We are starting a series of posts in which we will summarize each of our traveling years. The year in question is 2014, which we are going to explain by dividing it by month and with a symbolic photo of each one of them… Here are our 12 months of 2014 … Ready? Here they go:
JANUARY
January saw us enjoying the wonderful beaches of the Maldives and discovering that paradise can be tailor-made for a backpacker! We stayed on a local island where we were the only tourists, where we stuffed ourselves with gulha and other specialties of Maldivian cuisine and found out that life tastes better under a palm tree!
FEBRUARY
Sri Lanka was the star of February with its many colours: the green of the tea fields in Haputale, the white of the pagodas in Anuradhapura, the red of the sunsets in Tissa, the blue of the pool in Tangalle, but above all it had the presence of Jordi, a great friend who came to visit us from Barcelona: unforgettable night in the tree house, dancing under the moonlight to the sound of Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias (?), the leopard who wanted to cross our path, sun cream all over our faces and laughter, lots of laughter!
MARCH
March saw us part ways: after saying goodbye in Varanasi, Rober returned to Spain for 3 weeks while I travelled alone through Asia for the first time. The experience was great: I think everyone should do it (at least) once in their life… travelling alone is like the universe conspires in my favour, and although some “really terrible” things happened to me, it is true that I kept coming across people who helped me, without asking for anything in return. Like this very nice man (whose name I don’t even know!) who works at Mersing station selling fruit… we talked for a while and before I left on the bus he gave me five hundred bags of fruit!
APRIL
April was a great month: we met again and… Lety’s parents came to visit us in Bangkok! With them we explored the ruins of Angkor, wandered around Phnom Phen and returned to our neverland…
MAY
In May our new life in New Zealand began: lots of excitement, few plans… we stayed 3 weeks in Auckland where we took an English course, made new friends, lots of walks and the occasional getaway like the one where we turned into hobbits… New Zealand promised a lot!
JUNE
June was the first month with our 'tapotupotu' van: we learned to drive on the left, to get up with the sun and sleep under the Milky Way, we travelled to the northernmost point of the North Island, we met Maori with tattooed faces, we fell in love with fish & chips and we had a lot of fun. June was also the month of love at first sight...
JULY
… A love at first sight that followed in July: housesitting! We enjoyed this way of travelling and we took care of a little house with two really cute cats (Pedro and Mosca) and 5 chickens (we didn’t know it but in the following months we would take care of a really nice dog and a 20-year-old cat, as well as a very domestic cat and 8 sheep!). In July we published our first book and Lety started a new blogging adventure.
AUGUST
August was synonymous with Rosie, the nicest dog in New Zealand, it was synonymous with Coromandel, one of the greenest and most beautiful areas in this part of the world, it was synonymous with a lot of work (we wrote and published our guide to London for first-time and repeat travellers) but above all it was synonymous with jacuzzi: God bless her!!
SEPTEMBER
In September we did our last (for now!) housesitting, it was a super busy month: we started writing the book about Paris and another one about India, we became experts in 'polpettone', an Italian dish that could be translated as 'meatball' (not suitable for vegetarians), we continued enjoying the relaxing effects of the jacuzzi, we welcomed the kiwi-spring, we became fans of barbecues and we learned to take care of sheep... if only someone had told us that a few years ago!
OCTOBER
October 2014 will be remembered forever as the month we survived the Tongariro trek! All the effort was worth it to reach the summit and see the lakes area: amazing (and yes, it was worth the soreness that lasted two days… we felt like two 120-year-old grandpas!).
NOVEMBER
It was in November when, after 6 months in New Zealand, we realised that we were only on a holiday visa… and the working part? So we decided to leave our backpacks for a few months and start looking for a job: the chosen city was Queenstown and the day after arriving we found a job…
DECEMBER
And here we are, totally pissed off between beds, mops, interpretations of Jairo's 'The Lion King', toilets and damn double glazing that is always dirty. Luckily we discovered the chocolate-coffee-break, that Mr Muffin remembers to feed us from time to time and that on lucky days we find pizzas, frozen chickens and bottles of beer... in the end things aren't going so bad for us :-p
Let's see what 2015 has in store for us... but 2014 was not bad at all 🙂
