Traveling with Parents

 

So I realize that I only posted once on the blog last year and that means I probably only have to post once this year to keep the habit going. And my dad keeps asking me to write stories I tell him for the blog, and he’s also asked me to send him the photos I took in Guatemala (which I have not yet done), because that is where we went to celebrate him arriving at his 70 year of life. We were supposed to go to Malta, but his wife, my mother, decided that she has spent to many hours of her life on trans-Atlantic flights and too many wakeful jet lagged nights. So she plotted against us and convinced Dad that Guatemala would scratch his wanderlust itch and fulfill a life long dream while achieving her goal of joining in on the fun without changing time zones. She did an impressive amount of work (one conversation) to convince him and then he spent a lot of time on the internet planning the trip. So in the end, Mom and I went on the trip having mostly no idea where we would be visiting, but trusting to Dad and the youtube videos that he found interesting. My contribution was teaching them how to use airbnb and Uber, using my international sim card, and my transaction-fee-less atm card. I also bought a couple of interesting books on Mayan civilization, which Dad and I read while we were wandering their old empire.

I will not write about each place that we visited, but Dad planned a great trip and I think you should definitely visit Flores, Tikal, Antigua, and Panajachel if you go to Guatemala, which you should absolutely do during your lifetime.

My favorite place we visited was probably Tikal because I have long loved the ancient civilizations and the mystery of the end of the Mayan Empire always piques my interest. Seeing their 4 tallest buildings poking up over the top of the jungle canopy was fascinating, as was remembering that these buildings were hidden for years and almost completely forgotten—it’s hard to believe when you’re down on the ground looking up at them, but when you climb up to the top of the buildings and see the other 3 well over the tree tops but nothing else except trees for miles, you can kind of get it.

Anyway, this is not a travel blog encouraging you to go visit other places. If it were, it is failing. None of you have ventured out to visit me in my various homes around the world, always in peak tourist destinations like South Sudan and Chad. This is a blog to make fun of my parents trying to speak Spanish to Guatemalans and ending up speaking in Indonesian instead…just kidding, it’s not. I already  made fun of them to my sisters who can appreciate it because they also speak Indonesian and enough Spanish to know which is which. My parents spoke excellent Spanish back in the day. They studied in Costa Rica, but unfortunately left just before I could be born there and get a Costa Rican passport, which would have been really cool to have. My mom thinks it wouldn’t have been fun to have a baby in San Jose in the 80’s, but she would have been fine. And now who is suffering? Me. With only 1 passport. (Maybe if I had two passports, I could have had a travel blog…)

Guatemalan bajaj

Back to the language mixing, it is not usually something I do, so I tended to be the one explaining to them that it will not help to yell louder over the boat engine, the driver did not understand you when you asked him what is over there in Indonesian. I will admit however, to pronouncing Spanish words starting out with a French accent on the first syllable but a Spanish one at the end because you actually have to pronounce all the letters at the end of a word in Spanish, which you do not have to do in French. Also, I am fully prepared to admit that my parents speak much  better Spanish than I do. However, I was gratified when the driver asked to speak with me on the phone, presumably because he decided that while my dad understood him better, he understood me better with my limited Spanish vocabulary that was not interspersed with Indonesian words. I was possibly slightly less gratified when he spoke to me on the phone like this “Voy…a…hablar…mas…despacio….” I mean, it was helpful though…

But the good thing is that my travel habits have been developed over the years out of my own parents’ travel habits so we travel well together. We do not want a guide to tell us every single detail he has memorized about every inch of every building we are visiting. We are fine oohing and ahhing in our own ignorance and looking up things that we are curious about later. We like to try new foods and are not afraid of a good street food option. We like to walk and explore. We are all cheapskates but as we get older and realize we can’t take it with us, we spend a little more than we would have back in the day. Dad said, “It’s just a little less for your inheritance later,” which I’m fine with because I would probably have spent it traveling around somewhere interesting anyway. But sorry to the sisters who are also getting less now…

I would also like to shout out to my Mom who is a tiny bit older than my Dad and easily walked over 20,000 steps in a day. All her friends were amazed. She would also ask me questions sometimes like “is ‘apa ini’ Spanish?” (It is not.) I told my sisters because it reminded us of when our grandmother visited Indonesia back in the day and before going in a toilet, she wanted to make sure she was going in the right room, and in her genteel Tennessee southern accent called over to my dad, “Does ‘pria’ mean ‘ladies’?” and he said, “Try it and see!” (It does not mean ‘ladies.’)

Anyway, I’m back in Africa now and the parents are back in the US. We are back to normal life, which means dog walks and church stuff and grandkids (plus all the other volunteer activities they are doing at schools and charities) for them and visa issues, airplane-acquired colds, and emails for me. I did have a fun trip with Ethiopians to Kenya for a conference on fluoride, which might be fun to write about if I can motivate myself to write about it someday. This blog is for my dad, out of guilt for not sending him all the Guatemala photos he has asked for yet. Hopefully this will appease him for a few more months.

In June 2026, they will have been married for 50 years, so I took some romantic photos...

Antigua

Who would guess that minutes before this photo,
they were arguing about who interrupted whom
and who wasn't listening to whom...true love...

Dad loves a good boat trip...

He was very entertained by visiting a village that 
is also called San Pedro...

We walked 22,000+ steps this day in Panajachel-
not a problem for these old guys...

Volcanos and tropical flowers--a big part of our lives... 

Antarctica-Checking Off the Last Continent

Penguin selfie!

 I’ve been promising to write about this for a while because I got back in February and it’s now April. I don’t know what happened, but probably just extreme laziness on my part and the inevitable passing of time that is out of my control. Since I got back from Antarctica/Argentina, I’ve already been in Ethiopia, and I’m heading to Zanzibar on Monday because I’m a long-suffering good friend who would do anything for Claire, including going back to a place I’ve already been. But just this once… I figured before I get on to that trip and then the next one (meetings in Cambodia with Africans coming along—sure to be exciting mix of my Southeast Asian childhood and my African old age hood), I should probably write a few things here so I can tell people I did it and then I can go back to my normal lazy existence. 

I have had plenty of people demand in person stories from my trip, and I’ve shown lots of photos, most recently at an American Embassy function I was invited to a few days ago. It was not at the Embassy, but conveniently in my neighborhood. I know the lady who organized it and she was very upset because the generator wasn’t working at the venue in spite of the fact that it had worked every other day that week. It was probably the first time that most of the fancy Embassy people had to spend an extended period of time without AC, so I think it was good for them ultimately. Anyway, not the function organizer who was understandably busy, but another American Embassy friend asked me to tell her about my trip.

My main quick spiel is that it was amazing, I liked it more than I even expected, not that I didn’t expect to like it, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. There is an other-worldly beauty about Antarctica that Debbie (my go-to, always up for an adventure, let’s make it happen, thankfully organized friend) and I kept marveling at. We were often sailing by mountains that looked like they were painted onto a wall for an old fashioned movie set. We, creative brilliant geniuses that we are, dubbed them “Fake Mountains.” We laughed about how many photos we took of the very first distant iceberg we saw once we were surrounded by them, but we were definitely obsessed with how beautiful and fascinating they were. And of course the animals—penguins, seals, whales, dolphins, albatross—always amazing to see. 

Debbie is a very good photographer and has long complained that I lack her skills. She learned if she wanted me to take a photo to be very specific about what she wanted, and then there was a 60% chance she would get that photo on her phone. I learned that I could leave my hands toasty warm in my gloves and let her take photos that would be way better than any I would take anyway. We planned to share photos and did share some, but not all so sorry about that, but I really think you should just go visit yourself. Or if you want professional photos, there were several professional photographers on our trip who got amazing photos, and I’m sure they’re easy to find online should you want to see an adorable penguin floating on an iceberg or a seal yawning or something.

I realized when I was trying to pick photos
that mostly I have videos of penguins because they are so cute.
But I can never make videos work on the blog so you'll have to make do with photos.

This is the first organized tour type thing that Debbie and I have ever done as we tend to prefer wandering around by ourselves, but we aren’t experienced enough sailors to make it from Ushuaia, through the Drake Passage, to Antarctica, and back. Debbie certainly never would have made it as she was miserably seasick the first day until I made friends with the Indonesian staff working on the boat (yay for that Southeast Asian childhood again!) and convinced her to take the real meds instead of the hippie stickers and bracelets TikTok recommended to her. 

This photo hurts my vanity because I look insane, 
but Ibu Lu was wonderful and I can't find any other photos with her.
We sat in her part of the restaurant every night. She was the best.
Pasti orang Indonesia yang paling bagus!

While I appreciated the nerd lectures on the boat (and Debbie appreciated being able to watch them from the TV while lying down in her bunk) and also the activities that we got to do and not having to drive a boat by ourselves (although I do think I would have enjoyed that), we were not sad to leave the boat and have a few days afterwards to explore Buenos Aires and Colonia del Sacramento (Uruguay). We also had fun hiking to the Laguna Esmeralda in Ushuaia too. We ate a lot of good food and drank a lot of very good beverages and had a lovely time. Thanks, Debbie, for always being up for my crazy trip ideas!

We made it to Laguna Esmeralda and beat the time everyone said it would take.
Had to call our taxi driver to come back early. 

And now I’m going to share a few more photos that you can skim through. Thanks to my friend Lisa who told me that there is a limited number of people allowed on land at each landing site in Antarctica so we knew to get a smaller boat to make sure we made it to land. The limit is 100 people on land at a time. The other people would ride around in zodiacs (inflatable boats) and see wildlife and ice bergs up close and then switch. Debbie and I learned that we are very competitive hikers and need to be the first up any hill or to any Laguna Esmeralda and we don’t suffer slowpokes. We also learned that a lot of determined retirees with varying levels of physical fitness go on these trips and it can be tricky to get around them, but we managed.

Enjoy the photos and pretend you’re just swiping away on my phone like everyone else here did, but hopefully you are reading this from a nice cool environment because it is a million degrees here and we haven’t had electricity in several months now because most of the national electric company’s generators are broken. The Egyptian Consulate closed the other day because they had no power and their back up systems weren't working. Claire and I are going to Zanzibar to enjoy some rain, though Naomi coming from Northern Ireland is hoping for some sunshine. On va voir. 

My trip started out in luxury because I upgraded myself with miles.
Thanks, Sheba Miles, for always bringing the adventure of running all over Bole Airport,
whenever you want to use your miles because only one Ethiopian Airlines employee at a time
knows all the intricate rules of how to use your miles, and you never know where to find him...

On the bus in Ushuaia!

Excited to be in Ushuaia, preparing to board our boat the next day.

Our boat room!

To Antarctica!

Boat lectures

The first iceberg!

Some fake mountains--photos don't so it justice.
I'm not sure if they looked fake because of the quality of Antarctic summer light,
or because I'm not used to sun on snow.

I showed the photos to Moussa, who loves poultry of all kinds, 
and has a "collect them all mentality" owning chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, and turkeys.
He was very interested in penguins and their eggs:
"How can I get one of these? What do the eggs taste like?"
Considering its 46C/115F here right now, I don't think he should try to develop the industry here in Chad.

7 in Sign Language for our 7th continent

Look at this great photo Debbie took--she is truly an artist.

Glad to have each other as apparently lots of people can't find anyone
crazy enough to go with them on this trip so there were lots of single travelers.

We became friends with this cool London girl, which is good because 
before I left Hassan told me that this is a crazy trip that only white people would do.
"What if you get eaten by a penguin or some other dangerous animal?"
I said, "I think I'm in more danger of getting attacked by a hippo that lives near my house
or getting in a car wreck driving around Ndjamena." He did concede the point,
 after I showed him what a penguin is. But he still thought it was a dumb thing to do.
Michelle is Jamaican/British so I showed him not only white people do this.
When I admitted she was the only one of African ancestry and also she's actually British,
he said it proved his point. I would have counter pointed that there were a TON of Chinese
people on my flight back who had all been to 南极洲
but to Chadians nasaras and Chinese are basically the same.

Eating a piece of an ice berg right out of the ocean!

I will say in Moussa's defense:
legend has it that once a tourist stole a penguin from the beach
and stowed it in his bathroom. Maintenance finally broke in and freed it,
three days later once the bathroom stank so much people got suspicious.
They had to turn the boat around and return the penguin to its home.
So Moussa is probably not the only one wondering about breeding penguins.

An old whaling ship, sunk decades ago.

My Aussie friends were so psyched that John Eales was on our ship.
He was a good speaker too. His wife was also lovely.
Of course, I'm a Rugby League fan myself--Go Broncos!
Always cheer the boss's favourite ('u' for Australian) team.

Definitely did the polar plunge. No regrets.
Debbie, of course, tried to swim away, as she is a champion swimmer,
I used skills honed over the 8 years of not having a heater for my shower.
At this point, I wish I had a cooler for my shower because the water comes out hot.
I'm remembering this plunge fondly as I sweat in front of a fan that is pushing hot air around my house.

Cool artsy photo that Debbie took of the floor
in a cool Buenos Aires neighborhood with too many tourists.

Exploring Buenos Aires!

Colonia del Sacremento

Still Uruguay

I convinced Debbie to get matched tattoos:
7 in Arabic script since we met in the Middle East
and visited our 7th continent together.
In this photo it looks like she is the one trying to convince me, 
but I am the bad influence in this case.

Fortunately, she loved it.
Thanks to Norberto!

Fancy alfajor with tea on Debbie's coffeeshop tourism day.
I think she had about 6 cups of coffee in a few hours.
Or maybe that was another day?

Tigre, Argentina where people live by the river and own speed boats.

Tigre

I'll leave you with a couple more iceberg photos: