You are home again and safe. The burdens of the day are lightened.

Toronto, Ontario (October 1, 2002) — May your heart become a thin vein of copper. May you become an antenna crying though the night for sounds thin spun by space and time. May yours be a melody of absence: the sucking and sobbing of flowers, the dance of water seeping upwards. May you laugh, may you laugh, like hail falling on a tin roof, may you laugh. With the roar of silence in your heart, to lose again what you’ve found out, may you laugh.

This is an post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: On Returning Home" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Gwangju, South Korea

Gwangju, South Korea (June 6, 2001) — Leave me alone. I’m planning my escape from this refrigerator where everything is three days passed the best before date and I’m ready to sell my travelling companion to the military police for a glossy magazine and a plane ticket home. I hope she doesn’t get wise to the plan.

Where’s my passport? I need it to reclaim my fingerprints that they’ve sequestered at the immigration office so I wouldn’t smudge the windows that they’ve polished to keep me out.

Leave me alone. I’m planning my escape from this strange aquarium where the fish swim upside down and keep to themselves mostly. I’m ready to sell my travelling companion to the military police for some good Canadian tobacco and a phone call home.

Forget the passport. I need to put some distance between this country and my mind, even if it means I have to leave my fingerprints behind.

This is a post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken! NYEDAJHS7K42

"Looking Back: Korean Homesick Blues" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Back of a Tuk Tuk, Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand (September 13, 2001) — You move. You move without remembering the ones you’ve left. Without a tether, without an anchor to your bed back home. You move. You have no need for memories. You have the deepest need for maps. In the overstuffed drawers of travel agencies you live a post-modern epic where nothing happens  This is how you live—a pause punishable by death. With the urgency of instinct, you move against the currents of the day. Your blood thirsting for oxygen. You move. You move without remembering the ones you’ve left. Memories of home itching like a phantom limb. You move.

This is a post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: The Deepest Need For Maps" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

There is so much to see and do in Japan, contrasting between amazing cultural encounters to the more coloruful, neon light–filled chaos.

Tokyo, Japan (September 10, 2002) —In Tokyo’s veiny dusk vapor trails become rope in the fingers of my mind, criss-cross the darkening sky; a cat’s cradle of water droplets connects continents thousands of miles distant and hums with vibrations of home so vivid had I arms strong and delicate enough I would draw them down, hand over hand, until mist lay in bales all around and I saw, corporeal and magnificent, the lights of Vancouver and farther on, the luminescent caps of mountains bent in the slow marriage of continents.

Canada, you’ve never been so much mine; never so close, never so far away.

"Looking Back: Tokyo, Japan" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

The Salt Box cottage began to appear around 1870. The name Salt Box came from the design derived from an actual box of salt with the cedar roof short in the front and very long in the back. It was a typical house of the era, quick and easy to build. It was either a two story or a story and one-half, as pictured above.

Elizabeth J Cottages, Bonavista, Newfoundland (July 5, 2008) — The cottage, shot through with sun, beckons us awake. Where there was one are now two icebergs—the night having grown a twin, imperceptibly spinning in the light gravity of morning. The thin form of Kate moves behind the windows, each a mouth set in a square jaw. Planter boxes like curled lips sprout thin beards of hearty flowers, their thin tendrils reaching toward the sky. The smell of bacon rides the back of the wind rolling in from the sea—thick, but sharp. On the rocky shore, ancient rocks crawl in millennial advance from the bay, reptilian bellies flat in the silt. The tall grass, punctuated by butterflies, rolls in the breeze and genuflects in the sun’s slow arc. The butterflies ride the breeze, their wings like fine parchment pierced with windows of mica and sturdier than one might think. We close our eyes on exhale and confuse these moments into lifetimes.

This is an post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Elizabeth J Cottages, Bonavista" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Few images created in the last century are as instantly recognizable as the official portrait of Mao that hangs over Tiananmen Square. For decades, the 15-by-20-foot oil painting has served as a national icon. This is the same image that, in the 60s and 70s, was widely reproduced and displayed in thousands of homes, schools, factories and government buildings.

Beijing, People’s Republic of China (April 26, 2002) — As I sit in Tian’anmen Square eating a Big Mac and drinking a Coke over the nucleus of a country’s rupture, I enter the world as a tourist; am become invisible like the dead son of an Inuit tribe that welcomes its children into the source of meaning by naming them through their environment. Snow, Sun, River—names in which are conjoined and condensed a person whose past and continuity coincide with the word until the child dies or is married off and the word is never to be repeated or refound. What word did you stop repeating when you learned of my absence?

This is an post from our collection entitled ‘Looking Back’. It includes an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Tiananmen Square" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Lumpinee Boxing Stadium is located in Bangkok and is considered the home of Muay Thai. Contests are held on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

Bangkok, Thailand (August 29, 2004) —There is no spectacle in Bangkok like the boxers—their slick bodies like blown glass fresh from an oven. What people there are here were drawn from the limbs of Bangkok by the asthmatic breath of the park to settle here in Lumpinee Stadium. Cement pillars curving upwards like ribs, roof hung with corrugated steel, faces surfacing in the cigarette haze like canvases on deserted easels—we are tourists lost in the anonymous crowd. Every Saturday, automatic with instinct, the boxers paint a dance of blood.

The bell rings and the crowd explodes like a searing jackknife into the large loose sphere of night. In the sudden vacuum of time, the boxer’s bodies play themselves backwards—every bruise rewinding itself into an indigo flower pressing its face outward against skin. The spectre of their bodies on the canvas: Rorschach blots for our looking and laughing.

In the aftershock of the fight, comes a sigh not of relief but exhausted panic. No champion, but a man leaning into the crowd, madly shuffling through the faces trying to determine through the threadbare smoke—forensically—who it is he once was.

The boxers gone, their fight gone out, the spent crowd pour through the stadium’s ventricles and course home through the subways and skytrains—moving homewards to be repopulated by sleep and oxygen. Bangkok sighs and rolls over in her sleep.

This post is part of a series on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ . This series is comprised of an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001, when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Lumpinee Boxing Stadium" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Midday along Paharganj Street...

Delhi, India (August 10, 2002) — Hunger is that dizzying space between sunrise and sunset when her body, gutted by poverty, slides through Delhi’s traffic in a repeated rehearsal of disappointment until her eyes, like collapsed suns, lulled me into their orbit, and I imagined some beauty in the event while forgetting my breakfast of ham and eggs, coffee, cigarette.

"Looking Back: Paharganj Street" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Beras Terbakar: There is nothing much that one can see here, apart from the signage, but the story attached to this place is magical.

Beras Terbakar (The Field of Burnt Rice) is located on the grounds of a house belonging to Ku Halim bin Ku Hassan in Kampung Raja at Padang Matsirat—the ancient capital of Langkawi and the site of the island’s rice granary. During the Siamese invasion of Langkawi in 1821 the Chieftain of Langkawi, Dato’ Karma Jaya, ordered the granary to be burnt in order to starve the enemy. Legend has it that remnants of the burnt rice can still be seen today at the very spot of the burnt granary (known as Beras Terbakar).  

Langkawi, Malaysia (September 23, 2004) — Here is a paddy. Rice aslant in the thin acrid air of memory. Rather than let our enemies eat, we burnt it all down. It is said that the monsoon still sometimes bring burnt grains to the surface—such is the quality of water that the distinction between remembering and forgetting is lost. From the green painted balcony I can hear the tide bending its tremulous knee in the lyric of the Andaman—the dead coral surfacing with its rough nouns churned by the swell of verbs and the murmuring pools giving up their sins. I have ground the beach to glass search for what it was I wanted to forget.

"Looking Back: Beras Terbakar" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Palm fronds lined the beachfront trails on the island of Langkawi...

Langkawi, Malaysia (September 21, 2004) — Where the manicured fingers of the beach fan out across the asphalt, we tourists sing our cicada songs—seventeen years in the dark earth of our jobs. In one brilliant summer, we discover our world and wheel in the blue swarm of sky, burying our mandibles in every place blessed by wind. We sing during the heat of the day in all-inclusive harmony. But we hold out for a room upgrade with the recycled air bubbling in our blood: the promise of air-conditioned transfer to the hereafter and a welcome drink. Deep in the longboat shade, the specter of a grin surfaces like a dead fish.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Langkawi" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

On the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral...

Saigon, Vietnam (June 22, 2002) — On the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral, where Saigon’s ceaseless traffic flows, preternaturally—a murder of a million crows—I withdraw into the shadow of a high-rise. Out in the sun, the poor spear tourists with their eyes, who try, in vain, to neither notice nor react. Next to me, out of my reach, a woman fixes her makeup in a cracked compact: her lipstick dries the color of fear.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Notre Dame, Saigon" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Iceberg off Bonavista, Newfoundland

Bonavista, Newfoundland (July 2, 2008) — Where there were two, there are many—a multiplicty of icebergs worn down like chalk against the blue sky. The remnants of icebergs punctuate the horizon. Black-winged gulls wheel in the morning, lit from below by the morning sun. The only sound was that of the sea lapping against the shore—a soft sucking sound—intimate, like that of a fisherman’s knife cutting into the belly of a fish. Further out, a soft boat orbited by gulls. And the icebergs—untethered and rolling in the bay like upturned bowls—white porcelain run through with stencils of inviolate blue. Broken apart, congealing in the cold of the night only to be eviscerated by the morning sun. Wounds filled with rainwater and softening under their own weight in the July morning, turning and groaning in the surf.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Bonavista Iceberg" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Varanasi is a holy city in Hinduism, being one of the most sacred pilgrimage places for Hindus of all denominations.

Varanasi, India (July 22, 2002) — On the platform lanterns gather back the night with thin fingers of light and young girls pass with slow step among the benches selling cigarettes and old coins. The passengers are at a loss impatiently smoking and swatting at flies. The night train to Varanasi is overdue and we are all hungry for a little more geography in which to consider our own dissatisfaction.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Night Train To Varanasi" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Route 13, Northern Laos

North of Vang Vieng (July 1, 2002) — It’s eight hours’ drive from Vientiane to Luang Prabang Town, in the heart of northern Laos. Only the thin grey scar of Route 13 breaks the rolling landscape of jungle and sky. The scene was humbling, immeasurably majestic, and I found myself smiling bemusedly at Graham Greene, whose Lawless Roads I had just been reading before I looked out the bus’ window. Decidedly not a Romantic, Greene judged a landscape by its value to man: “Nature appals me,” writes Greene “when unemployed or unemployable.” Romantics of course, would have loved the scenery in Northern Laos, finding God in the remote and verdant jungle fronting the rocky craigs thrust upwards into the underbellies of soft, white clouds. But it was obvious neither God nor man dwelt here any longer—just the memory of man rolling onwards in the surfaced road and the memory of God, pushing in on all sides through the fecundity of the jungle.

"Looking Back: Route 13, Northern Laos" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Choung Ek Killing Field

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh (June 26, 2002) — In an old high school in the middle of Phnom Penh stand the remains of S-21, coloured delicately in moss and mildew. Ranges of makeshift cells—collapsing wood and mortar walls bisecting old classrooms—lay one against the other, empty and swept out. This prison was hastily built after the Khmer Rouge marched on Phnom Penh and it’s been left as it was soon after they abandoned it. Cells everywhere with their empty horror enclosing the hollowed out shells of genocide—bare iron beds and car batteries and spades. In the courtyard large urns overflow with rainwater and settled in their bottoms like silt lay drowned out confessions. Blood stains colour the floors and in glaring juxtaposition, the remains of half-finished algebra lessons fade in coloured chalk on the walls.

In yet another building once housing an administration office (there seems like there are hundreds, but in reality four or five) where the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of their immeasurable brutality, the numbered photos of prisoners hang from all four walls. Their eyes, behind a grime of dots, form star-maps of fear, confusion, and despair. And in each photo the prisoners carry with them their deaths, like tents, to be pitched in the Killing Fields.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Angkor Wat

Phnom Penh (June 28, 2002) — Phnom Penh is spill of whitewashed buildings heaped together on the shore of the Mekong like bones bleaching in the sun… Under the high eaves of the Foreign Correspondents Club sunburnt tourists divine their futures in the runes of ice-cubes settling in sweating glasses… Suspended in the ground, fleshless skulls shine inviolate like stars arranged in fallen constellations…

Roadside children collect lotus flowers to weave into bracelets while, feet away, latent and unseen, landmines lay underground like knives asleep in kitchen drawers imagining meat… Roots of Banyan trees slowly and incessantly cleave apart the carved-sandstone knees of celestial nymphs… A monk—his back bisected by the soft evening light—wraps a headless Buddha in an orange tunic.

"Looking Back: Cambodia" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Saigon traffic infused with beer and night...

Saigon (June 22, 2002) — Delightful and disconcerting, Saigon is Vietnam on amphetamine. The ante’s always up in this city: where Hanoi slows down and shutters its windows, Saigon is just getting warmed up. Take, for instance, Notre Dame Cathedral: lit up at night in neon, it looks more like it holds a nightclub in its bowels than a nave. Saigon sprawls—not lazily, mind you—in all directions. And here, like elsewhere in Vietnam, yet more fiercely and savagely, cyclos and motorbikes dart through the streets, like swarms of two-stroke bumblebees spitting exhaust. They move en-masse, as if they possess—like insects or birds in flight—the preternatural ability to sense in which direction the congregation will move. And like this they continue, and occasionally one or two will fall off to drone down back alleys or splash through puddles and disappear.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Saigon" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Wat Visoun

Luang Prabang (July 6, 2002) — I went out this afternoon and walked through the streets of Luang Prabang, shored up by a lunch of pho (noodles and vegetables), and into the Talat Dala—a market smelling of peanuts and burnt rice. On a hill above rose the “That Chomsi”—a two hundred year-old stupa, shining in the sun like a pregnant lotus blossom. All around lay French colonial edifices—interspersed with more traditional Lao architecture—and beyond that, silent and melancholy, the Mekong rolled on towards Vientiane, carrying with it fractals of the afternoon light. But there’s nothing to connect Luang Prabang with Vientiane. They belong to different worlds. Luang Prabang exists as, writes Marthe Bassene, “a delightful paradise of idleness . . . the refuge of the last dreamers”. At dusk, motorbikes buzz lazily through dirt avenues, lit from above by fluorescent bulbs that flicker onto the street through insistent moths; the sky glitters like gold-leaf and pink clouds hang low over the shoulders of the mountains that surround the city.

"Looking Back: Luang Prabang" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Huc Bridge, Hoan Kiem Lake

Hanoi (May 26, 2002) — Out of Buddhist altars and herb sellers blurred into hemivision. Out of old men begging for the tourist dollar, their faces as pinched up and scarred as a tractor tyre lashed to a pier. Over St. Jospeh’s Cathedral and The Huc Bridge. Out of tinbox makers and gravestones giggling past my doorway. I, sitting at the vortex of this carousel, weave butterfly nets of words with which I chase down the barefoot beauty of the women curling through traffic. The memory of their faces as impermanent as a fragance.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

"Looking Back: Hanoi" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!

Royal Lao Classical Dancers

Luang Prabang (July 3, 2002) — Beautiful and remote, the Lao Royal Dancers moved sedately across the floor of the Royal Palace Hall. Behind them, the walls were covered in shards of colourful glass—arranged in scenes of village life and Laos legend. The dancers were re-enacting the “Ramayana”: their feet moving in short, thoughtful steps; their arches curling and lifting them; their perfect postures and steady unmoving chins; their arms like the necks of swan, rolling and dipping; their gracefully arranged fingers—their bodies entire moved in measured, fluid, concert. As the sun moved below the mountains, the room shone scarlet and rose and had the dancers not persisted in their careful movements, I would have thought them subjects on a wet canvas, their forms outlined in thick dollops of colour and the whole room churned by an artists’ brush.

"Looking Back: Royal Lao Classical Dancers" is a post from Two Go Round-The-World. Join Kathryn and Daniel as they plan, prepare and pack for a year-long RTW trip! Ready to dive in? Click here for a few easy ways to stay connected with us!