Departure day

Trip Start Nov 08, 2008
1
20
Trip End Jan 17, 2009


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Flag of Thailand  ,
Friday, January 16, 2009

Two and half months after arriving in SE Asia, here I am in the final hours of my stay in this fascinating part of the world. Nancy and I fly from Chiang Mai to Bangkok this evening. We then take separate flights to Seoul, Korea, where we have a room in the transit hotel in the airport. After a few hours sleep, we board a flight together to Seattle. Home.

Having been away from the U.S. for so long, I'll need a cultural hyperbaric chamber to acclimate, I'm sure.

With a mixture of conflicting feelings about leaving and going home, I keep coming back to one thought from Peter Matthiessen's classic travel book, The Snow Leopard, the book I was reading when I arrived here. Matthiessen, trekking in the Himalayas in pursuit of a glimpse of the snow leopard, came to the realization late in his travels that he didn't actually need to see the elusive creature...he had experienced enough without finding the object of his trek.

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined..."

With a few goals of my journey unmet -- a visit to the rice terraces of Yunnan, China, for example -- I might say the same. It has indeed been a trip that turned out to be far more than I could have imagined.

May all of your journeys be the same.
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Comments

the_stamms
the_stamms on Jan 19, 2009 at 03:49PM

Thanks for taking us on the journey!
Let us be the first to post a Welcome Home! Man do we have some questions... Really enjoyed the colors in this last set of photos.

lambs
lambs on Jan 19, 2009 at 04:37PM

Re: Thanks for taking us on the journey!
thanks for the welcome home. yes, let's talk...much new info since we last talked. btw, i facebooked you.
sorry about the all lowercase...cat sleeping on my left arm.

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