I can see Russia from my cruise ship! Well, maybe that’s Russia – it definitely will be Russia tomorrow morning. For the next week, we occupy a room on the Celebrity Millennium as it sails across the Bering Sea (with a stop in Russia, if the Russians see fit to let the passengers off. Sometimes they just say ‘nyet’ we’re told, and miss out on all that tourist cash. Bad capitalists…..). This week, I hope to NOT do two things (eat too much cruise food or read the news) and plan to concentrate on one thing: Capturing our Epic Journey in words and pictures, before my memory starts its inevitable…

We were sitting on red ants. We had crossed the border into Laos, and at the local market children had been trailing our every move, pestering us: “Baht! baht!” – imploring us to give them money, pointing to our Diet Coke cans, asking us to buy some for them (we think that’s what they wanted, anyway). As hard as it is for both of us to say ‘no’ when asked to help (especially when the askers are children), we listened when our guide Ranee told us that if we gave in, we’d cause a mini-riot among the poor children. So we hardened ourselves and kept saying ‘no’. But now the…

A ride on an elephant was definitely not part of the plan, but here we are: riding on elephants. Go figure. We knew we were going to visit an elephant rescue camp, but if you’d asked me yesterday if I would ever ride an elephant in this lifetime, that would be a definite ‘no’. So glad we did (Padre even swam with them), and the elephant rescue camp impressed us so much that I plan to devote an entire post to our visit and the camp’s work in the near future, as well as longer posts on topics such as Burma, our visit to the Northern hill tribes, endemic poverty,…