Is it some sort of mid – twenties crisis? A complete failure of artistic photographic ability? *Just a phase I’m going through*?

No.

–

It all starts about 18 years ago. I got my first verruca, on my left foot. That’s an english term for a wart on the bottom of your foot. A wart is a viral infection (not a fungus or bacteria) just under your skin, caused by a virus called Human Papillomavirus. It causes the skin to grow erratically and generates a nasty looking shape above the skin.They start really small and can grow quickly. Being in school, my job was to wear a ‘verruca sock’, a plastic sock covering my foot in a kind attempt to prevent it being picked up by other kids. It was eventually frozen off painfully by the doctor, only to reappear a few years later.

By my mid teens, my foot had four or five at the top, and one on the heel. They weren’t going away. Because they weren’t sore except in the heat, I lived with them. 

By my early twenties, the bottom of my foot was completely covered by large warts, like this: http://www.foothealthcare.com/images/articles/editor/warts.jpg, only  worse. On my heel, several large ones had joined together and most of my heel was covered with a huge, deep wart. They grew slowly, and I continued to live with them.

In 2009, just before Alice and I got together, I got my first wart on my right index finger. It grew slowly at first, then to about 5mm, and after a few months I managed to get rid of it in a rather painful mess which I won’t describe as it’s not relevant.

It came back about six months later, and got bigger and bigger. After an attempt to use an over the counter ‘freezing’ medicine from Boots UK to remove it, it grew even faster. By the end of 2010, I was trying all kinds of painful treatments including vinegar. In the mean time, four more warts had begun to appear in between and on top of my toes. Nasty!

Alas, in 2011, the year of my wedding, it returned larger than ever, a horrible 1cm cauliflower on my finger. Busy with wedding preparations, instead of fight it, I took to just covering it with a plaster. If you look at all the photos of my wedding to Alice, you’ll see the top of my right index finger is covered by a white band. It’s for the better, trust me!

Two more appeared on another finger, one growing fast. Clearly I was susceptible to the skin form of Human Papillomavirus, and my body couldn’t fight it. For the first time in over a decade, I decided to try to have the finger ones painfully frozen off with liquid nitrogen. The small ones on my other finger disappeared within a few months. The large one kept coming back, smaller each time. About six months ago, in January 2012, I had my latest freezing session. Since then I was constantly checking for evidence of it returning, which thankfully it didn’t. I paid no attention to my foot any more. I knew I’d be living with warts for the foreseeable future. It had been almost two decades, after all.

–

As you know, Alice and I have just got back from a long trip around Asia. We’ve been in all kinds of strange and wonderful places, and sometimes dirty, and checking my feet was the last thing to worry about.

Three nights ago, I looked at my foot, and noticed it seemed cleaner than normal. Holding my breath, I took the bedside lamp and shined it to illuminate the full palm. A sight which I’ve not seen my whole life greeted me, and in shock I gazed at my fully grown left foot, completely clean of warts on the top and bottom. Huge, deep verrucas I’ve lived with for ten years, gone. Warts which had grown fast and large on the top of my toes in the past year, gone. 

–

I struggled to analyse why, how? After so long, why should my body suddenly be able to fight them off during a long trip across China, Tibet and India? Warts are known to just disappear after some time, as I later researched, but still, after two decades, in my case, what triggered it? What’s your opinion?

* The recent freezing of my finger and attempt by the wart to regrow was met with a response from my immune system that eventually fought all the others too?

* Starting my journey with Buddhist meditation. Beginning to see things from a new perspective with new eyes. A calm of mind. 

* Travelling through many difference places and tasting many dishes of varying exquisiteness finally beat my warts?

* Being in Tibet. The spirituality. The high altitude. Lower blood oxygen level?

* Indian water – enough to kill anything?

* Other foot problems (toenail) stimulate my immune system to fight off the virus?

* Travelling through multiple climates and temperatures fooled my warts into confusion, and they came off?

* A critical number of warts in my system get noticed by my body such that it fights them all off at once?

Either way, travelling is usually the time when your immune system is weaker, and you pick up things you didn’t have before, not fight off a cronic virus you’ve been living with for 18 years. I’m happily baffled, but resolved my own response to the whole thing:

* It doesn’t really matter what thing or combination of things caused them to go. I am thankful, and have a better understanding of ‘nothing lasts forever’ or as the Buddhists say, the impermanence of all things, even if they look set to stick around forever! 

Alice put it so very eloquently in the previous message, how can I follow?

I too find myself a little overwhelmed by the material joys of being home, but left with an odd feeling of dissatisfaction. How to engage with new comforts when we have had little but the most important things with us on our journey? Even my computer seems alien, and those of you who know me well will see this as quite unbelievable; but I am not used to using a computer at all after almost three months without it. It feels like a distraction, a luxurious and beautiful product designed with the power to help, but also dangerously distracting, disengaging. How to mindfully use a computer? I don’t know yet. I shall have to learn.

Nevertheless, a mild bewilderment on our parts is an excellent sign, I think. It shows some of the filters in us, however small, have changed, and it is deeper than just ‘returning home after seeing some great sights for a few months’. 

Our linear, western minds have trained us to see abstract things such as beginning and end as real, solid. Alice and I have landed for the last time in this trip, we are back, and our lifestyle will change, but what is really over? Beijing shows signs of the greenery of spring, the new building at Fortune Plaza stands 200 feet taller, there are friends to meet, jobs to find, new people to meet. And so life now challenges us to take our new eyes, and make them see things we didn’t see before, and perhaps even pay less attention to things we saw as important before. The journey continues. Returning to a familiar place and seeing it differently is never the end. It is the beginning.

在之前的信息中Alice把它描述的那么生动形象，接下来我都有点不知道该如何表述?

我同样发现自己被回家之后的物质欢乐所淹没，但之后却伴随着一种莫名的不适之感。我们在旅行时除必需品外并没有携带许多身外之物，那时我们是如何体验到那种不同的、新鲜的身心愉悦感呢？现在对我来说，就连电脑似乎看起来都是多余的，像您一样了解的我的人可能觉得这不可思议；但是与电脑分离三个月后，我确实不再习惯用电脑了。电脑的出现之初就环绕着强大辅助功能的奢华、美丽的光环，但同时，电脑又那么容易分散人的注意力或让人与世隔绝。如何更加智慧的使用电脑？我还没有找打答案。这是我必须学习的。

然而，我认为这种小困扰是一种非常好的兆头。它显示了我们正在思考一些问题，过滤一些事情，虽然微妙，但是我们已经在改变，这并不简简单单的是“看了几个月的美丽风景之后回到了家”，而要更加深刻的多。

线性的、西方的思维训练让我们把抽象的东西看做是真实的、有质感的。飞机的降落结束了Alice和我的这次旅行，我们回来了，并且我们的生活方式也将改变，但真正结束的是什么？北京绿荫遍地，彰显着春天的绿色生机，财富广场的新大楼高达200英尺。回来后我们会见老朋友，结识新朋友，寻找合适的工作。生活的挑战促使我们以一种新的眼光去面对它。我们会看到之前从未看到过的，也或许会对以前非常在意的事物投去更少的关注。生命的旅行在继续。回归到一个熟悉的环境看到不同的事物有新的感受，这从未结束，而是一个开始。

回家了，顿时感到北京的生活竟是如此奢侈，家是多么的洁净明亮宽敞舒适！有空调，有冰箱，有大浴巾，有木地板… 还有立体声音响！我都不好意思享受了。回想旅途，是一个寻找的过程，在物质匮乏的情况下，才有专注的寻找：寻找体验、景色、想象、精神。其实我们必须需要的东西真的不多，甚至很少。。
We are home. A wave of luxury hits us in Beijing. The flat feels so clean, bright, spacious and comfortable! The fridge, the AC, the big bath towel, the wooden floor.. and even a stereo set. I’m almost embarrassed to be enjoying these. While traveling, we were always seeking – seeking the new, the beautiful, the imaginary and the spiritual. These are detached from materials. In fact, what we must have in physical forms is not much, if not very little.

我们76天的旅途今天结束，可在最后这一段卡住了。流量管制，北京雷雨（预报），在昆明机场上了飞机又下了飞机，滞留候机楼，无预计出发时间。跟过去两个半月的旅途相比，我们对于在有空调有厕所的平地上等待，没有什么怨言了。可回头一想，这一路上无论是印度的火车还是尼泊尔的过夜大巴，甚至珠峰脚下的吉普爆胎，还没有让我们旅途延误超过两小时的事件。看来这个纪录今天要破了！
Today is the last day of our 76 day trip. We got stuck on our final leg of the journey. Thunder storm forecast in Beijing and air traffic control made us step off the plane after boarding, with no further departure time in sight. There is little to complain about the situation though comparing to the last two and a half months – we are waiting in an air conditioned room on flat ground with a toilet nearby. However, among all the transports we took before including Indian railway trains, Nepalese overnight buses and even jeep at the foot of Mt Everest with a flat tyre, there hadn’t been any event that delayed our journey by more than two hours. I guess this record is about to be broken!

这些小圈圈的字在我看来都像简笔画的动物~
These cute circular letters all look like little animal drawing to me.

亚洲旅途第七十五天，也是倒数第二天，我们乘过夜火车离开海滨小城亭可马里，前往另一边海滨的首都科伦坡，准备结束我们在斯里兰卡短暂的一周。
Day 75: The second last day of our Asian Adventure. We take the overnight train from the seaside beach town Trincomalee, diagonally across the country, to the capital city Colombo, as an end for our one short week’s stay in Sri Lanka.