As the cliché goes, the trip is over but the journey continues. Writers, philosophers, photographers and artists have endeavored to capture both for thousands of years, perhaps striving to defy the passage of time or bequeath something of themselves that will not die. But the length and breadth of this, our 70th-birthdays-and-35th-wedding-anniversary trip — 92 days and 41 beds, 21,000 nautical air miles, five islands including a continent and three nations, more than 5,300 miles of roads driven down as far as we could, cultures 50,000 years old and five seconds from the next news cycle, old friends reaffirmed from 44 years ago and new friends made almost in the blink of an eye — have enriched the journey in so many cliched ways.

Before we try for the sum of all things, we must thank those not only who made this particular adventure possible but, also, those who enhanced it. The problem, of course, is with whom to begin. Do we start with unknown Aborigines or Abel Tasman? To what degree may we separate those who enabled our trip from those without whom the worlds of this trip might have been different? Our best recourse, of course, is to keep it simple … so thank you, in roughly chronological order, to:

Judy Bishell, John and Carol Wisker, Tod and Kate Dawson and parents and children, Patrick McCombs and Mary-Jane, AJ and Shannon, John and Roberta, Robin and Bernice Sutherland, Ian Cooper, Mary Ardwyn, Stephen and Robyn and Hugh Thomas, Stephen and Maureen and Ian Thomas, Michael and Ingrid McGaughey, Jim and Jenni, Sam and Danielle, Wayne and Myra, Jeff Clark, John and Karen, David and Helen, Carol Buhaj, Graeme Tuer and Simon Rigg, David and Gay, and Jane Johnson. And all the strangers who helped us in countless ways big and small.

Thinking back on this trip is like walking without a map in a museum made of our own memories with delightful docents whispering explanations we only half hear in rooms with donations we’ve forgotten we bestowed ourselves. We have added artifacts to rooms and appended galleries to the building but they all seem rearranged and changed as we sleep each night.

Some of the memories fade like photographs left in the sun … are missing pieces like a broken vase … lose their smell in the draft of time … become lost in an expanding maze of thought. Others tower like mountains … burn with significance … linger like ripples on water … echo like bells tolling in the corridors of a vast building.

Of the relatively unexpected, we have found coral as blue as the sky and sky as red as molten rock, forests with trees as tall as the Statue of Liberty, water the colors of copper and turquoise, people as blunt as bullets yet as unselfconscious as children, glaciers blackened with basalt, art old and new with unforgiving messages, meat as soft as butter from two-legged beasts two meters tall, architecture of daring materials and modernity, music that moves from bands in the boondocks, people with wit as dry and warm as a desert, jacks of all trades as smart as scholars, roads like corkscrews and great wines without corks, a past unrecognizable in the present ….

Do we know this part of the world better? We certainly do and we certainly have been enriched by it. If we have learned anything beyond confirming our luck at birth and current state of privilege, it may be that Paradise is here and now; it is not some other place beyond present reach, just over the horizon, or a few miles down the road. It is not outside our selves but within our connections to … well … to all that is. It is not a noun; it’s a verb.

We have learned a lot, though, ultimately, we know ourselves only a little better. We remain strangers in Paradise with the journey unfinished and, hopefully, miles to go before we sleep. And so for us twotramps …

… another day in Paradise.