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Outside Magazine's 2002 Family Travel Guide

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Roam Schooling (Cont.)

Next stop was Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island. (One of the great ironies of "taking the kids out of school" was that Kolya's class was at home studying geography.) We gaped at orangutans, gibbons, and macaques, as well as kingfishers, river otters, and crocodiles. We also visited logging camps and gold-mining operations that threaten all of the above. Despite the fact that Kolya calls me a "hippie tree hugger" for doing my environmental research, I think he got the point.

On September 11, we were in Singapore. After seeing the searing images of falling bodies and buildings, I wondered again if we should call the trip off. But we carried on, feeling safer in Asia than we might have at home, and also sensing that being part of the world community was better than hiding out in the States. Moving on to Vietnam, we visited Cat Tien National Park, the last mainland-Asian home to the gravely endangered Javan rhino. Tory left us in Ho Chi Minh City, and the three of us went overland into Cambodia before heading to Thailand. In Nepal, the last stop of our ecological tour of endangered places, one daylong jungle walk afforded us a frisson of danger when we saw tiger prints, but no tiger.

We came home through Western Europe, visiting friends and family in Switzerland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. For the kids, Europe seemed blissfully familiar after three months in Asia.

Highlights? Just doing it, getting out of our quotidian cages and into global orbit; the kids' faces after we had hopped barefoot out of our jeep at dusk to watch an enormous rhinoceros grazing by a riverbank, and realized that we were standing, smiling, ankle-deep in rhino poop; watching Kolya and Zoe sit atop an elephant in the middle of a Nepali river, bathing under the elephant's trunk spray; visiting Ta Phrom, in Cambodia, an ancient temple where Tomb Raider was filmed; swinging from vines in the Australian rainforest; visiting an orangutan orphanage, where one female sucked her own breast and playfully spit the milk at Kolya; Zoe dressing up like a Balinese maiden on the way to a ceremony. And on and on.

Lowlights? They are already receding from memory: the kids tormenting each other with words and fists; what they dubbed the "crack hotel" in Kumai, Borneo, where the power stopped but the mosquitoes didn't; a 14-hour rickety bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh with roadside food sellers offering fried toads to hungry travelers; Kolya throwing up all night at a caravan park in Queensland; Zoe throwing a fit at the excruciatingly slow customs line in Kathmandu.

One story sticks in my mind, my own metaphor for the trip. Two weeks into our travels, we are camping on a mile of white sand, our last night backpacking on Australia's Hinchinbrook island. After dinner, the kids drag me to the deserted beach under a half-moon midway through the antipodal sky. The two of them jump me, and we begin a three-way tag-team wrestling match that mostly involves the kids running kamikaze at me and me tossing them to the sand like a benevolent King Kong. In the tropical night, Kolya and I stripped to the waist, Zoe to her bathing suit. Without a word, we begin a kind of simian step, hunching our shoulders up and down and dragging our knuckles on the fine sand. The three of us peer at each other with cocked heads, vocalizing like monkeys. We start moving slowly, almost in a circle, then faster, and faster, with more abandon and less inhibition. Soon we are dancing wildly along the beach, rolling around and jumping. Kolya dubbed it "monkey-dancing."

From that point on, we monkey-danced around the world. And even though we're home, there's a little monkey-dancer left in each of us.

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