About the stats

We have has a lot of requests asking what the stats are really about. Well, we haven't but wanted to tell you straight anyway. Countries are big things with land, people, animals and different kinds of fruit sandwiches in every one; the driving includes what we have done in California, Patagonia and New Zealand - at some point it will be accurate as we have a captain's log; strangers befriended are the people we would like to think of as more that just ships passing in the night - those 46-or-whatever are the ones we know the names of, have stayed in touch with and/or aim to see again - we have met a few hundred people whose names and/or Amazing Race names we have logged but they can't really count as all having been befriended; we really have been counting the bus rides - the longest was 23 hours from Tepic to Acapulco a tyre change - and we have been on over 20 night buses all pretty painlessly... many of the bus journeys have been reallly spectacular - Colca Canyon with a 2000m sheer drop by the roadside and the Lake Titicaca dawn ride in Bolivia stand out - the worst journey was probably getting stuck near Medellin in Columbia because of landslides.

That reminds me. In the Bolivia post I hope the pictures give some idea of how amazing the scenery was. It is a fairly unforgiving place, the least developed country, the hardest to get around, but is also the most diverse and most spectacular IMHO when it comes to natural wonders that we have seen (and I am including NZ, where I write this).