Mountains and Miles

Before arriving in Taiwan, we booked our exit tickets leaving from Kaohsiung, the second largest city in Taiwan located at the south end of the island. Originally, we intended to take Taiwan's bullet train down which would have taken just under 2 hours and traversed the west side of the country probably so fast we wouldn't have seen a thing. But after being convinced by Susan, our friend from Granada , that the more beautiful, and of course adventurous side of Taiwan, is the eastern seaboard, we decided to see what we could make work going that way.

This is the most common question we get after “where are you going?”. The short answer is we took what we would for a week of travel, but added a few additional items we felt would make the trip more comfortable. Then we subtracted at least as many items we felt were unnecessary because they wouldn’t. After that, we figured out how to make it all fit into two 55L backpacks.

Well we've booked another 7,470 miles and added a new continent to our list. We landed in Taipei, Taiwan with instant jet lag and a bit of confusion. No we were not confused because it was 4pm after sleeping all night, or because we were stepping off of our first experience on Emirates economy for 16 hours thinking “sure, I’d do that again”. We were confused because for the first time since starting this trip, everything was efficient, easy to navigate, and overall just made sense.

Indian food you say? Why yes, London offers some of the best according to Bloomberg . I couldn’t tell you myself, because we didn’t actually find the time to indulge in this cuisine during our short four day stopover, but that didn’t stop the many restaurateurs from trying to win our business as we casually walked, drank, and bartered for no reason down Brick Lane. We actually ended up enjoying an excellent Turkish meal at Mangal which we did not have to barter for, or at least we didn't try. Afterwards, since we were definitely not hungry and had been catching up with friends at the Off License  (A less costly alternative to the pub which consists of buying beer from the corner store and consuming it "off the premises"...pretty much legal in London) we had no choice but to buy the world's best salt beef bagel sandwich from Brick Lane Beigel Bake .

Although we haven’t actually come close, we feel as if we’ve traveled every square inch of the Iberian peninsula without ever setting foot in the capital. Since the cheapest flights to London we could find were out of Madrid, why not visit this major city? I had visited Madrid before, but never really spent enough time to get a good feel for it. After a half sleepless night on the overnight bus from Porto, we arrived bright and early desperately needing coffee and a siesta.

After completing the Camino de Santiago we were ready for a “vacation.” We took a bus from Santiago de Compostela to Porto, Portugal where we spent an entire week in one place. It was pretty exciting having our own mini-kitchen (Ricardo sure misses cooking), our own bathroom, and just a consistent place for 7 days in a row.