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While stuck in Argentina due to the bus strike, we both got this crazy idea of flying back to China and give Dad a surprise as it was his birthday on May 14th! So we set off on one of the longest transits we’ll ever take, starting from Salta at 7am on May the 7th, we arrived in Shanghai at on May 10th at midnight!

Salta -> Calama -> Santiago -> Sao Paolo -> Toronto -> Minneapolis -> Tokyo -> Shanghai.

A 14hr bus ride and two 20+hr flights. A lost luggage and a lot of (bad) movies later, we showered and fell asleep in Shanghai!!! We stuck around China for 8 days, visiting relatives and spending an awesome birthday with daddy. Well worth’d!!!

As for us, we’re in Malaysia now, getting set to do some diving!! We’ll try to keep up with the blog =)

We were sailing all through the night, but it didn’t start to get rough until early in the morning.

Alan went out for breakfast while Jiajia toughed it out in bed feeling dizzy. We didn’t want to take the patches from the doctor anymore, as the side-effects weren’t worth it. Looking back, we’re not sure if that was a good idea or bad.

Lunch was the same, Alan scrawled out of bed for some food, but the dining hall has open windows where you can see the boat pitching and rolling like a bitch, and the smell of food makes it worst.

And in the afternoon, both of us were laying idle, watching movies and the BBC documentary on repeat. We saw “Freshwater” episode about 5x, and “Mountains” about 7x. Worst of all, there was one extra episode that we didn’t watch but they were stuck on the index and someone didn’t press “Play” at the control room, so we were tempted with the index loop waiting for them to press play…. it was like torture!

Sleep, wake up in a daze, sleep, watch a bit of movies, sleep.

Checking the blog, it looks like we’ve dropped the ball and haven’t updated it. Behind the scenes though, we’ve been furiously updating our posts and picking pictures. Just for our Antarctica trip we’ve taken well over 4500 pictures. Yup. Just sorting through them takes a tremendous amount of time…

More importantly, we’ve been rather busy not just writing our blog, but travelling to places so we have something to write about! We just returned from Easter Island, and we’ll have quite a bit more to update.

For now, please be patient. Travel is our ‘job’, blogging is only part time. =)

After a lot of back and forth with a multitude of issues, we are finally good to go.

March 9th – March 20th, we’ll be sailing across the rough currents of the Drake Passage and into the Antarctica peninsula…without actually passing the Antarctic circle! We’re excited, and not quite sure what we’ll see, but anything would be awesome

=D

For the next week, we’ll be sailing upon a live-aboard for a cruise around the Galapagos Islands!!! Yeahhhhh!!

足大家： 新年快乐！！！

We spent a week back to the comforts of home and the convenience of a metropolis. We definitely missed Cantonese food, hot showers and most of all, friends and family. Taking such a long time away, people kept asking me if I missed anything about ‘normal’ life, but to be honest we were perfectly happy travelling and shivering with cold on the mountains. The only thing we do miss though, as cliche as it sounds, is our family and friends.

Taking such a long trip away from familiar places, and especially spending so much time in the sweeping landscapes of the outdoors, it takes a bit of adjustment to return to the towering skyscrapers and the mosh pit sidewalks. Despite having grown up in these kinds of places, all the bright lights feel as foreign as ever.

Think we’ll have a bit of a learning curve to adjust back to our prior lives, rounding to the nearest million while combing through CALM models.

Today was a very relaxing day, grabbing lunch, buying train tickets to Lhasa, catching up on pictures/blogging.

Dinner was complete with a stroll down the night market, gorging ourselves with street meats, taking pictures of everything with my phone, until realizing I don’t have it anymore at the end… The problem was, the market wasn’t even packed with people!!! 

Thieves got skillz. 

Oh well, maybe it’s time to move to Android?