So, our odyssey is over.

If you don't count the travel days at either end, we were nomadic for 255 days.

Now we're back in KL; we've moved into a new studio flat; and the semester is fast approaching. Of course, our journey has always been mostly work-oriented (pretty hectically so at times), but now the schedule will be much less flexible.

We've clocked up some scary stats: 20 flights with 13 airlines (next time round we won't fly as much...); 42 hotels in 35 towns/cities; 24 trains; and 30 boats.

And we've had some amazing experiences, all shared by the little red bear (Redd) whom we adopted from the 100-yen shop in Nago on 1 January.







Our journey -- through 15 "countries and territories", three of them new (I'm not counting Peninsula Malaysia, which is home) -- has been hugely informative. My university will only be interested in the publication outcomes, and the inter-university contact, and the contributions my research leave makes to my teaching. But for sure, just "being places" has made me a better scholar.

A major theme -- quite unplanned -- has been people movement. So many people upping sticks, and taking themselves somewhere else, for so many reasons.

For example:

-- Okinawans, once part of a separate little kingdom with links around Asia, were driven by poverty to Hawai'i and other Pacific islands.
-- Hong Kong has long been a magnet for migrants of many categories.
-- Hainan was the departure point for so many migrants to Southeast Asia, who brought versions of their food with them.
-- This applies to Guangzhou, too, of course, which -- along with Hong Kong and Shanghai -- was also a target for the imposition of foreign concessions.









-- The Philippines, also traditionally a country of settlement for migrant Chinese, is now one of the most significant migrant-sending countries in Asia, as well as an important destination for Koreans.
-- Kuching was a draw card for early Chinese migrants, and then, of course, the British.
-- Davao is a hub of internal migration, and an important destination for Indonesians; it was also a pre-war pole of attraction for early Japanese migrants.
-- Shanghai is famously cosmopolitan, but the story of the Jewish diaspora was new to me.
-- In Xining, the mixing of Han, Hui, and Tibetan cultures makes for a fantastically interesting cultural backdrop.
-- In Tibet (apart from the wave of Han settlers), the hospitality industry has drawn notable quantities of Nepalese and Indians.
-- Chengdu has its own Tibetan population, both permanent and floating.







-- In The Hague, we learnt about post-war migrants, and their varying experiences.
-- Then there's Newark, where the hand car wash business is operated by hard-working Romanians.
-- Liverpool was built with slave money; it was also the embarcation point for huge numbers of migrants to the New World, and a port of call for Malay sailors.
-- And the Isle of Man -- well, the Manx got everywhere...
-- Newstead Abbey was home to the ever-gadding Byron (who, a few weeks further on in our journey, appeared in Chinese); it was later refurbished using slave money.
-- Doha is a city with a vast number of migrants, and it has now started to recognize its own history of slavery.
-- In Bangkok, Chinese culture has been assimilated over centuries, yet the "new Chinese" are now making waves.







-- Georgetown and Taiping, in peninsula Malaysia, were the destination of choice for many wanderers. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Teochew, who moved from Henan and the Yellow River region to Fujian, and then to the eastern part of Guangdong (Chaozhou), and then, after the First Opium War, via Guangzhou and Shantou to destinations in Southeast Asia and further afield. They share similar histories with Hakka and Hokkien, but carefully preserve their differences, too.
-- Singapore's dynamism and cosmopolitanism are built on its history of migration. This time we focused on the Indian community and the Samsui women.
-- Indonesia's Chinese and peranakan communities came into view in Semarang and Surabaya. At the Klenteng Sanggar Agung, we met a man whose family came from the Shanghai area 100 years ago. Surabaya also saw the unwelcome arrival of the British at the end of WW2. In the ultimate tragic irony, colonized Indians, their own independence just a few years down the track, were sent to fight newly enfranchized Indonesians.





I find all this 100% fascinating. Humans are travellers. Migration is part of our humanity.

And we too are travellers.

So we'll be resting our rucksacks for a few months in KL. But then we'll be on our way again. There's a massive world out there, and there's so, so much to learn.