Last year was hard for money. The whole year was tough, but particularly hard was the last time I was raising cash for our startup Vectr in San Francisco. At that point we had two angel investors, but that money was just about gone and we were still primarily bootstrapping the company; I was in SF to raise VC money to keep us going.

With a friend I just finished my first long-distance bike trip down the west coast of Taiwan. I’d planned to make a full loop of the island, but I’m headed to Sri Lanka in a few weeks and wanted to spend some more time in Taipei before I leave, so I hopped a train when I got to the end of the tracks in the south and came back to Taipei. When I come back to Taiwan I’ll rent a bike again and go down the east coast, which’ll probably be sometime this summer.

After a year traveling Southeast Asia, followed by another year traveling Northeast Asia, I had seen more of the Asian continent than I’d seen my own country in Canada. But with two years abroad I had skipped one Christmas at home with my family, my mother wasn’t going to let me get away with skipping another, so after two years abroad I was coming home for the first time – I decided to take the opportunity to make up for lost ground, and experience as much of Canada as I could.

I just came back from 22 days trekking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, with a few side treks including one to Tilicho lake.