Anna & Dave at the 10,000km mark
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”We came around a bend in the thick of the forest and Dave saw ahead of him Anna stopped and mumbling something and pointing at the side of the road and there it was! A gorilla! One of the 300 or so left in wild! It was unbelievable.”
Church bells are ringing in Guadalajara, it must be 9:00…
Yup! : )
Thanks so much for letting me chat with you this evening.
Your about us page says that you two met in Mongolia. That “We were on the same plane from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar and we fell in love when, across ten rows of sleeping Mongolians, 35,000 feet above the Gobi desert, we made eye-contact and smiled.”
Who approached who and what did they say? : )
so, we made eye contact on the plane, and smiled at each other - I (Dave) smiled at Anna and she smiled back.
Then at baggage claim I was looking all around to find the cute blonde, and I didn’t see her. i saw her backpack go around the carousel and then disappear though, and then finally I spotted her in the corner, reading her Lonely Planet…
I went over and talked to her and asked her if she knew where she was going - I didn’t.
So I talked to her first, but what I later learned was that she was faking reading her LP so that I would talk to her.
Anna knew exactly where she was going and was just pretending to stall for time.
So I spoke first, but only thanks to her ruse…
lol! That is too cute.
Yeah, it’s a funny story, we forget it sometimes.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “Before Sunrise”?
Nope! Should I netflix it?
It’s a couple who meet on a train and then spend the night in Vienna wandering the city talking. He is American (Ethan Hawke) and she is French and when we got back everyone made us see that movie.
it’s okay, nothing exceptional, but they are in Vienna, where we lived after we first met, so it’s a funny film for us to see. And it is eerily similar to our own story…
You spent 16 months cycling through twelve countries – How did cycling vs. driving a car or taking public transportation, change your overall travel experience?
Tremendously! There is nothing like cycling and we could go on for hours about what makes it so great. In general though, you are traveling on the same level as the local people - especially in Africa where few people can afford private cars.
And so people are much more open to you and approach you and since they generally think what you’re doing is totally crazy they’re curious and ask lots of questions.
And then also, when you’re cycling you’re limited to how far you can pedal in one day -100km maximum for us really - and so you stop where you need to stop, not where the guidebook says to stop.
As a result, you spend a lot of time in areas where tourists usually never go - and for good reason of course, there’s nothing “to see” there. But what you realize pretty quickly is that “nothing to see” doesn’t mean anything, there are people living there, it’s their whole universe, and most travelers miss it totally.
Anyway, if you haven’t cycled somewhere, you don’t know it really, that’s our feeling on travel!
Did you meet other cyclists?
We only met 5 other cyclists in our whole 16 months in Africa.
There are lots out there in other parts of the world, but Africa isn’t so popular in the cycling crowd.
But the ones we met were very hardcore - three of them had done over 100,000km, one of them had been living on his bike for 9 years at that point.
Oh my goodness..just finished an hour run and am feeling like a slacker…
An hour run is hard! Cycling is easy compared to running! And besides, no one starts out saying you will bike a billion kilometers.
Every day you just make it to the next village and soon you find it’s a bit easier, the hills aren’t so steep, and you roll along.
And then you realize you’ve had 6 hours of exercise, you’ve been outside all day, and that in the space of 24 hours you’ve had the best and worst moments of your life.
Must of been incredible.
it’s incredible, yeah, totally.
You must of worked up an appetite!
oh yes, we ate a TON!
Favorite meal you enjoyed?
In Mozambique, they make a stew of casava leaves, coconut milk, peanuts, and sometimes shrimp. and it’s served with “sima” which is a sort of hard maize meal cake (like a thick polenta), which is a staple all through eastern and southern africa.
Matapa it’s called! it’s delicious, best food we had the whole trip
A big part of what you two are doing while traveling is trying to understand issues facing the world right now and then trying to make a difference - - In your opinion, what is a big problem, that most people aren’t really aware of?
Hm, interesting question…
Anna thinks that most people don’t really appreciate the degree of the destruction of the environment. This is what struck us most in Africa, seeing that in the least developed continent, where you would think things would be relatively preserved, that still the forests were being cut down, the fields were becoming deserts. And then you realize, once you know what to look for - once you know what a healthy ecosystem is and what an unhealthy one is - you see it everywhere. The planet is sick, and most of us live lives that are so divorced from nature that we dont realize it. For us, this was the biggest revelation of our time in Africa. (Dave agrees - like a good husband).
The environmental destruction we saw there is present everywhere, in every continent, we just need to learn how to see it. Traveling through the southern US you see kudzu growing everywhere, and there is a massive drought now in texas, and the list goes on and on. It’s not just Africa, it’s everywhere…
What’s a phrase that you learnt in Africa and used quite a bit?
There are a few phrases we picked up that we still use actually. One is Mzungu, which is a Kiswahili word to refer to foreigners and white people in general. You hear this constantly in the parts of Africa where we were. “Mzungu how are you!” is like the national anthem in some countries. We got used to it though, and now we say Mzungu all the time, which is nice since most other people don’t understand it.
The other phrase is “pole pole” which is also Kiswahili and which means “slowly slowly.” It’s something people will say whenever you need to be careful, or just to say there is no need to rush. Pole pole is for us such the African approach to life - work hard, take things seriously, but no need to rush, things will happen as they happen, when they happen. A great mantra for travelers!
How is traveling as a couple different than traveling by yourself?
We have both traveled independently, in fact we were traveling alone when we met. Since then though, it’s been mostly traveling together. I think we couldn’t say one is always better than the other, but they work for different phases of life. When we were younger and wanted to go out and see the world and sort of “find ourselves” I think traveling alone made more sense, it’s more intense and pushes you in a more personal way. Now though that we’re older and our interests are more in understanding the political / environmental situations of the countries we’re visiting (and especially now that we’re meeting and filming environmental organizations on our way down to Rio), it’s much easier to be in a couple. It gives you someone to talk to about what you’re seeing, a sounding board for ideas and the like. It also makes traveling for long periods easier in general - we’re each other’s family, so we’re always home when we’re together, so it’s not so bad to be on the road for 16 months, or now 20 months. It’s like that song: “Home is wherever I’m with you…”
What is one travel memory from your time in Africa, that’s particularly special to you?
A memory that is particularly special to us… There are so many! Every day, especially when you’re cycling, is so intense that there are moments of bliss and moments of horror sandwiched together.
There are many people who offered us hospitality and kindness along the way out of nothing but the warmth of their hearts, and we remember each of them with such fondness and gratitude. I suppose though that if there was a sort of “epic” moment that we will never forget, it was in Uganda, biking on the worst road ever through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. This is where Uganda’s gorillas are, and tourists come and pay about $1,000 all together to see them, which is way beyond the kind of budget we have. We thought we would take the public road across the park just to see the tropical forest though, which is spectacular. Everyone we met assured us that we wouldn’t see the gorillas of course, they are so few, and they would be on the other side of the mountains at this time of year, and on and on. Some people who lived there had only seen them once in their lives, so we assumed we wouldn’t and just went to bike through the park. But the roads are atrocious and the local people, who know that tourists spend more money than they will see in their lives just to spend 45 minutes with a gorilla, were not very welcoming, chasing us and grabbing at our bags and demanding money. It was the hardest cycling of the trip, though the forest was so beautiful that the moments we were thick in it we forgot all the difficulties. It was raining too of course, it always is at such moments.
Anyway, on the second day, we came around a bend in the thick of the forest and Dave saw ahead of him Anna stopped and mumbling something and pointing at the side of the road and there it was! A gorilla! One of the 300 or so left in wild! It was unbelievable.
We parked our bikes farther on and watched from a distance and took some photos. There was one by the road, and then another up in the hillside above us, and another we could hear downhill a ways. They were all grunting to each other and eating leaves. It was amazing, and we were alone there with them until the park rangers came and shooed us on - Mzungu can’t see gorillas without paying $1,000 it turns out.
We didn’t mind though, it was such an incredible experience.
Dave & Anna at the southernmost point of Africa
