Amsterdam is the last destination of this journey. Kaoru is Shiho's friend from the university and Rene is her boy friend. We enjoyed staying at the nice apartment by the canal.

(stayed 2days as planned)

We met them at the campsite in South Africa. They were interested in going to Japan, so we brought some information about Japan to them. They travel every summer and kids are good traveler too!

(stayed 2days as planned)

Fusa,Katsuru and Shiho went to same campus in University. We found out where they were and contact them in France.

(stayed 2days as planned)

Mari is Shiho's friend and Julien is her husband. We spent more than a month in Antibes where there house was. This is the longest stay during our journey, Without them, we might come back a month earlier...

(stayed 39days, Planed: 1month)

Sayaka is Shiho's friend from high school. She was in Frankfult on business. Without her, we might stay at the campsite in freezing weather.

(stayed 3days, Planed: 1day)

Two frineds of Shiho got together in South Africa, and they carried our favorite Japanese food such as Noodle, Dried Plum, and Salmon flake and so on. We will never be able to forget those tasty stuffs Yum!


Eight hours delay of their flight made our meeting more memorable....

We met Jennifer at Wild Coast, South Africa same as Darcy. She is from N. Y., but she is doing volunteer work such as teaching English, providing other education about HIV/AIDS at small village in Namibia for two years.

She welcomed us to help her, and we visited her village since it is quite difficult to communicate with local people and to experience their own life.

We spent 10 days at village, and completed the 'Library Renewal Project', and were thanked by teachers in the primary school. It was really good experience.

We occasionally met Darcy and Clala at Wild coast, South Africa, and Darcy told us we could visit them as they lived in Cape Town where we would go.
We did hiking on Table Mountain several times, and they gave me lots of travel information. We had several Japanese dish party, as we could get fresh Tuna there!

Finally, we made a record of staying one place.....

( stayed 16days, Planed: 7days)

The first time we met him was at minor trail in Torres del Paine Nat. Park, Chile. Since we were only three on that trail, we became friend. Nowadays, traveler exchanges their e-mail address, but he only gave us his physical address.

We try to visit him when we landed Germany. Even though we couldn't let him know about our arrival, he warmly welcomed us and helped to prepare for our journey in Africa.

He no longer live in Heidelberg, and he mentioned to move somewhere in West Africa or Brazil. Although we sent several e-mail to him, we haven't had any reply from him yet....

Definitely one of the best friends of Taku. He took day off to pick us up!!, and we headed to our favorite noodle soup restaurant right away.

He came to pick us up the airport again when we finally returning home.

We met him on a diving boat at one of the Galapagos Islands, and had dinner together. We found that he had a guide book of South America, and we knew he was going to come back to Japan soon. We asked him if we could borrow it, and then he just said O. K.

We were served a nice hot pot when we visited his house to return his book....

A friend of Shiho's from University and his wife Tomo. He just moved to L. A. for his MBA degree right before we got to L. A. Our returning flight was from L. A., so we visited them twice, and spent 13 days in total, which is the record for staying one place in American round
( Stayed: 13 days - planed: 5days)

In addition, those are some of what they have done for us...
1. bought a tent for our African round, and sent to Japan
2. kept some of our stuffs sent from Belize
3. fed us at Chinese restaurant as he won at a golf game.
4. introduced us some of their friends who knew about Africa.( See below)

Due to a big wildfire, there was no boat from Eagle to Dawson City where we parked our car, and that meant we had no way to come back.
A cool guy from gold rush era and an alaskan couple helped us.

1. A gold miner living in Eagle took us to a small village on a border. Since he knew Japanese loved salmon eggs, he gave us a big plastic bag of them,

2.An Alaskan couple who took us from border to Dawson city. No one but them wanted to take us because there was a border on the way, but fortunately, they could take us from the border (we had to walk more than 4 miles to border from 5am...)