- Home
- News
- Forum
- Sports
- Features
- Arts
- Business
- Obituaries
- Comics
- Gallery
- Classifieds
- Commentary
- Advertisers
- Contact Us
3,978
1,520
Sasha and Sierra’s excellent adventure
A journey the likes of which Sasha Hill and Sierra Clark took over the past year could hardly leave a person unchanged.
The two young women, just weeks out of high school, embarked on a trip last June that took them through more than a dozen countries on four continents over the course of a full year.
Though they had saved for the trip since they were freshmen in high school, they also worked to earn their keep on farms and in orphanages and hostels, from Peru to France to Thailand, completely immersing themselves in each culture along the way.
They learned about the dicey political situations in places like Israel and Burma from the people who live there; spent 26 days in silence in a Buddhist monastery; climbed to the top of an enormous sand dune in Morocco and Machu Picchu in Peru; and enjoyed the extraordinary generosity of complete strangers who offered them places to stay along the way.
And when they returned to Davis a couple of weeks ago, many people remarked on how much they had changed.
But the changes, Clark remarked, were akin to losing weight.
“You’re aware the pounds are coming off,” she explained, “but not to quite the same extent as someone who hasn’t seen you in a while and is shocked at the change.
“I know I’m different,” she said. “But I don’t see it the way my family and friends do.”
————
Clark and Hill have been best friends since they were fourth-graders at César Chávez Elementary School.
They’ve lived across the street from each other since fifth grade.
And beginning in high school, they embarked on a mission together: doing whatever it took to ensure they could spend the year after high school traveling the world over, visiting and working in countries on four different continents over the course of 12 months.
They formed their own company, The Dynamic Duo, offering “jack-of-all-trade” services to everyone in their East Davis neighborhood. They cleared gutters, weeded back yards, cleaned houses, baby-sat and more.
The two entrepreneurs also coached Summerdarts and worked as lifeguards, sold produce for Capay Canyon Ranch and Mt. Moriah Farms and between them worked no fewer than eight jobs during the summer. They saved just about every penny they earned.
By the time they graduated from high school last June — Clark from Da Vinci Charter Academy and Hill from Davis High School — they had raised $18,000 for their epic journey.
The friends embarked just weeks after graduation, headed for Peru, where they spent six weeks living and working at a yoga retreat and farm in Cruz Verde, and exploring the country, including a trip to the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu.
From Peru they headed to Europe, and over the course of a couple of months worked their way through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain.
They worked on an organic farm in France and in a hostel in Spain and enjoyed Oktoberfest in Germany. Using couchsurfing.com, they found places to stay — and made new friends — wherever they went. They also encountered bed bugs, stomach bugs and clueless taxi drivers who occasionally left them wandering strange new towns late at night.
But the itinerary they had laid out for themselves before they left pretty much held up and nothing really ever went wrong, Clark said.
“Things always work out,” she noted. “Even though we went through some struggles, some missed buses, missed trains, there was nothing major.
“The way the trip unfolded was perfect,” she added. “The beginning was very organized, very planned, but as the trip progressed, it became less planned and more spontaneous. By the end of the trip we were choosing places to go a week ahead and finding places to stay that day.”
————
One lengthy stop that they had not originally planned was in Turkey. Thanks to couchsurfing.com, the pair found a host in Istanbul who offered a bedroom and computers so they could work on scholarship applications. Both Clark and Hill had taken a gap year fully intending to enroll in college in the fall after their return, and now decided they needed to spend some time looking for money to pay for it.
They also used the pit stop to catch up on their blog, http://offthebeatenboulevard.com, posting lengthy pieces about their travels as well as photos and videos.
But briefly settling down, even in exotic Istanbul, wasn’t easy after all their adventures on the road.
“I got a little freaked out and restless, like we should be traveling,” Hill admitted.
Still, the stop proved serendipitous for Clark.
Recruited by Brown University for rowing, Clark had been accepted to the school and learned from an assistant rowing coach that a future Brown teammate lived in Istanbul. The two hooked up in no time, becoming fast friends. Clark worked out with her new teammate and even spent time with her family. They parted ways thrilled to know they would see each other again in the fall.
————
Before heading to Asia, the pair spent time in Israel, Jordan and Greece, but it was Morocco that held the high point of the trip — literally and figuratively.
The most exciting moment of the whole journey, Clark said, “the one that makes me feel the most triumphant,” was climbing a sand dune in Morocco late in the night.
The climb took close to two hours, crawling on hands and knees, but it was so worth it in the end, she said.
Hill wrote about it on the blog:
“It was like climbing quicksand. My feet sunk deep into the soft sand and with approximately every three steps I collapsed onto my knees, unable to muster enough strength to propel forwards. Bear crawling provided a viable alternative, but it was painfully slow, and moving in bursts at least gave me the feeling I was going somewhere.”
When they finally reached the top, Hill wrote, “we all jumped around in the moonlight for a while, then slowly relaxed and lapsed into silence. The moonlit dunes below looked like clouds seen from an airplane above, or a stormy sea. We could see mountains back in the direction from which we’d come, and the endless flat of the Algerian Sahara in front of us.”
————
The other great triumph of the trip came months later in a decidedly different place — a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where Clark and Hill participated in 26 days of silence, culminating in three days of meditation, in which they didn’t sleep at all.
Unable to talk to each other for nearly a month, Hill said she “saved up everything to tell (Clark). I had so much to say.”
But oddly, even after a lifetime of being more like sisters than friends, they found they almost had to “relearn our conversation patterns,” Hill said.
The real challenge, though, was the final three days of meditation, alone and awake the whole time.
“I wasn’t sure if I could do this challenge,” Clark said.
“But it gave me a better understanding of how my mind works. I got time to be alone with myself, time to understand who I am. I also learned how to calm my mind. It’s a good skill to have, learning how to sift through your thoughts and keep the positive thoughts at the forefront.”
Hill, too, was nervous about the challenge, but said, “it was an amazing feeling that I had actually done it.”
And the meditation turned out to be a great way to end their yearlong journey and prepare them for their return to their lives before.
————
Arriving back in Davis in late May, the pair found themselves surprised at how easy the transition to home life was.
“It’s weird that it’s so easy,” Hill said.
But while being back in homes largely unchanged by their absences, they are very aware of the changes in themselves.
They speak of having much more confidence, of feeling much more knowledgeable about the world.
“We gained so much perspective that it’s hard to remember what I thought before,” Hill said. “There’s so much difference between being taught something and seeing it. Every day we were taking in so much information.”
“I learned more in this one year of travel than I ever could have in one year of school,” Clark agreed. “I know I’m more patient. I love myself like never before. I love my face without make-up, and I never could have said that before. And confidence. I thought I had it before, but not like this.”
Both said they would do it all again, and do nothing differently; that all that hard work through high school to make the trip possible was worth it in the end.
“This trip is the best thing I ever could have done for myself,” Clark said.
Now they will spend the rest of the summer working and preparing for college. While Clark will be at Brown in Providence, R.I., Hill will be at Barnard in New York. And both see much more traveling in their futures.
They highly recommend their experience.
“We really encourage any high school student to do this,” Hill said. “And we’re happy to talk to them any time. We’re brimming with advice and feel passionate that this is a good thing to do.”
Contact them by email at [email protected] or visit their blog, http://offthebeatenboulevard.com.
— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at [email protected] or 530-747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy
Comments
