Apologies, Apologies...In a Nutshell

I realized from a few recent emails that by fading out on this blog, we actually left many people in limbo worrying about us. Did we make it? Did MinWah get eaten by a lion? Did Quinn die from malaria? Did the lot of us get kidnapped and held for ransom? WHAT IN THE WORLD HAPPENED TO US?!!!

Now, you can take a few deep breaths and put yourself at ease. Because WE MADE IT! Though we all had different ways of making it, we all made it safely back to the US, and back to our respective lives.

I will hopefully, in shah allah (God willing), be writing stories about our African journey in retrospect. They will be posted here.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who supported us; it meant the world when we were stuck in the most daunting places. So, if you're bike touring and just happen by...

Much love,
MinWah



What Happened to Us (in short)


Nate and I arrived at Port Said, the Mediterranean Sea at the mouth of the Suez Canal, on Aug 6, 2009. Then we did a little musing about in Ras el Bar, the mouth of the Nile River. He wrote about it: matembezi.blogspot.com

As you know, Karen went home in April. She had been thinking about going home since Malawi; she wanted to spend some time with her family before she started grad school in the fall. Then in Dar es Salaam (capital of Tanzania), she sprained her leg and decided to fly home.

Quinn got malaria in Tanzania. He had been sick for 3 weeks before we actually found out. After he recovered from that, he started to think about bike touring in Europe instead, where he could visit friends for the summer. He knew the section through Northern Kenya was going to be on rough road. Would he want to relive pain when he's just recovered from malaria, and already gone through his rite of passage on his Alaska-to-Argentina trip? Ironically, when we reached Nairobi, he found out he got malaria again, and decided on Europe.

Orian left us at the head of the Bad North Kenya Road; he hitched a ride straight to Ethiopia. Since Karen wasn't in Africa anymore, he wanted to get to Egypt in time to fly home for their anniversary. He figured he'd skip trudging through bad roads, because like Quinn, he felt he already went through his rite of passage on his Alaska-to-Argentina trip. He had to take some buses through Ethiopia and Sudan in order to make it. But what a trip, Nairobi to Cairo in 6 weeks!

Sometimes, I wish I'd taken a bus through some parts of Ethiopia too! I wouldn't have been so mentally drained by the time we entered Sudan.

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Where We Are Now

I am back in New York City with my parents, although I travel frequently to Boston for my job search. Nothing has amounted to anything yet, but I have had a few first round interviews, and that's a start. I'm trying to follow other, more creative interests in the meantime...(like urban farming and fixing bikes in order to nurse my withdrawals from New Zealand and bike touring)

Karen is getting a Master's in Building Technology at MIT. She's very happy with her program. She's studying water flows in cities and gets to go to South America in January to study archaeological sites!

Orian received a Gates Scholarship to pursue a PhD (building high efficiency diesel engines) at Cambridge University in England.

Quinn just landed a temp job in Alaska, working with his parents at Boeing's missile defense site. He's starting college in California in January.

Nate biked back to Wisconsin from New York. I think he's spending time with his grandparents and looking for a job as a writer.