Heading homewards

So! Less than 12 hours left... That's if the plane leaves as planned. It's been an amazing nine months that somehow simultaneously feels like years and just a few weeks. Everyone's already started asking what the highlights were so here's a run down:

1st= Hiking from yurt to yurt in Kyrgyzstan. Drinking kumis (fermented horse milk) and hot tea as the sun set over the meadows and then cosying into a wonderful warm bed.

1st= Japan (the whole damn country for its great design, sushi, lovely people and wonderful baths but particularly Kyoto)

2nd Evenings full of ridiculously long and elaborate toasts in Georgian restaurants followed by restorative hikes to tiny remote churches.

3rd Endless lovely food and the joys of the open road in Oz.

4th Eating like kings in China and Hong kong, and watching the Olympics.

5th Following tigers on elephant back through the forest in India.

The other common question seems to be whether we wanted to kill each other. Answer: only occasionally... On the whole we ambled along pretty well. Tom would say that I still don't know how to cross the road and I maintain that he gets too enthusiastic about his bartering. Luckily they have price tags and traffic lights back home.

If I start lavishing you with more details than this over one too many gin and tonics tell me I'm turning into an old travelling bore and I promise I'll stop!

Before I go for good (although there might be some more photos if I can be bothered) here are a few more number ones:

- Most embarrassing moment: Not releasing we didn't have double entry visas for Uzbekistan until we'd left its neighbour...

- Worst toilets: India generally and the overflowing one on the ferry across the Caspian, shared between twenty of us for 3 days, some with stomach bugs.

- Best toilets: Japan's automated warming, washing, noise producing marvels.

- Country where we were most photographed by random strangers: Uzbekistan followed by India. What strange albums they must have.

- Most hippies: Pushkar in India and Byron Bay in Australia.

- Most irritating fellow tourist: The guy living in a Japanese hostel who claimed to have pulled his tonsils out with a toothbrush as they were annoying him, to have teeth that fell out and regrew every couple of years, to be making a Kung Fu film and to play in a Japanese jazz band.

- Longest train journey: 36 hours through the deserts of Kazakhstan.

- Most surreal bedroom: An open air bed in the yard of a lady in Aralsk, now miles from the Aral Sea, and a government hotel in the semi ruined palace at Orchha in India with a bath the size of a small car.

- Weirdest food: kumis (see above), barbecued sheep gullet, pig ear and knuckle. We turned down the deep fried baby birds.

- Most ex-KGB moment: when policemen in Kyrgyzstan repeatedly came up to Tom and warned him journalists weren't allowed to cross into Uzbekistan. It happened too many times to be a coincidence.

- Best meals: People 7 in Shanghai, the tasting menu at Circa in Melbourne and fresh sushi 6am from the fish market in Tokyo

- Most persistent song of the trip: Fat bottomed girls and something annoying in Russian.

- Winner of the most scrabble games: Me (but only just which is pretty shameful when playing a dyslexic).

- Winner of the most connect 4 games: Tom

- Winner of the most card games: Hard to be sure as we were well into the hundreds....