Despite the fact that India has a track record of changing their visa requirements whenever a tourist misses a waste basket with their empty Fanta can — the government had weeks earlier decided that any visitor who leaves India can’t come back for two months, effectively killing our plans for side trips to Nepal or Sri Lanka — it seemed like the process  would be easy enough. If nothing else, there was plenty of information online, because the Indian embassy in America outsources all of their visa processing to a third-party company called Travisa. Travisa seems to be sort of the Cash4Gold of consular documentation. “Just mail us your passports and bank account numbers and power of attorney documents and in — DON’T READ THEM — and in 7-10 days we’ll mail you a visa! Honest!”¹

Even better, Travisa offers a same-day turnaround service. If you make an appointment at their New York office and show up with your passport and completed application and without any sharp objects, suitcases, backpacks, cell phones, iPods, sealed envelopes, food items, or Pakistanis, you can walk out with a visa that evening. This seemed like the perfect strategy. Sophie and I would spend a couple of days in New York, get the visa issues taken care of quickly, then move on to the relaxin’. From our hotel room in Istanbul we booked our flights to New York, reserved our hotels, bought our onward tickets on to Pittsburgh, and made our Travisa appointments on their Web site. Then we finished reading to the bottom of the page.

The page bottom told us, with undisguised smugness, that one of the requirements for a visa is proof of address — a government-issued photo ID or a major utility bill. Unfortunately, we are unemployed, homeless drifters who are using my mother’s address to receive mail. Even worse, we are unemployed, homeless drifters who had not been smart enough to get new drivers licenses after moving out of New York. So we had none of those things.

“Surely a bank statement, cell phone bill, or credit card statement must be accepted,” Sophie said.

“Cell phone bills, credit card statements, and bank statements are not accepted,” the bottom of the page responded, glaring at us over the nose of its reading glasses.

So there went that plan. We had no hope of obtaining proof of address before we arrived in New York. Our only option was to abandon the same-day turnaround and instead get drivers licenses when we arrived in Pittsburgh, and then apply for the visas by mail. The plan was fraught with perils, but there was nothing else to be done. We agreed to give it a shot. The page bottom snorted and fixed itself a martini.

Such perils broke down thusly. We were scheduled to arrive in Pittsburgh late Thursday afternoon 1/14, and then leave again for Turkey early on Wednesday 1/27. Travisa claimed the mail in process took five business days from the date they receive applications. Add to that two days of back-and-forth shipping time. Doing the math:

1. Thursday 1/14: Arrive in Pittsburgh late afternoon
2. Friday 1/15: Get drivers licenses, overnight applications to Travisa
3. Monday 1/18: Applications arrive at Travisa
4. Monday 1/25: Travisa ships passports and visas
5. Tuesday 1/26: Passports and visas arrive to us
6. Wednesday 1/27: Board plane for Istanbul, use new razor-sharp visas to foil underpants bombers

Add to the above the fact that the DMV would be closed 1/16 through 1/18 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, meaning that if we messed up getting the licenses on Friday it would completely kill our chances of getting our passports back in time. Add to THAT the fact that the Indian consulate would be closed Tuesday 1/26 for Republic Day, meaning that even a single day’s delay in shipping or processing would completely kill our chances of getting our passports back in time. We were cutting it close. To use a football metaphor, we needed to perfectly steam that tamale or we’d have giant piles of shit thrown at us by wild monkeys.

Nevertheless, we arrived in Pittsburgh borne by the confidence that comes from ignoring the fact that the plan was doomed from the start because we couldn’t actually get Pennsylvania drivers licenses anyway. See, to obtain a license — which we wanted to use as proof of address–we knew we’d be required to provide proof of address. And Pennsylvania wants all the same kinds of proof of address that India wanted and that we didn’t have. Foiled by our own dereliction!

Luckily, previous experience had by now taught me that it could sometimes be useful to continue reading to the bottom of the page. And at the very bottom of the PA drivers license application, I saw the loophole that would save us: unlike the Indian consulate, Pennsylvania accepts a signed lease as proof of address. Ah-ha! I simply had to purchase and download a lease agreement form and have my mother formerly rent me the room in her house that Sophie and I would be sleeping in. Simple and quite possibly legal! This perfect plan became even simpler when my stepbrother, who’s in the real estate business, happened to have a PDF of a lease form that he could give me.²

Armed with our mostly-not-fraudulent lease, I lay in bed in the wee hours of Friday morning going over the details of my perfect plan. I decided to double-check some facts on the Travisa site, so I grabbed my iPhone off of the night stand and surfed over. The dark bedroom was suddenly illuminated with the eerie glow of this message, pasted in an orange rectangle on the Travisa home page:

Update! 5:58pm ET, Thursday 1/17: All visa applicants must now include photocopies of their birth certificate or school diploma.

The wild monkeys started throwing shit.

TO BE CONTINUED….

1. This reminds me that Cash4Gold once inspired a fit of extreme didacticism in me and my friend Chris P. during which we devised a plan involving a series of TV ads telling people to send us a their gold for cash. We would then mail anyone who responded a dollar and a map to a spot in the Nevada desert where we had buried their jewelry.
2. Honestly I only include that detail because I want to mention that my stepbrother, having been a landlord, has fantastic stories about the incredible lengths tenants will go to to avoid paying rent, including one particular freeloader who claimed that he left the rent money sitting on the kitchen table only to have it suddenly eaten by a passing turtle.

1) Sophie and I spent our planned two weeks in the US busily catching up with friends, seeing family, explaining to our nephew who Donkey Kong is, asking our niece whether her butt hurt because it pinched or because it inched, and generally not relaxing at all. On top of that, with the hardest part of the trip yet to come, we individually started realizing that we may not be as adventurous as we originally thought we were and that we were going to need some time to understand whether we want the rest of the journey to play out as we’d intended.

We of course ignored all of these things until the last possible minute, namely Tuesday 1/26, the first day we’d been alone together since we’d gotten back to the US. We admitted to each other that morning that neither of us was ready to fly back to Istanbul, let alone on to Egypt and India. But it now being less than 24 hours before we were supposed to get on planes for the second half of our non-refundable tickets, we were faced with a serious dilemma. We looked into each others eyes and knew what to do. We went to the Original Pancake House. There we drank eight cups of coffee and decided that it was worth losing a little money to delay our departure for at least another week. Then we set about figuring out the way to make that happen with the least financial consequences. Which brings me to…

2) I’ve been saying for a while that we’ve been massively over budget on this trip, but I’d avoided doing the analysis to figure out how severe the consequences of that would be. During our second week back in the US I did the math. It quickly metamorphosed into one of those Kabbalistic rituals in which naming the right sequence of numbers leads to the stars going out and the rivers turning into Postum. Essentially, it showed that if we’re lucky and very tight-walleted, we have enough money left for about 12 weeks of travel. Which would be great if we hadn’t planned on the remaining part of the journey being more like 24 weeks.

It became clear that we could no longer fool ourselves into thinking that we could jet around willy-nilly with the trip we had planned without it turning into touching down in a country, having our picture taken with the passport control officer, eating a duty-free Toblerone, then climbing on a plane to the next subcontinent. So…

3) We started researching how much it would cost to reroute our round-the-world ticket, and surprisingly discovered that the cheapest way of replanning the trip would be to actually completely cancel the remainder of that ticket and start from scratch with a new, shorter one. In fact, we discovered that we might be able to piece together a series of individual tickets that cost even less than our original RTW ticket.

Armed with that info, we suddenly had the world as our oyster again and felt like we had regained a sense of freedom that had been one of the original motivators for the whole trip. We could get excited about replanning, pare down and focus on where we really wanted to go, leave when we want, and no longer have to deal with the stress of YOU MUST DEPART TOMORROW that had been weighing us down. Then…

4) Late last week, I was hit with unexpected health problems. I am going to be fine, and I’ll write more about them eventually. But the long and short is that they mean we’re going to have to delay our departure for a little while. It’s unclear how long.

So here we are, still in Pittsburgh. We’re enjoying being back in the US, but it’s hard not having a real home and moving back and forth from parents’ house to parents’ house like our moonstone nursery has gone under. And it’s even harder feeling this trip implode and trying to understand my own feelings about the whole thing while watching a dream ram headfirst into reality. But what’s hardest is that I know you’re out there, and you’ve been telling me how inspirational this trip has been to you and how you can’t wait to hear about what comes next. I feel like I’m letting you down. Like I’m letting us down. I don’t like that.

But anyway, nothing’s over yet. It’s just delayed. In the meantime I have jokes about visas I want to tell you, and intricacies of airfare classes I want to explain, and thousands of pictures to make you look at, every one of which is really, really boring, but are worth it for the one of the car that looks like a dog with a rear windshield wiper for its tail.

We’re approximately here, on our last morning in the desert, riding back to the hotel. Most of the time we were out it was just me, Sophie, and our guide Athman (in the blue and yellow), but at camp on the last night we met up with seven other people who all rode back with us. That’s who you can see in the convoy ahead of me.

We’re not cancelling the rest of the trip, just delaying it a little bit. In fact, it turns out we’re only delaying it a week, because visa problems are forcing a week’s delay anyway. India, which is the next up after Egypt, is the first country that requires anything bureaucratic in the way of visas. Our original plan had been to get our visa at the consulate in Istanbul during our week here, which according to all the information they provided seemed easy enough. But last week I decided to see if I could find anyone who’d actually tried it. I did. They failed. It turns out the consulate won’t issue visas to Americans and instead makes you go to the embassy in Ankara. That in itself wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that getting the visa takes about a week, during which time we’d be without our passports. And since most hotels here require you to have a passport to check in, we’d be stuck in Ankara. There’s plenty of stuff we’d like to see in Turkey, but none of it is in daytrip range of Ankara.

We’d already been toying with the idea of a break when I learned that, but it suddenly made more sense. It made even more sense when we realized that, through a creative use of frequent flier miles and American Express points, we could fly home for less than the cost of a week in Ankara. Plus we’d then also be able to avoid having Sophie’s latest supply of medication shipped to us, which will save us several hundred (yes, several hundred) more dollars. Also, we realized that once we leave Cairo, the idea of going home for anything short of an emergency or ending the trip will no longer make much sense, because we’ll be too far afield. On top of that we’ve been having to face up to the fact that out nine-month trip will likely have to be more like seven as our pile of money disappears faster than we’ve expected, so this break just about marks the halfway point.

But really, more than any of that, we just need to stop for a little while and have some normalcy. This trip has been harder than either of us expected, and we’ve both realized that we’ve reached the point where we’re just dragging ourselves from place to place. There’s no point in spending thousands and thousands of dollars on this journey if we’re not going to enjoy every minute of it. So if all goes according to plan, by the time we leave the States again we’ll be so bored that we can’t wait to get back on the road.

And that plan is: on Tuesday January 12, we fly to New York (on separate planes, to save money). We’ll spend two days there sorting out our visas to India, relaxing in the Ritz-Carlton for FREE (Thanks hotels.com loyalty program! Chumps!) and with luck briefly seeing some of our friends (to whom if you’re reading this: we’re toying with the idea of having a get-together in our hotel room on Wednesday involving duty-free liquor, stay tuned). On Jan. 14 we go to Pittsburgh, where we’ll stay until Jan. 27 when we turn around and head back to Istanbul to pick up where we left off.

I can’t shake the feeling that no one’s going to be happy to see us and instead will scoff and say, “What are YOU doing back, quitters?” But the tickets are nonrefundable, so we’re coming home anyway. And we’re going to the Olive Garden.

Our week in Portugal was extremely enjoyable, in that we spent more time sitting on the couch than we did doing all other things combined, which is exactly what we wanted. It occurred to me that Sophie and I haven’t had any real “home” time (which is defined as some combination of cooking, eating, sitting on the couch, watching TV, knitting, playing video games, and/or surfing the Internet, together, and is the backbone of our relationship) not just since we started this trip in September, but since before we moved out of New York at the end of August. It was hard to bring ourselves to leave.

Nevertheless, we hauled ourselves out of bed at 6am on Christmas Eve for a four-hour drive to Algeciras, Spain to catch a ferry to Tangier. And we made it too, despite Spain valiantly attempting yet again to kill us on the motorway, this time with 35mph winds and a rain storm so intense that even driving at 35 mph I still couldn’t see where I was going. And despite a two and a half hour ferry ride that took four because the churning seas kept making the boat go backwards, and despite us standing around in the carbon-monoxide-infused parking deck of the ferry for an hour before someone bothered to let us out.

Someone eventually did, and we went ashore to find Morocco to be the first place on the trip that really made me feel like I’d stepped into a foreign country. It’s something of an attack on the senses, just like the guidebooks say. The best way I can think of to describe the Tangier medina might only make sense to my New York friends, but imagine walking down Canal St. on a Saturday afternoon in June. Except that instead of bootleg CDs the vendors are selling cumin and nuts. And the street isn’t there so the cars just drive on the sidewalks.

Oh also imagine that you’re walking around wearing a cowboy hat and chaps. That’s about how much we stand out here, which means we’re constantly bombarded by the touts and hustlers trying to find us a hotel or restaurant or to give us a tour. (My favorite so far being the kid who asked us, “Where are you from? New York? Boston? Chicago? San Francisco? Washington D.C.? Miami? Seattle? Las Vegas? Arizona? Ohio?”)

It’s all amazing and extremely intimidating and has made me realize that, despite all the time we’ve been gone, we’re just now starting the hard part of this trip: Morocco. Turkey. Egypt. India. Cambodia. Indonesia. Three months in those places. We’re suddenly not in Europe anymore, and I wish I’d prepared myself better.

Anyway, this will likely be my last post until 2010, because tomorrow we catch the night train to Marrakech, where we’ll be picked up for a drive across the country followed by a three-day trip into the Sahara on the backs of camels. I don’t think the camels are wi-fi enabled. So Merry Christmas, if that’s your thing, and happy new year. We’re thinking about you. Send us a message and say hi.

I also have a couple of pounds of salt cod soaking in the fridge right now, enough for two attempts at bacalhau, a traditional Portuguese Christmas dish that we were served at the Douro winery where we spent the night on the way down here after driving through 500km of snow, ice, and impenetrable fog along switchback roads on the side of a mountain without a guard rail.

The point of all this is that right now I’m having such a nice time not doing any of the things that I’ve been doing the last 12 weeks that I might not get around to catching up on the blog like I’d hoped. Also we have the view out of our terrace to stare at (pictured), which takes a surprisingly large amount of time. We’ll see how it goes.

The blown budget’s due mainly to two things: first, we’re not getting off easy on any of the costs that I thought we might get off easy on. Second, and more significant, the dollar is worth slightly less than Showbiz Pizza Place skee-ball tickets. For most of the trip a dollar’s bought about €0.67*, making a Euro is worth $1.50. It’s impossible to maintain a sensible budget when there’s a 25-50% mark-up on everything.

So, we’ll probably shave a few days off of India, a few off of southeast Asia, a week or two off of New Zealand (which we’re okay with because we originally planned six full weeks for a country the size of a handful of Fritos) and a week or two off of Australia, getting us back in the USA at the end of May. Though once we leave the Eurozone things might improve financially, so we’ll see.

Right now, we’re down to our last week in Europe, and we’re getting very sick of doing things. So we’ve decided to stop doing things. We’ve rented an apartment in a fishing village in southern Portugal for a week, starting Thursday. We’ll sit around and play house — cook our own meals, catch up on this blog and the hundreds of photos I have to post, and hopefully rent a PS3 at one of the local video stores oh please oh please. Then on Christmas Eve we’ll climb on a boat for Morocco and say good-bye to Europe and the first third of our journey.

*Shift-option-2 for the Euro symbol, by the way. And did you know that in most European countries there are so many diacriticals that the keyboards have an extra option key to allow for morw characters? The @ sign is usually something like extra option-?, which means that if I use an Internet café it takes me an extra 10 minutes to type an email address.

And so we arrived off the train from Barcelona last night at 11pm, walked the kilometer to our hotel, and told the guy at the reception desk that we had a reservation. He said, “No.” He seemed confident that settled things and turned back to his computer. Back in September I might have assumed that he was right and just headed back to Barcelona. But now I have 11 weeks of hardcore travel experience under my belt. So I replied, “Yes.”

“For tonight? No.”

Clearly I’d lost this argument. I considered also telling him that we had no money or clean clothes to see if he could use some no’s to fix that too. But because I happened to have proof of my outlandish claim of a reservation, I produced that. The clerk examined it skeptically, then handed us a room key in much the same way that one would hand one’s car key to someone claiming to be a valet parking attendant at Denny’s.

We unlocked the door to room 206 to find a strange mechanical device humming away happily in the middle of the floor. It was kind of a metallic shoe box with a fan at either end and a label that said “Steril-Room.” With surprising nonchalance we unplugged Steril-Room, assumed that whatever it had been protecting us from couldn’t be immediately fatal, and went to sleep.

We did not, however, sleep late. That’s because Sophie has some medication that needs to be refrigerated. She normally asks reception to put it into the kitchen fridge, but clearly if she had asked Dr. No down there he’d just have looked at the package and said, “This does not need to be refrigerated.” So instead she decided to get up early before the ice packs melted and see if whomever was on the morning shift would be more helpful. Also, I couldn’t sleep because the reservation snafu, combined with Steril-Room lurking in the corner, gave me nightmares about housekeeping repeatedly opening the door in the middle of the night to tell us that we had to let them know that we were in there.

The morning reception lady was more helpful than Dr. No in that she explained that the reservation mix up was my fault, because I had said “that you made the booking on the web, when actually you made it on Expedia.com.” Then she told us where the fridge was and shooed us away with one of those little shooing-away waves that Gloria Swanson used to do.

Up early with plenty of time to kill and the only clean item of clothes left between us being a single pair of cargo shorts, we turned to laundry. Here I should explain something. There are two types of places in Europe: in the first type, laundromats are plentiful and easy to use, with a box on the wall that controls all the machines and magically produces free soap if you need it. In the second type, if you ask someone if there’s an establishment in which you can do your own laundry, they look at you as if you asked them if there’s an establishment in which someone will scoop your brain out of your skull and use it to stuff a partridge. Bilbao, we learned after navigating many ugly streets in the pouring rain, is the latter.

Nevertheless, I am an optimist. Tomorrow the museum will be open, and it will be beautiful. We’ll be several hours closer to not being in Bilbao anymore, and eventually we’ll drive off into the sun, wearing our clean socks that we may or may not have washed in the bidet.