Gap year RECAP!

Hello all!

I'm back to blog after an extended absence. The three months spent in China were filled with camels and new friends and loving home stay mothers. Beginning in Beijing, I spent a week familiarizing myself with my Where There Be Dragons group, reading about the country's recent history, and exploring the neighboring countryside including an unforgettable night on the Great Wall. The second week, our instructors shocked us with cross country plane tickets to Xin Jiang--the northwestern-most province of China. There we became acquainted with the Uighur language and culture in past Silk Road trading posts; journeyed up to see the 20,000 ft Pamir Mountains; then back down to negative altitude in the depressed Gobi Desert where we spent time in an ancient agricultural oasis in the middle of the world's second largest desert. Our next move was southeast towards cultural Tibet. Mosques’ 5x daily prayer calls were replaced with the sounds of prayer wheels turning and monks chanting mantras. I felt the strength of community when I joined a Tibetan family for a week of plowing fields, picking pears, and the endless task of cooking. Other beyond phenomenal moments/days of the first 6 weeks include 20+ hour train rides where my groupmates became family, a crammed camel market, millions of stars blinking down on a sacred lake, sunrises on red mountainsides, days of journaling in grasslands, laughing with maroon robed monks, and the group's impromptu a capella jams.

The second six weeks of China were more static in terms of travel, but not in challenges and growth. We arrived in Kunming, Yunnan where we entered 4-week home stays. The weeks were full of home cook meals, sibling entertainment and sometimes rivalry, family excursions, Mandarin language classes, researching the Mekong, and frequent afternoons lying in our favorite park Cui Hu. The month was interrupted by a trip to southwestern Yunnan's Ruili. There we explored our first jungle, taught English and art classes, and spoke and listened in a Burmese refugee camp. The end of our time together was spent in Gansu—the southeastern most province of China. There we celebrated our growth and friendship as a group and individually on the cloudy fishing island of Weizhou Dao.

Then my independent traveling began, not solo, but with my boyfriend Evan Gastman. The trip started with three weeks in Laos. There we used local water transportation to boat down the Nam Oh River in northeastern Laos. After three days of jungle covered mountains and karst landscapes we were spit out in the UNESCO world cultural site Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of Laos. There, rural life was replaced with days wandering through French colonial streets and dozens of renovated grandiose wats. A night bus later, we toured multiple museums in Vientiane and then a longer night bus south to Pakse. On a three-day motorcycle tour of the Bolivan Plateau national park we learned that water (especially waterfalls with small half naked Laotian children) is the best escape from the 95-degree/85% humidity afternoons. We bused to our last stop in Laos, the 4,000 islands. The border between Laos and Cambodia is lost in small islands—inhabited and uninhabited—scattering the kilometers-wide spread of the Mekong. I felt like I’d found the edge of the world, where time and gravity whirl together and distort all Earthly laws of physics. From the 4,000 Islands we crossed the border into Cambodia and spent a day in a sweaty bus to Siem Reap. Days exploring the mind-boggling carvings and jungles of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were punctuated with intermittent history lessons from tuk tuk drivers, wikipedia, and the personal accounts of our happy hostel owner Bon. Phnom Penh brought the exploration killing fields and a jolting memoir accounting a childhood under the Khmer Rouge. But as horrifying as their recent history is, Cambodia’s landscape and people kept every day positive and illuminated the bright path into their future. Christmas was spent relaxing on an abandoned beach, and the New Year brought us to Thailand. The allotted week of beach time proved to be too much for our ambitious traveling spirits and soon we were exploring Kanchanaburi, a province bordering Burma rich in WWII history. Then came Chiang Mai in northern Thailand where isolation preserved ancient customs far into the 20^th century, perfect for becoming a 21^st century backpacker haven. Rounding out our trip was a week in Bangkok: in the King’s Palace, along the canals, in cooking school, enjoying the eclectic Atlanta hotel, in the hippie Westernized Khao San, and the ultra-modern sky rail and business/art sectors of the capital. On the 15^th Evan flew home to New York, and four days later I followed him back to the US. I spent the last week of January and the first three of February splitting my time between Mt. Hood, the bakery, visiting friends at University of Oregon, Macabee and Sarah visiting HR, and filling college applications. A trip to Boston nailed down my decision to transfer to that city for college and was topped off with a lovely visit with Aunt Anne, Uncle Jeremy, Emily, Eli, and Emma Rose. And then February 20^th had snuck up on me and it was time to meet Megarinski in Santiago. So now this incredibly long, yet brief account of my travels from September to February will come to a close as Megan and I embark on our long-awaited South American adventure. 

Staying safe and having fun,

Jihelah