Late last year my beautiful fiancée Drea and I decided to take six months off to travel the world as off-the-beaten path as possible. We had been thinking and talking about it for a long time and we finally decided to pull the trigger. Our flight leaves in less than a week and things are getting really crazy as we approach the starting line. On March 4th we start with two months in Nepal. We’ll be doing a 35 day trek through the mountainous mecca of the Annapurna Circuit and the Annapurna Base Camp. We’ll also be trekking up through the Upper Mustang region. Mustang is a completely isolated ancient Himalayan kingdom within Nepal that’s super hard to get to but is ‘what Tibet used to be.’
Then we skip over to Addis Ababa for six weeks in Ethiopia where we’ll be scarfing down delicious injera and wot, drinking coffee from its ancient place of origin, trek two different mountain ranges and explore the ancient rock hewn churches of Lalibella.
From there we head to Sri Lanka for six weeks where we’ll be munching on mouth-watering South Asian cuisine, visiting tea plantations and elephant orphanages, relaxing on beaches and climbing to a mountain-top temple barefoot for the sunrise pilgrimage.
We finish the international portion of our trip in Sumatra we’re we’ll slurp down spicy Padang curry from its birthplace, search for orangutans in the wild, scramble up volcanoes and dive the untouched reefs of Palau Weioff the tip of Aceh.
Finally we return to the US to attend Burning Man as part of the LEGO Truck camp (this year’s camp theme is ‘Cargo Cult’). Then we’ll spend the rest of September visiting family in Vancouver, British Columbia and Cali, Colombia.We would love to see friends along the way so let us know if you want to drop by in any of the destinations on our itinerary.
It was a long process to plan the trip, especially given that we’re both very professionally driven and needed to juggle a whole host of factors to pull it off. I’ll be doing a series of posts here that lay out what went into making the trip a reality and that chronicle our adventures along the way. Drea will also be documenting our (mis)adventures on her awesome new blog so make sure to check it out regularly too: www.dreacastillo.com