The end? The beginning?

Many moons have come and gone since Judith & I boarded the last flight of our little stint abroad. This blog has been pretty quiet ever since, but we both felt that for once in our lives, we shouldn't leave a thing unfinished. Apologies for the slight delay.

I shall spare you the details of our last few days in Bangkok, even though Judith & I did have a great time there with all that food, meeting our friends Kerstin and Marco, and plenty of souvenir shopping. Instead, I wanted to conclude our blog (for now) with some summary statistics.

Here are our facts & figures (for a detailed account of our travels, you can read our blog right from the very beginning):

• In total, we travelled more than 83,000 kms (for our non-metric system friends, that's the equivalent of going around the world twice). Thanks to our superior planning skills and good looks, we pretty much sticked to the route we had initially planned
• We visited 17 countries (18 if walking across a bridge to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, and having a coffee at McDonald's counts as visiting a country)
• We boarded 18 flights and paid taxes at 23 different airports
• We slept in 96 different locations with an average quality rating of B+ on the international J&F scale. Note, however, that the surprisingly high average rating was largely driven by the fact that we were able to enjoy some fabulous A+ stays with the friends we visited
• Our blog received some 5,000 hits since its launch
• We got engaged once
• We ate tarantulas, crickets, frogs, scorpions, and strange intestines. We also killed a fish and a frog only to barbecue them later
• We drank goat vodka, fermented mare's milk, liquor with snakes in the bottle, sake, shochu, wine, and beers all over the world (our favourite beer brands are Beer Laos and Suntory). Sometimes, we even drank non-alcoholic stuff, like green tea, black tea, salty milk tea, weasel coffee, water sourced directly from little creeks in the Himalayas, and water coming out of roots in the rainforest
• We met many, many people all over the world. Of these people, 95% were really great, and the other 5% I can't really remember. Selective memory, what a great thing. 

So, to summarise: on our tour, we definitely had the best time of our lives. By far. Ever. Nobody can take this away from us. This leaves us with nothing but to say goodbye and thank you to all of you who have followed our blog, who kept in touch while we were away, and who we met while on the road.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.