Sarah: People travel for all different sorts of reasons, and with any number of interests. There are photography buffs, who spend much of their trip looking at the world through the viewfinder of their camera; beach bums, recognized by their leathery, hot-pink or nut-brown skin, extra-large sunglasses, and extra-small bathing suits; adventurers, with their zip-off pants and penchant for rock-climbing, paragliding, scuba diving. There are the partiers, the amateur anthropologists, the enlightenment seekers. We’ve met examples of all of these throughout our trip.

But the (probably true) cliché about travel is that the thing it teaches you the most about is yourself. And on that front, Patrick and I have come to a realization about what kind of travelers we are: shameless foodies.

Sarah: One thing I’m realizing is that the things you learn traveling are seldom the things you set out expecting. At the moment, I’m not even talking about philosophical revelations or new self-awareness or any of that, although there has of course been plenty, some of it surprising. Right now, I’m just talking about the random skills and odd bits of knowledge that I’m going to come back with; skills like knowing how to play chess and ride a motorcycle and estimate distances in meters, or random scraps of factoid like how drainage systems function in traditional Chinese shophouse architecture and how swiftlets construct their nests and the definition and mode of preparation of almost every single type of Indian bread.

Patrick: My first entry here put me off writing for a while. I was overwhelmed with how much of my day it took to chronicle my day, and so I went sour on it. But today, Sarah told me, “I’d like to write another entry, but people will start thinking it’s my blog, and not ours. You should really write something.” My reputation thus threatened, now I write. This will not be a comprehensive log of our recent travels. I’m just going to describe the creatures we’ve seen, beginning with the mudskipper.

Sarah: The thing about travelling for a long time is that the phrase "once in a lifetime" can begin to lose its meaning. Each day is a new adventure, and every city we visit is a place we are likely never to see again after we bid it goodbye.