Ced & Avril’s Bigarsed Adventure UNLOADED!

10/3/07

Hey there friends, family and other furry animals

Well, we are currently sitting in our office at home in Brisbane and we regret to inform you that Ced & Avril’s Bigarsed Adventure Reloaded 2005-2007 has now been UN-loaded and is now over…

…sort of…

When we were in Ghana in Africa a month ago, we received an email that my Grandmother had had a fall in her nursing home, and when they scanned her head, they found that she had multiple brain tumours, and they weren’t too sure how long she would have to live.

Anyway, she is 94 so we were expecting that something like this would happen one day, so I guess we weren’t too shocked by it. But since she and I were close, we made the VERY hard decision to finish the trip early and head home to try and see her while she still had some of her faculties.

It was a REALLY hard decision at the time though, because we were literally 2 days from flying out to Kenya and Tanzania to do some safaris and then into Uganda and Rwanda to do Gorilla tracking, and we weren’t sure whether we’d have the time to still do this and get home before she died…

And although it sounds horrible… as upset as I was about my Grandmother, I was equally upset that we were going to finish our holiday early, because this has been the trip of a lifetime and Ghana was such a shitty country to finish such an amazing trip with… Not to mention that we had been looking forward to doing the safaris and also coming home on the Trans-Siberian railway through Russia, Mongolia and China.

In anycase, we decided to head home after spending a couple of weeks in Dublin and London catching up with friends and doing fun things like taxes… but we also bought return tickets to London, so we have every intention of returning to East Africa before the end of the year and RE-loading our Bigarsed Adventure, so you’ll have to stay tuned.

But at this stage, I think my Grandma will live for a few months longer, so I’ve decided to head back to work since we are chewing up all our money just eating out and catching up with friends… AND because Avril just bought a SHIT HOT supercharged Mini Cooper!!! Check out these pics if you don’t believe how SHIT HOT our new car is!!!

Anyways, coming home has been weird and VERY disappointing.

We’ve actually been so busy readjusting to normal life, that we haven’t had time to reminisce properly, but we’ve worked out that we’ve been away from home for 19 months and have travelled to 28 new countries bringing our country count to 54 or 23% of the world’s countries according to www.world66.com.

We were hoping to have had 60 countries under our belt by the time we got home, but I guess 54 ain’t nothing to be sneezed at either.

But since we know that there are a lot of people out there who have been following our adventures, we thought we’d take this chance to thank you all for following our trip, and especially all of you who we’ve never met, but who wrote to us to say how much you enjoyed our travel writing.

It was honestly a lot of fun writing those blogs and we often giggled ourselves senseless over some of the stupid things we got up to and wrote about.

But it was also a lot of work taking time out to upload photos and write the blogs, so we really appreciated all you guys who replied and said that you enjoyed reading our adventures over the last year and a half… It really gave us the motivation to keep writing and travelling… You guys ROCK… And thanks!!!

However, the blogs aren’t finished yet. I think I’ll write a couple more blogs over the next few months just so you all can get some closure and hear how we’ve adjusted to real life after travelling for so long… so stay tuned for that. And hopefully we’ll get back to Africa later this year so we’ll get to blog another day.

But for our own closure, on the plane home we made a list of all the amazing things that we have seen and done, and we blew ourselves away remembering all the cool shit we did but had forgotten about. So if you want to read it, I have attached this at the end of this blog… purely for show off value mind you!!!

It is actually really hard to put into words all the experiences that we’ve had… and despite there being some tough times, reading through this list, we realised that our adventures have been nothing short of BIGARSED and amazing, so we will definitely miss the excitement of all the travelling.

Anyhows, we are back living at our home in Brisbane, which we are sharing with our house sitters Darlene and Allan until they move into their new apartment. And it was great to see Puddles our cat again although she gave us the cold shoulder for a few days when we got back just to make us pay for running away on her.

But I’ll do another blog about our returning home next week sometime.

For those of you in Brisvegas, drop us an email or give us a call to catch up. Our phone numbers are the same as when we left.

Anyhows, gotta go to the gym now since we are sloppy porkers.

Lots of love and mooshiness

Ced “Home is where the fart is” Chu
Avril “Give me a home amongst the b’um trees” Bowie

PS. Thanks Axel & Lisa for helping sort out our flights home and for letting us crash at your place. And thanks to Gaby for letting us crash at your place too and teaching us a new recipe. And thanks heaps to Donal & Suzy for being our loving family support and letting us crash at your amazing place everytime we were in Dublin. All you guys ROCK!!!

PPS If you missed the link above, click here to see Avril slinking out on our new Mini Cooper.

PPPS OK this is our list of cool things that we’ve have done this holiday…

• We partied like teenagers in Buenos Aires
• Jumped over to Uruguay for a seafood meal
• Rockclimbed up the Sugar Loaf in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
• Swam with hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
• Explored archaelogical sites near rebel areas in Colombia
• Climbed active volcanoes in Nicaragua
• Shopped and chilled out in Panama
• Had the cockroach experience from hell in Cuba
• Watched my cousin get married in San Francisco
• Saved a kitten’s life in County Cork, Ireland
• Watched the Festival of Lights in Lyon, France
• Took the Glacier Express train across the Swiss Alps
• Hopped over to Liechtenstein just because it was there
• Ended up in a police station in Tatooine in Tunisia after fighting with our guide after touring Star Wars sites
• Learnt to snowboard in Quebec
• Accidentally learnt that diesel cars can run on petrol in Sicily
• Got blessed by the Pope in Rome
• Snorkelled in-between tectonic plates in Iceland
• Island hopped in the Greek Islands
• Took a hot air balloon flight over the Cappadocia region in Turkey
• Watched Australia Vs Brazil in the World Cup in Munich
• Cycled with friends from home through pouring rain to Monnikendam in the Netherlands
• Shopped for really cool music in Berlin
• Discovered Alfonsa Mucha, the famous Czech art nouveau artist in the Czech Republic
• Had Avril’s birthday with friends from home on the banks of the Danube in Slovakia
• Saw the Pixies and Stereo MCs play at the Nuke Festival in Austria
• Hydrospeeded down an Alpine river in Slovenia
• Sailed for a week with friends down the Dalmation Coast of Croatia
• Ate chocolate and saw the Tapis Des Fleurs festival in Belgium
• Went shopping for designer clothes in Luxembourg
• Moonwalked with pilgrims in Fatima, Portugal
• Shopped our ar’ses off in Barcelona for punk clothes
• Went to Andorra just because it was there
• Chilled with friends in New York, checked out the Macy’s day parade and indulged in a new digital SLR at the huge Thanksgiving day sales in NYC
• Got to attend the prestigious Festival Au Desert in Timbuktu, Mali
• Ate a truckload of road dust in Burkina Faso
• And finally… we almost got attacked by Baboons in Ghana

The End! We ROCK! AMEN!