Malaysia, and the rest of Southeast Asia

After Nepal, the trip loosened up. No more single defining objective like a mountain pass — just a region to move through before the year ran out: Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, filling in the rest of the map I'd started with the "no flights until Panama" rule I'd long since abandoned.

Malaysia gave me one of the biggest group photos of the entire trip — a table's worth of people I'd connected with through the Deaf community there, crowded around a mall Starbucks like we'd been friends for years instead of hours. That's one of the things nobody tells you about traveling Deaf: the community finds you, or you find it, faster than you'd expect, in cities you never would have guessed had one.

Malaysia. A table full of people I'd only just met.

Singapore and the nights that followed blur a little more in memory — a market at night, food stalls, a friend's kid perched on my hip while somebody else in the group flashed a peace sign at the camera. Not a landmark moment. Just what the ordinary evenings looked like by that point in the trip.

An ordinary evening, by then.

The Philippines gave me the single most surreal five minutes of the whole two years — pictured at the top of this page: swimming alongside a whale shark, close enough to see the pattern of white spots across its back, close enough that scale stopped feeling real. Something that big, moving that slowly, close enough to touch — you don't come out of the water the same person who went in, even for something as small as five minutes.

By September 2016 I was standing on a tarmac in the Philippines, waiting to board a flight back to the US, a year and a half after crossing into Mexico at Laredo with no return ticket. I finally had one.

Heading back to the US, September 2016. Not the end of the trip yet — just the end of this leg of it.