keep in touch and we look forward to catching up over the coming weeks. 

Leaving Heathrow Airport

Back at Heathrow 1 year later!

Top 10 meals of our trip

We've had many memorable meals in our year away.  The other day we were reflecting back together on some of our favourites, not just about the food, but the occasions too and here's what we came up with.....

La Golosa, Cabo Polonio, Uruguay

Seafood Delight pasta dish with heavenly sauce which made Louis' 9th birthday even more memorable.  The owner had given up his job as a corporate Italian lawyer to do what he loves the most - preparing great food in the unique little hippy hideaway that is Cabo Polonio.

Very special meal celebrating Louis' 9th birthday

La Waffleria, El Chalten, Patagonia, Argentina.
Chocolate Explosion; waffles with chocolate ice-cream, pieces of chocolate, hot chocolate on top and chocolate sauce, made that much better by the 20 km trek that preceded it.  At eleven hours, it still remains our longest single day's trekking of our trip, so it's fair to say we burnt enough calories to deserve this!

We started wolfing this down before we managed to get a photo!

Mike's 'Parilla' for my father's 80th Birthday, Andes Lands, San Rafael, Argentina
Mike, is an expert in preparing fabulous Argentinian beef on a parilla, a kind of Argentinian BBQ.  We had a broad range of cuts, all beautifully prepared, with the highlight being the 'mollejas' (sweetbreads); and washed down with a lovely bottle or two of Argentinian merlot.  Then Loic and Candice had very kindly made a rich chocolate birthday cake for Dad which was delicious. 

The many cuts of meat expertly arranged on Mike's parilla

Raising a glass to celebrate Dad's 80th birthday

Miconia, San Cristobal, Galapagos, Ecuador
On our last day before leaving San Cristobal, we decided to treat ourselves to a seafood extravaganza, a huge dish of every kind of fresh, locally caught seafood, including lobster, squid, crab, mussels and tiger prawns. There was a World Cup game on in the background, and when Ecuador scored, the whole town erupted in cheers!

A delicious seafood feast

Hawker stalls in Malaysia
We ate at too many of these to name one, but the food was generally high quality, very tasty and very cheap! Here's one of the boys finishing off some squid, and an entry wouldn't be complete without the second photo, as we had quite a lot of chicken satay too!

Yum!  especially love those little twirly legs!

Chicken satay......again!

Momos in Kathmandu, Nepal
We did a cookery course in Kathmandu to learn how to make 'momos' - a kind of Tibetan dumpling.   Sakunthala, our chef, made sure that we added everything in the right quantity at the right times.  The results were absolutely delicious, and we made three types - a ricotta cheese and spinach momo, a spicy chicken momo and (primarily for the boys!) a mars bar and snickers momo!

A wealth of spices to choose from

Frankie getting to grips with the dough

Delicious - especially the chocolaty ones!

Picnic on Mystery Island, Fiji
Bobo took us out on his boat from our base at his farm in Rukuruku to Mystery Island and while we were there, prepared a lovely picnic for us. He was surprisingly adept at spear-fishing, given the contraption was basically a thin metal pole he'd sharpened and a large elastic band! It was one of those occasions where the food was simple - freshly BBQed trout, breadfruit, coconut and coleslaw - but somehow tasted so much better because of where you were.  This complemented the delicious food that Karin, Bobo's wife prepared for us back at their farm while we were staying there too.

Delicious fresh fish

The boys kept an eye on the fish while
they cooked on our makeshift BBQ

Skyline Restaurant at Rotorua, New Zealand.
A quality all-you-can-eat buffet up a mountain, with huge variety, for greedy budget-conscious travellers that prepared you for the luge ride back down. (It didn't exactly seem like the obvious thing to do to us, either!) We'd just met up with the Guano family too so the kids were hugely excited to be altogether.  A notable dessert that Louis recalls was vanilla and chocolate ice-cream with jelly beans and marshmallows and chocolate fish!

Luging back down with the Guanos on a full stomach!

Breakfast at O Veleiro B and B, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This was the very first place we stayed at on our trip.  Maybe it was the excitement of being away with a whole year ahead of us. Maybe it was the sense of adventure and togetherness that we shared in that moment.  But when we climbed the narrow, dark wooden staircase of this little guesthouse and saw the breakfast that Patricia had laid out for us, we were amazed and delighted.  Fresh fruit, pastries, cake, cereals, granola, fruit juices, toast, an assortment of jams including our first introduction to 'dulce de leche' - a really sweet caramel-like spread that we would come across frequently in Brazil. 

Choripan in El Chalten, Patagonia, Argentina

So this may seem a strange entry, but on one of our treks, Gonzalo, our host at the cabin we were staying at, told us about a gaucho called Mauricio who does the best choripan (Argentinian sausage sandwich) ever.  So as a means of giving us some energy for our trek up to a particularly pretty hanging valley, we decided to have one each.  He had his own special recipe for the sauce, barbequed it to perfection and it was absolutely wonderful.  

Mauricio with the boys ahead of the trek

The choripan gave us the energy to get to the top to see the hanging valley!

And that's the Top 10.  So many other meals that we really enjoyed, of course, all along the trip, so this is just to give a flavour.....

Latest video - Trekking in the Himalayas

In our previous post below, we talked about our recent trek to Poon Hill in the Annapurna range in Nepal, and shared some photos. Here is a short video of the experience, including some interviews with Louis and Frankie beforehand about what they were expecting!

Four stations in one day.......

I like truckin', I like truckin'........

Driving around Australia in a campervan is a great way to see the country, and makes arriving and leaving new places refreshingly simple.  No need to book ahead, no need to lug your rucksacks out of the car or bus and then unpack them.  And consequently no need to repack them when you are leaving.  You just park, turn on the gas for the cooker and you are good to go. Sure, the journeys are long and the scenery can be boring at times, but there are a heap of things that could happen on the way to keep you on your toes.

Ready for the 'Kangaroo Slalom'

Firstly, there's the possibility of a kangaroo about to leap out, especially if you are early in the morning or approaching sunset.  You see enough dead ones to know that this is a reasonable bet at some point. Then there's the added drama of overtaking road trains, all fifty-plus metres of them, with the excitement of the rear trailer (some have four trailers in all) snaking along and threatening to whip across and push you off the road as you attempt to pass; the sheer length of the road trains making you sometimes question whether you have left enough road to pass them as it takes an age to do so, and forget the huge sideways gusts of air as you finally pass the front of these giant road beasts. I chatted with a road train driver, he said they drive sometimes 1,400 kilometres in a day, up to 17 hours. (I couldn't help thinking about the "I like trucking" sketch from the 'Not The Nine O'clock News' team all those years ago, but there wasn't a kangaroo sticker in sight on the driver's door). 

Move over,  house coming

You get plenty of “wide loads” coming along, which force you to come off the road sometimes less you find yourself embedded in the side of a moving house......yes house. Then every now and again you'll see a flurry of activity on the road ahead, and as you get closer, you'll make out crows and wedge tail eagles feasting greedily on a bloody carcass, probably the latest victim of the merciless road train, that stops for practically nothing. The eagles are always last to leave the table, circling lazily around to return once you've passed.  But the crows are cannier - we've seen quite a few dead eagles, but not a single dead crow. 

Australia is the most expensive of all the places visited on our trip to date. So when we found ourselves visiting four gas stations in one day yesterday on a particularly long trip from Karajini to Sandstone, I figured we'd definitely not be coming out under budget for the day.  I'm not saying that we used four full tanks, but the received wisdom out here is generally to top up whenever you can, as the distance between filling stations can often be 200 or 300 kilometres or in some cases, particularly when you get inland, considerably more. 

Beach breakfast al fresco

Head to toe in their cosy RV bed

Still, this part of the trip was particularly for the boys, who loved the idea of an RV trip ever since we spent a week on a houseboat in Canada a couple of summers ago. And they, and indeed we, haven't been disappointed. Lots of meals al fresco, (except when the flies become just too much), and opportunities to sleep close to nature - like in the Cape Range National Park by the beach on the amazing Ningaloo Reef amongst inquisitive kangaroos; or in the outback at Karajini National Park close to the beautiful gorges and refreshing lakes; or overlooking the curious metal sculptures that dot the dried out salt flats of Lake Ballard and seem to continue endlessly out towards the shimmering horizon. 

Camping on the edge of Lake Ballard

I'm sure we'll miss the RV a little when we hand the keys back in a couple of days. Although having a little more space will no doubt be welcome too!

Loads of room, really, when you have a system.......

Saying Adios to South America

Being on the move quite a bit, you get accustomed to looking forward and not back. But as we pass into New Zealand, and with it, the half way mark of our trip, we found ourselves reflecting fondly on our 6 months in South America and what a rewarding and exciting journey together it has been so far. 

From the absorbing Atlantic Rainforest trails of REGUA, north of Rio, with the lovely people we shared time with - the owners, volunteers and delightful children at the Guiapaçu school - to the amazing, memorable, close-up wildlife experiences of the Pantanal, that we enjoyed on horseback, on foot, by boat and by truck.

Getting to know the sunny South American coastline from Rio in Brazil down through Uruguay to Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the fun we spent at Ilha do Mel, Ubatuba, and the uniquely tranquil, querky and beautiful Cabo Polonio, where we celebrated Louis‘  9th birthday and the boys surfed and sand-boarded for the first time.

Learning about life in the Galapagos, the differences across the various islands and enjoying the unforgettable encounters with wild and playful sea-lions there, (and the not-so-playful huge grumpy one), and paragliding over Lima on the way back.

Enjoying our introduction to Argentina with Spanish lessons in Buenos Aires and the freedom of horse-riding across the wide open plains a few hours south with the impressive and engaging Gauchos at the Estancia La Margarita.

Relaxing and sometimes being restless on the long, very long bus trips across Argentina, and all the amazing wildlife experiences that these journeys afforded us, with penguins, Southern Right Whales, Orcas and other dolphins; with baby fur seals as well as huge elephant seals, not to mention hairy tarantulas and our time with dinosaurs (though the latter is not strictly “wildlife!”)

And in the south of Argentina, where the boys learned all about glaciers, (both advancing and retreating!) whilst finding their trekking feet on the lovely, natural trails of El Chalten against the breathtaking beauty of Patagonia there.

Thinking of home a little, whilst celebrating Christmas in Bariloche with our good friend Jarrod, who came all the way from the UK to see us, ahead of our drive along the best and worst of the famed Ruta 40.

Climbing volcanos in Chile, and the fun and games with borders in between, as well as getting up close to lofty Aconcagua.   

Finishing with one of our favourite places, at San Rafael, in Argentina, so good, we went there twice, with my fathers 80th birthday celebration, to enjoy the tranquility of the place, and the warmth and hospitality of our hosts Mike and Vicki, the volunteers and other guests (and of course the dogs!)

And across all these places, we’ve been struck by the kindness and friendliness of far too many people to name, their patient and welcoming nature, especially with the boys, their interest in our own adventure and openness to share about themselves.  It's helped make the experiences we've shared as a family together, which, after all, was the prime motivation for this trip, that much more memorable. 

So it's not hard to see whey we’ll be wanting to come back to South America someday.  Perhaps the World Cup or the Olympics might afford an opportunity!