Ah, London in springtime. A heavy fall of April snow (April snow?!) causes further disruption at Heathrow (you don't get many cargo ships waylaid or diverted by a flurry of white stuff now do you?) and the good old British sense of justice and fairplay is manifested in the plucky protests against the parading of the Olympic torch through the streets, keeping the terror in Tibet on the world agenda despite Chinese attempts to sweep it back under the carpet. It's good to be home...
I'll still be using and updating this blog now that we're back and will shortly be giving it a complete revamp. In the meantime there's a few more relevant odds and sods to keep you distracted...
The Penultimate Observer columnThe (now almost complete)
Photo ArchiveA blog on
'How to travel slowly (without going round the world for a year!)' I wrote for the Guardian Online this weekend
And, finally, here is the concluding Observer column (the 29th!) for the whole trip...
Final Observer ColumnA year after he set off, Ed Gillespie bids farewell to Central America and boards a banana boat to the UK for the final leg of his flight-free round-the-world odyssey. The Observer, Sunday April 6 2008
In San José, Costa Rica, we broke three of the sacrosanct travelling rules we've evolved over the past 13 months. First, never arrive after dark. Second, remember bus stations are invariably in less-than-salubrious parts of town. Third, if a hostel has a website, check it out first. Failure, through a combination of circumstances, to heed these rules led to us wandering agitatedly around the dark, seedy underbelly of San José at 10pm with a wild-eyed crack-head offering us wholly unsolicited assistance in finding a cab.
This joy, followed by several fruitless circuits of the district in our 'rescue' taxi, was then cemented by the hostel. Externally it resembled some form of Guantanamo Bay security facility - all coded gates and imposing steel frontage, while inside, gangs of binge-drinking American students on Spring Break whooped pitifully.
An 'after the fact' check of the hostel website revealed the scale of our mistake.
'The hostel your mother warned you about!' screamed the home page, amid lurid images of alcoholic carnage. Well our mothers didn't, but we wished they had.
With only days to go before we were due to board our banana boat back to the UK we escaped the capital and made for Cahuita, on the Caribbean coast. After four months of Spanish-speaking Central America we found ourselves among English- and Creole-speaking Caribs. The familiar accent and aroma of jerk spices helped us acclimatise for our impending return to Brixton. Home, though still several thousand miles away, suddenly felt a little closer.
We hiked through the jungle, beside palm-fringed surf beaches. There we spied the ultimate slow travel icon - a three-toed sloth with an impossibly cute baby clinging to her greenish fur. Moving at a deliciously slow pace along her branch, she turned to survey us, her expression unfazed and lazily benevolent as if to say
'What, precisely, is all the rush?' Far from having negative connotations, 'sloth' should be a badge of honour if this cool, calm and contented creature is anything to go by.
Finally we found ourselves aboard the MV Horncap, the ship that would take us to Britain, along with its top-heavy cargo of bananas and pineapples. This overloading gave the round-bottomed ship a distinct roll in the slightest swell, to such an extent that we were glad our beds had wooden sides to keep us in. A
'roll gauge' on the bridge told us we rarely exceeded 15 degrees either way, but the gauge went up to what must be a terrifying 40.
'What happens after 40 degrees,' I asked Alexander, one of the Ukrainian officers.
'Lose vessel,' he said humourlessly.
At mealtimes we shared a table with David, a retired postal worker from Reading, and Karen, an American pensioner with a voice disturbingly like Marge Simpson's.
'They're a bit ecological,' David later said to another passenger about our worryingly subversive planet-saving tendencies. Another German passenger commented that when he looks at Fi he thinks
'hippie'. Time for a haircut, clearly.
After two days of Caribbean cruising we passed Haiti and entered the eerily calm Sargasso Sea, where scarcely a ripple broke the surface. Further east the Atlantic threatened to whip up a stormy reception, reminiscent of the turbulent start of our trip in the Bay of Biscay.
Mercifully the elements smiled on us as we played cat and mouse with menacing low-pressure spots, before we chugged up the Channel under blue, contrail-streaked skies to the white cliffs of Dover.
While Terminal 5 at Heathrow was descending into grumpy confusion, we and our bags slipped swiftly off the ship and into the arms of our families on the quayside. Within minutes we were on the road to London, without a customs or passport check in sight. After 381 days, 45,000 miles and 1.8 tonnes of carbon we were home, and it felt like we'd just stepped off a cross-Channel ferry.
'So, what have you two been up to this year then?' asked my dad breezily. That, father, is a long, slow story...
Ah, London in springtime. A heavy fall of April snow (April snow?!) causes further disruption at Heathrow (you don't get many cargo ships waylaid or diverted by a flurry of white stuff now do you?) and the good old British sense of justice and fairplay is manifested in the plucky protests against the parading of the Olympic torch through the streets, keeping the terror in Tibet on the world agenda despite Chinese attempts to sweep it back under the carpet. It's good to be home...
In San José, Costa Rica, we broke three of the sacrosanct travelling rules we've evolved over the past 13 months. First, never arrive after dark. Second, remember bus stations are invariably in less-than-salubrious parts of town. Third, if a hostel has a website, check it out first. Failure, through a combination of circumstances, to heed these rules led to us wandering agitatedly around the dark, seedy underbelly of San José at 10pm with a wild-eyed crack-head offering us wholly unsolicited assistance in finding a cab.
We hiked through the jungle, beside palm-fringed surf beaches. There we spied the ultimate slow travel icon - a three-toed sloth with an impossibly cute baby clinging to her greenish fur. Moving at a deliciously slow pace along her branch, she turned to survey us, her expression unfazed and lazily benevolent as if to say 'What, precisely, is all the rush?' Far from having negative connotations, 'sloth' should be a badge of honour if this cool, calm and contented creature is anything to go by.
Finally we found ourselves aboard the MV Horncap, the ship that would take us to Britain, along with its top-heavy cargo of bananas and pineapples. This overloading gave the round-bottomed ship a distinct roll in the slightest swell, to such an extent that we were glad our beds had wooden sides to keep us in. A 'roll gauge' on the bridge told us we rarely exceeded 15 degrees either way, but the gauge went up to what must be a terrifying 40. 'What happens after 40 degrees,' I asked Alexander, one of the Ukrainian officers. 'Lose vessel,' he said humourlessly.
At mealtimes we shared a table with David, a retired postal worker from Reading, and Karen, an American pensioner with a voice disturbingly like Marge Simpson's. 'They're a bit ecological,' David later said to another passenger about our worryingly subversive planet-saving tendencies. Another German passenger commented that when he looks at Fi he thinks 'hippie'. Time for a haircut, clearly.
