Thousands of people crammed into Trafalgar Square late last week to congratulate Britain's successful Olympians on their triumph in Beijing.
The reception wasn't so great when, just a couple of days later, we straggled into the very same place on our triumphant return from the Olympic city.
Fair enough, we didn’t strike Games gold, but I reckon our grins were just about as big as those on Team Great Britain as we crossed the finishing line on our Olympic odyssey from Tiananmen to Trafalgar.
Fifty seven days, eight hours and 15 minutes after setting out from the Chinese capital, we made it to London. I was dead tired, wearing the same clothes I’d put on the previous morning and in desperate need of a good washing machine. It didn’t help that our bus was four hours late arriving, after a fire in the channel tunnel meant we had to catch a ferry from Calais to Dover. Or that I was sitting behind a man who has possibly the world’s worst body odour.
But it was strangely reassuring to drive through London’s streets and see shop and restaurant signs written in English again, and later to catch up on all the news that we’d missed on our overseas jaunt. Things have certainly changed in the two months since we’d gone - the world economy has tumbled almost as spectacularly as the balance of my bank account during this trip and, almost as troubling, Pizza Hut has become Pasta Hut (is that just over here?).
It feels like such a long time ago that we’d left London and boarded a plane for Beijing. That flight only takes eight hours – and while flying is definitely faster and more comfortable, this trip has made me realize how many adventures you by-pass as you whiz across the continents on a plane with a free-drink in hand and your head among the clouds.
It’s taken us two months but we have successfully made it a third of the way around the globe back to where it all started. We’ve journeyed on trains, buses, bikes, we’ve walked, caught chairlifts, gone snowboarding, horse riding, and caught boats. We’ve met Mongolian train smugglers who tried to rope us into their caper; got saddle sores from a six-hour horse ride in the Mongolian countryside; been yelled at by surly provonistas on board a Russian train; drank buckets of beer with a bunch of Germans at Oktoberfest; gone snowboarding on a glacier in Austria; nightclubbing in Lithuania until the wee hours of the morning; and ate a silk worm at a Chinese market. And looking back, all of it – even the silkworm, now that it’s safely out of my system - has been a blast.
So after nearly a year of planning, the journey draws to a close. Which means for now, it’s back to the drawing board.
But not for long … Central America, here I come.
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