What happens after Swaziland?

We’re now in the final 12 weeks of our Peace Corps service here in Swaziland, so I think it’s high-time to brief everyone on the details surrounding our departure. If you don’t feel like reading the below stuff and just want it in a nutshell, here it is: Our Peace Corps service ends on August 7^th, after which we’ll be traveling for a while through Africa, India, and SE Asia before coming home.

First of all, our official “Close of Service” date is August 7^th. Some people in our group are leaving earlier while others are extending their service or are otherwise staying here in Swaziland for longer than that… but we’re outta here after the first week of August. This date is certain.

And we won’t exactly be coming straight back to the U.S. We’ll be taking a more… circuitous… route back home. Without getting into too much detail, we feel it’s important to give you all back home a sense of what we’re endeavoring to do. Maybe you have travel plans that intersect with ours— maybe you’ll even want to make some. Or maybe you’re just wondering when we’re planning to get home. Either way, I hope the following info helps. But since these plans will likely change a bit, we’re not yet ready to give an exact date of return to the US.

After leaving Swaziland we’ll go to Mozambique and travel northward through that country with our friends (also married PCVs serving here in Swaziland) up into Tanzania. Could take as long as 3 weeks in Moz.

Then we plan to go to Zanzibar, an island off the Tanzanian coast. Once back on the mainland we’ll travel northward through Tanzania and Kenya, and then we’ll pause in Ethiopia to spend some time that country. Maybe 2 or 3 weeks in Ethiopia. Then we’ll continue north through Sudan (or perhaps fly over it entirely) and spend a little time in Egypt. This might be sometime in late September.

From Egypt we plan to head east into Jordan (and perhaps even Israel), and fly from Amman (Jordan) to New Delhi, India. This might be in October. We’d like to spend a number of weeks in both the north and south of India. Then we’ll fly east from India to Thailand, which will be a launching point for travels in Southeast Asia—especially Cambodia and Thailand, but also hopefully Vietnam, Indonesia and/or Malaysia. This would all be around December.

Now, what we do after Southeast Asia has not yet been planned. We’d like to be back in the States for Christmas… but we’d also like find an opportunity to travel eastward across the Pacific. So we just don’t know yet. But as always, it’ll depend upon at least 4 powerful and interrelated forces of travel: money, opportunities for further travel, things pressing back home, and the potent force called “what we feel like doing.”

We’ve been given the very unique opportunity of being able to start a trip already halfway around the world, and we really want to make the most of it. So often in life, one either has plenty of time and no money, or plenty of money and no time. It makes big trips really hard to plan. But we have been given the rare gift of having, for a brief window in time, both time and money, and for those of us who love traveling that’s just not an opportunity to pass up. So while we dearly miss all our friends and family back in the States, we’re going to make a few stops before coming home. Hope you’ll understand.

We do not currently have a day or week in mind for an eventual homecoming, but as soon as we do we’ll let everyone know. Until then, let me share what we’re currently thinking. We’d love to be home for Christmas 2010. That said, we’re not prepared to set that as a “deadline” on our travels. At least, that’s our current mindset.

What we are fairly certain of is this: given our chosen path of travel, we plan on making our US landfall in Seattle. And after an initial round of long-awaited reunions in the NW, we’ll travel east to the Quad Cities for the same. From there, our next destination will depend on job/employment developments.

Of course, we’ll keep you posted as all these plans take further shape. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers and support during this rather unique transition. And if you have any travel plans coinciding with ours, or if you want to make some, please do get in touch with us! We’d love to meet up, and we’re flexible.