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Bus Burrow

March 29, 2019 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Living five people in a 250 square foot bus, it is safe to say Byers Without Borders is not taking up too much room. In fact, it often feels like we’re training the kids for a future in the submarine corps or as the next occupants of the space station. They even refer to their bunks as sleep pods. Hey NASA how about a couple of space camp scholarships? Or some T-shirts? Just none of that flavored styrofoam you’re calling dehydrated ice cream, please.

What’s it like living like this? If you look to the internet to understand life in a skoolie you’ll mostly find Kondo-inspired posts shaming you out of your collection of concert T’s or countless blogs devoted to making your tiny home look like an IKEA fallout shelter. According to the web, living in a bus will make your life a series #nofilter-moments taking you ever closer to parental nirvana.

The truth is you’ll likely arrive at every destination reeking of exhaust, there will always be a line of people at the shoe cabinet, during winter the walls will weep with condensation and during the summer you’ll roast in your tin-box house. These websites never mention that “free-wifi” means sharing a trickle of bandwidth with foil-hat alien enthusiasts trying to upload their latest online seminar about the panspermic roots of octopus intelligence.

The blogs never mention that your sex life will revert back all the way to high school and those hushed, under-the-blanket encounters when your pants acted as a pair of ankle cuffs. With little headroom and no stabilizers, skoolie sex is like a diabetic dessert, a reminder of how much you miss the real thing.

Life in a skoolie is hard!

But it is also one of our most fun and exciting adventure-experiments yet. The tiny space can be a source of frustration, but oddly it is also one of the bonuses of the bus. Our bus has become a cozy little burrow. Maybe its an evolutionary remnant buried in our limbic systems. But don’t we feel more at ease, comfortable and safe in small cozy spaces? Has there ever been a refrigerator box that didn’t spend the week of glory as a kids plaything? Animals make dens, kids build forts, and Byers Without Borders burrow in a bus.  

Watch a typical Saturday morning on the bus.

https://youtu.be/G7xo8kGOLXw

Filed Under: Adventure, bus life, Bus Life, nomad life, skoolie, Uncategorized Tagged With: adventure, family adventure, happybus, living with less to live with more, nomad life, skoolie life

Retching Record

December 2, 2018 by byerswithoutborders 2 Comments

We’ve been doing this sort of thing for decades, Jen and I. We’ve negotiated transport and driver countless times. You think by now we would have learned to ask if the road is paved the entire way. I guess we’re slow learners.

This weekend’s excursion was to Rwanda’s western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unlike the flat savannahs of the east, western Rwanda is mountainous. So our five hour, partially-paved trip was overflowing with twists, switchbacks, and hairpin turns. Stella beat her Bhutan record and threw up four times during the ride. What a trooper, she collects airsickness bags from all our flights, knowing that we’re likely going to force some nausea inducing adventure on her.

Not helping matters was our driver’s aggressive acceleration-braking, characteristic of those who drive with two feet. Perhaps a technique for our zealous driver to more effectively overtake and pass every bicycle, car, minibus, and lorry that had the affrontery to occupy the road ahead of us. Through a complex semaphore of horn-honking and turn-signal flashing, he would communicate to the other motorists his desire to pass at the next convenient blind curve. Fatalistic drivers like this one always earn me a seat as shotgun. Jen knows that my life insurance has the higher payout. So instead of watching our driver attempt to squeeze three abreast, between an endless succession of buses and oncoming dump trucks, I focused out the side window, at the passing mountains of western Rwanda.

Around 5000 feet, the topography of western Rwanda reminds me a lot of Appalachia. However, being situated on the equator the curvature of these hills are clothed in a very different flora. In place of the mixed temperate forests of NC or VA, these mountains play host to a more tropical variety. Immediately outside of the capital, the land is parceled in an endless quiltwork of gardens, and small subsistence farms. Broad leaved-banana trees surround homes and run up to plots of corn, peas, sweet potato, melons, cassava. There are stands of bamboo, avocado trees, passion fruit vines. The valley floors are all sectioned into rectangled rice paddies. If any naked earth shows it is the red dirt of my childhood in GA. Shades of green and red are the dominant palate of these hills.

After a while I notice something missing. I’ve not seen any draft animals in Rwanda. There are no oxen tilling those paddies, no donkeys pulling carts of produce. I guess it makes sense. Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated country. Labor here is cheap. We’re constantly passing bicycles laden down with small mountains of plantains, sweating men and boys pushing them to market.

Tea Plantation

As we get closer to our destination, the patchwork of gardens gives way to industrial-scale tea plantations. The waist high shrubs are so tightly packed, they make entire hillsides into bright green topiary. The only break, the occasional blue-grey stand of eucalyptus, identifiable by its scent as much as its silvery leaves. The plantations are community co-ops. In addition to a source of local income, these fields form natural barriers around Nyungwe Forest National Park.

Colobus Monkey

Nyungwe is Rwanda’s most important area of biodiversity. 1000 plant species, 13 species of primates including chimpanzee and colobus monkeys, 275 species of birds, 120 different types of butterfly. When we cross into the park we enter a world of nature left to its own business. Now the hills are obscured by curtains of green wild rainforest jungle. Blue monkeys eye us from the roadside and hornbills glide along the valleys. There is so much green it makes a racket for the eyes.

Rwandan soldiers also watch us from the roadside. In body armor, with an impressive array of machine guns, they are a reminder that we are on the border of the DRC. From our hotel room, we can look across Lake Kivu and into that no man’s land of civil war and Ebola. It’s like looking into North Korea, Syria, South Sudan, Yemen. Like standing at the edge of the grand canyon or the top of the Sears tower. It gives you the willies. Some travelers (with a poor sense of self-preservation) actually cross that border tracking gorilla, looking for adventure, hits of adrenalin.

For Byers Without Borders, the hotel buffet was adventure enough. Lily and I spent the majority of Monday prostrate on the cool tile floor of our bathroom in Kigali.

Filed Under: Family, Health Volunteers Overseas, Medical Volunteers Overseas, Travel, travel with kids, Uncategorized, Volunteer Tagged With: adventure, africa, family adventure, family travel, happy life, health volunteers overseas, Medical Mission, rwanda, travel, travel with kids, volunteer oveseas

Asian Aftertaste

June 7, 2018 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Imagine you’re lucky enough to snag a table at The French Laundry, the chef’s tasting menu, multiple courses with wine pairings, ingredients locally sourced and Michelin-level prepared by Thomas Keller himself, and after swallowing the last morsel of dessert perfection you pop up and rush to the restroom to brush your teeth. Unthinkable! No! An experience like that warrants time on the palate, time for savoring. Those exquisite and complex flavors need a chance to imprint themselves. They should be allowed to fade slowly.

Our re-entry to the west is always like this. It takes us a few weeks to allow the recent experience to fade. Time to process, to reorient, to recalibrate to this cultural baseline.

Our last port of call in Asia was Singapore. We had the good fortune to stay with our friends Kim and Tom. Not only did they store a mountain of cold-weather gear for us, while we played in Indonesia, they acted as wonderful hosts and guides in a town that now ranks in our personal top 3 Asian cities.

Everyone has heard how clean Singapore is (yes, it is against the law to chew gum in public) but really, it is insanely clean. My mother’s housekeeping standards are based on the magazine layouts of Southern Living. As a kid she made me vacuum my way backward out of rooms so I wouldn’t walk over the sweeper lines in the carpet’s nap. Even she would be impressed with Singapore. Add in its tropical flora, and it’s understandable why the kids kept saying “I feel like we’re at Busch Gardens”.

Somehow Singapore has found a way to blend English, Chinese, South Indian, and Maylay cultures without watering down any one of them. The best place to see this is in the food hawker centers. Tiny mom and pop owned food stalls specialize in the authentic cuisine of the owner’s heritage. By picking multiple stalls our mealtimes often resembled a buffet at the U.N.  Satay and coconut rice, saag paneer and tandoori baked naan, chili crab and buns, even a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, all laid out on long communal tables and washed down with bottles of Tiger Beer.

Singapore is famous among foodies and was even featured on an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. The celebrity chef called Singapore the most food-centric place on the planet, and our host Kim made sure it lived up to the hype. I had a religious experience with soup dumplings, Jen spent an afternoon sipping authentic Singapore Slings, and the kids discovered the little-known Singaporean Ice Cream Sandwich.

Even food expert Bourdain missed that one. An inch thick slab of ice cream slapped on a slice of psychedelic colored sandwich bread, eaten taco style. It

sounds ridiculous, but the lines at these carts attest that it is ridiculously good. The texture of the bread makes the whole encounter reminiscent of a strawberry shortcake.

Savoring Ice Cream Sandwiches with friends

 

 

 

 

 

 

The food, the mix of cultures, the clean streets, a crime rate that is conducive to 10 year olds taking the subway unaccompanied, Singapore left a taste we wanted to savor.

Even departing Singapore was pleasant. Smiling immigration officers stuffed the kid’s pockets with candy. In contrast, their kevlar-clad U.S. counterparts welcomed us home with scowls and the news of the latest school shooting.

Culture shock makes sense. You’re in a foreign environment, so obviously you should feel a bit off balance. But reverse culture shock, the struggle to feel at home when you’re at home, is much more distressing. You’re in an environment that should feel comfortable and normal, and yet things still feel alien. There are too many cereals to pick from at the grocery store and not enough smiles to help soothe your indecision.

Rob & Sharon’s pet bear/dog Hagrid

For the past month, this has been our little struggle. We’ve felt out of step and misunderstood. Fortunately, we returned to New Haven for another month of work at Yale. Hearing Arabic or Russian on the bus is nothing special in New Haven, and 90% of the kid’s friends here have passports. Also, we have been able to connect with some of our HVO-Bhutan-volunteer buddies. We had

Having fun with Hagrid

dinner in Avon with surgeons Rob and Sharon, and their giant Newfie Hagrid. Charlie and Carolyn had us over for cocktails in Branford. And

Sunset on the beach with the Mizes.

Jen and the kids spent the better part of a week in Maine at Betsy and Randall’s camp. Spending time with these people, friends who understand why we go and how we feel when returning, has helped pull our heads out of the sand. We’re all feeling a bit more at ease. The kids no longer balk at brushing their teeth with tap water.

With Betsy at her and Randy’s camp in Maine.

So we’re back to normal. Or at least as normal as Byerswithoutborders can ever be, which means… moving day!

My month-long contract at Yale is over. It’s time to hit the road again.

”We’re like birds. Wherever we land we build a nest” Given

 

Filed Under: Adventure, Family, Travel, Volunteer Tagged With: adventure, culture shock, Family, family travel, friends, ice cream, Singapore, travel overseas, volunteer

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