Dahna: Homesickness: Symptoms: feeling isolated, dis-connected, alien, unknown, invisible and lonely. Perhaps slight anxiety and just a sense of a general anti-climax. It can make you become strangely and uncharacteristically patriotic and start to think warmly of things that you would formerly have ridiculed, or atleast not even given a thought to. Causes: perpetual itchy feet that lead one to foreign destinations likely to trigger the illness. If the affected person happens to like hot climates, he or she is more likely to suffer the illness if he or she travels to a cold destinati [View Full Entry]

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Update on spitting on the streets: no, not so many people in North Vancouver seem to spit on the street. Other random notes and observations since I last wrote: · Canadian drivers are much more courteous to pedestrians and cyclists than drivers back home. They all overtake bikes properly - even at risk of having head on collisions with oncoming traffic. And they stop at roads to let you cross. · The minimum wage here is hideous. $8 an hour! It has not changed since 2001. It has not even kept up with inflation. It makes the poverty line look [View Full Entry]

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We finally met up with my relative and fellow adventurous spirit, Colin. We have decided to participate in his next big adventure: an entirely unsupported human and animal powered trip from China to Africa crossing through Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: mmm… it has been a while since my last blog entry. It’s a little harder to write regularly now because we are in that limbo land somewhere between travel and normal day-to-day existence. Now that I have found myself a job that involves sitting infront of the computer for 40 plus hours a week, the last thing I feel like doing is sitting infront of one in my spare hours. But, since it is a rainy Sunday, I thought I’d take the time to put in a quick entry. I’m becoming a bit addicted to this blog thing. I confess. [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: Even though the official Squamish climbing season had not yet begun, and most sensible people were still playing on the snow, Jono and I could not ignore that wondrous piece of Granite any longer. I just had a battle with Microsoft Word, which kept trying to make Squamish in to squeamish. We caught a Greyhound bus out to the township of Squamish and stayed in what used to be a hostel aimed at climbers, which even had its own indoor bouldering cave. The hostel has changed owners, rooms have been painted pretty colours, the bouldering cave is now a storage [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: People talk about how hard the whole job searching thing can be on your ego, but I have actually started enjoying writing about how good I am and what I have done over and over again. I go to sleep like a new age positive thinking guru, chanting “I am an excellent communicator. I am highly organized. I work well under pressure. I enjoy deadlines….” Etc. Over the next couple of weeks we did manage to get a few blasts of fresh air and make some spaces between selection criteria’s and cover letters. I can’t quite remember specific dates now, [View Full Entry]

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Jono: Well it is about time I actually contributed to the Jono and Dahna blog. So here is some babble from Jono... David Suzuki, a resident of Vancouver, describes the city as the most beautiful on Earth. After two weeks in Vancouver I tend to agree, for the most part. An easy five minute walk down Commercial drive to get some groceries reveals a breathtaking sweeping panorama of snow capped mountains. A 20 minute bus trip to the University of British Columbia campus and we find ourselves in a forest of ancient, giant fir trees and desolate, rocky shorelines with amazing [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: Ok, I'm going to have to condense this last leg of our Hawaii trip because we have now been in rainy Vancouver for nearly two weeks and the memory of Hawaii is fading as quickly as my tan. Sooo, here goes my attempt at something between an essay and a synopsis: With only a few days to go in Hawaii, we realised it was time to get realistic. We were not going to be able to kayak along the Kona coast, mountain bike around the whole island, hike up to Mauna Lowa and Mauna Kea summits, watch big wave surfers [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: A point the taxi driver failed to mention, when he was suggesting that we really needed a rental car to get about in, was that the public buses that go from most major towns/areas to most other major towns/areas are free. So, on the 27th we found ourselves sitting at the Hilo bus stop waiting to be taken up to the Volcano National park village. The bus terminal felt pretty seedy. There were quite a few anti drug and anti alcohol signs up around the place, and fairly blatant drug deals going on near the pagoda, just behind the bus [View Full Entry]

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Dahna: Wow. We rode our bikes out to the headland near Hilo today, and walked around the wetlands and rocks. We found one amazing tide pool after another. In a little pool no bigger than five meters squared we saw more fish and coral and sea creatures than we did in the entire cove that we paid money to be shuttled to with a bunch of other suckers. ooops. Sorry, but 'tis true. Sea cucumbers, slugs, crabs, hermit crabs, anenomes, coral... all the better because there was no photo-shopped version that led us there. No film of sunscrean floating on the [View Full Entry]

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