Category: The Journey

After the A is for Awesome and B for Beautiful (Boat + Pearls) posts, consider this a palette cleanser. Something pleasantly astringent and provocative, I hope, so we can taste what’s coming next with more nuance. Because when you do a trip like this, it is striking how fast the ‘awesome’ becomes normalized.

More broadly speaking, it’s intriguing how quickly we humans get habituated to certain experiences over time from the good, bad, ugly, dull or extreme. Our exceptional situation notwithstanding then, there is a pattern here that extends to all, making this worth a short segue.

Following my A,B,C,D,E framework for wonderment, this theme can go in many directions. However to kick this first one off, allow me the indulgence to talk about our beautiful boat. For all the ups and downs we have had in our new build, it is unquestionably a beautiful design and sails so so beautifully.

• won-der-ment (noun) 
• 1: a cause of or occasion for wonder 
• 2: astonishment, surprise 
• 3: curiosity about something 

“Bula, Bula!” as they say in Fiji, the exuberant hello or welcome of this nation, a refrain heard many times a day and this isn’t just a phony put-on for tourists. They really mean it. Translated literally as “life,” when Fijians use Bula as a greeting, they are wishing you good health.

This is a fitting way to start this post given Toby’s path to recovery after his infection, still a work in progress, as septic shock is no joke.

Dear People,

It has been almost seven months— 156 days — since we started our circumnavigation. Not quite half way through, our journey has been astoundingly rich and full so far— too much so to recap with any coherence.  So we will just start, where we are, now.

At the time of this writing, we are on Denarau Island, Fiji. An unexpected detour to a tourist enclave teeming with Kiwi and Aussie families on winter break, Toby required some urgent medical care at a hospital in Nadi Town, the unfortunate outcome of a nasty staph infection picked up in the water at a beach party in Tonga (so we think). Suffice to say, this enforced downtime has got me to the keyboard at long last. And without these tourists, including us, such excellent medical facilities would not exist. 

But before I go any further, let me zoom back out and explain why we have been so bad at this. A dear colleague of Toby’s put it rather bluntly: “man, it’s a good thing you’re not an influencer because you suck at it!” So what’s the deal?