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To close out our 22 months on the road, we chose somewhere easy: Bali and the nearby Gili Islands. Part of my travel philosophy is what I call the travel sandwich — start and end comfortably, and save the harder, more chaotic stretches for the middle. It gives us something to look forward to on the days when we’re sweaty, frustrated, and wondering why we ever started this adventure in the first place.

Indonesia also checked off a surprising milestone for me: my first time in the Southern Hemisphere. Somehow, after visiting 32 countries, I had never crossed the equator before. Africa had been the first major bucket-list item on this trip, and this was the second.

We spent one night in Sanur near the Denpasar airport before making our way by taxi and fast boat to Gili Air, one of three small islands off the coast of Lombok. Motor vehicles are banned there, so transportation consists mostly of bicycles, electric scooters, and horse-drawn carts. Naturally, every horse that passed me received a full visual inspection for hoof condition, harness fit, and overall health.

I was relieved to discover a local charity on nearby Gili Trawangan that provides free veterinary care and farrier services for the working horses. I like to give back to the places I visit, so I made a donation and immediately started dreaming about returning one day to volunteer. The horses are walked on the beach every evening for a dip in the ocean, which sounds like a pretty amazing way to help make the horses’ lives more enriching.

Unfortunately, the day after arriving on Gili Air, both Randy and I got hit with a stomach bug. I spent nearly an entire day asleep, surviving mostly on electrolytes and coconut water that Randy kindly fetched from the pharmacy. Thankfully the island itself suited recovery mode perfectly. Life there moves pretty slowly, and nobody is in much of a hurry to do anything.

While hiding from the midday heat in a little poolside hut, I pulled out my watercolours and painted some sea turtles and the Hindu elephant god Ganesha. On the wall nearby was a random painting of a bandana-clad man who looked suspiciously like Axl Rose. What Axl was doing at a yoga retreat nobody knows.

Because it was the tail end of rainy season, the island was pretty quiet. The tourist crowd was an interesting mix: mostly Europeans, a few Russians, and surprisingly, hardly any Australians or Americans. Canadians, however, somehow always manage to find each other abroad. We were stopped multiple times by people who overheard our accents.

One thing I’ve noticed during long-term travel is that every destination has its own social atmosphere. In some places, the visitors keep to themselves and in other places, they can be quite gregarious. On Gili Air, we found ourselves settling into an everyday routine. We began recognizing people at the gym, nodding to familiar faces at cafes, and noticing the feral children who clearly belong to long-term expats because they speak multiple languages and run around the streets with their local Indonesian friends.

One evening we had dinner with a Canadian-Swedish expat couple and their young twin boys, one appropriately named Thor. In between mouthfuls of Greek food, our new friends had to manage the boys’ needs, making it quite chaotic. Randy was in his element but it was a new experience for me, not having been around a tonne of boys’ energy.

We also joined a snorkelling excursion to swim with sea turtles. The turtles themselves were incredible: calm, graceful, and completely unbothered by us drifting nearby. What wasn’t so magical was the amount of plastic floating in the water after a recent storm. It was really disheartening swimming through floating cups, packaging and plastic bags. We spent part of the trip stuffing garbage into floating bags we found drifting nearby. It struck me that snorkelling tours could easily hand out mesh bags and turn tourists into cleanup crews for an hour. But environmental awareness still seemed inconsistent on Gili Air, despite how dependent the islands are on tourism and healthy reefs.

As our final days approached, neither of us really wanted to leave. We had settled comfortably into lazy mornings, beach walks, gym visits, afternoons soaking in the hot sun, and amazing food. I was slipping into a trance and could have stayed forever.

But home was waiting, along with a very different kind of adventure back in Canada.

After a short final stop in Sanur, where I caught up with an old friend from a previous round-the-world trip, we boarded the long journey home via Taiwan — closing the chapter on nearly two years of life on the road.