Bananas Don't Travel Well

Sunrıse at Nemrut DağıWe are Chris Bolduc and Nicole Hopper, and this is our travel website. Chris is a web programmer and Nicole is an energy policy researcher. Although we are both from Toronto, Canada, we have called San Francisco home for the last six-plus years. Both of us were born in the year of the rat.

In May 2007, we gave up our apartment and our jobs, and began a year off to travel. For several years, we had toyed with the idea of taking a long trip together. We traveled a lot in our early twenties, both individually and in tandem. Although we'd been living away from home for almost ten years—in Taiwan and San Francisco—we had been relatively settled, with increasingly responsible careers and all the money and stress that entails. Living abroad meant that our vacation time was often spent visiting home, and our forays to other places never lasted more than a few weeks and were more about trying to escape than any real exploration. We missed having the time to travel long enough to really unwind, and we also felt we'd lost some of the perspective that our early travels had instilled as we became more complacent with our middle-class existence.

World events were also a great motivation for doing this trip now. The effects of climate change are permanently changing the world—trekking in the Pamirs will be an entirely different experience without glaciers. We fear even more catastrophic changes to geopolitical and humanitarian landscapes in the coming years, both from climate change and the economic impacts of rising fuel prices. While we have chosen careers that—we hope—are part of the solution, not the problem, we see that the stage is set for interesting times. While in a sense we are on a mission to "see it before it's gone," we recognize that change is ongoing and nothing is ever what it once was. Overall, we are optimists in that we believe in the goodness and humanity of most people, no matter their culture or circumstances, and while we appreciate the preservation of culture, we respect the desire of people to modernize. Unfortunately, modernization all too often comes with a loss of culture, although we believe it need not be so.

In sharing our experiences, we hope not only to stay in touch with family and friends, but to reach a wider audience. Our trip along the silk road will take us through a large swath of the Islamic world. Despite the efforts of the media to vilify Islam in recent years, we believe the vast majority of Muslims to be good people and are approaching this trip with an open mind. We hope that our experiences will bear this out, and that by sharing them we can play some small part in helping dispel the negative portrayals that are so common in the West.

But at bottom, let's not forget that we are doing this trip for fun!
So here we go!