So we didn’t win the Australian Van-Tastic contest. We fought hard, but we didn’t win.

It was a long shot. We learned about the contest a week before the submission deadline. We only started working on our application video three days before. We thought we did a pretty good job, all things considered.

A little bit of background:

If I was going to keep a blog during my trip, I wanted it to look like no other blog that exists today.

It had to be gorgeous. It had to be fun. I wanted visitors to feel like a child before a new toy full of buttons that beep and rattle and thrill.

One name immediately came to mind: Laurent Lasalle.

Damn.

That about sums up my thoughts on the response to that video I posted of my colleagues’ reaction to my yearlong trip.

On Facebook, on Twitter, and on a few blogs, friends and friends of friends happily passed it on to their networks and, before I could say “unintended viral marketing”, I had a massive spike in traffic on this blog.

I’m honoured. And a little scared. I made this video thinking only friends and colleagues would see it. I never expected it to multiply through the miraculous butterfly effect of the retweet.

“The same way that slowing down improves your peripheral vision when driving, reducing your speed allows you to take more in while you travel.”

This analogy, lifted from Rough Guide’s First-Time Around the World, distills perfectly our approach to travel.

It’s highly tempting, in a trip of this scope, to visit as many places possible. It’s like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and loading on shrimps, lasagna, orange beef, chicken tikka, and Caesar salad on a single plate.

What would your coworkers say if you left your privileged, endangered job to prance around the world for one year? This is what my coworkers said.

When he published his Round-the-World Travel Guide, Marc Brosius had the good sense to print, right on the first page, the following caveat:

“WARNING: This site has been known to change people’s lives!”

And wouldn’t you know it, it did.

Bianca informed me we’d be hosting a pair of Israeli men and I immediately turned to my most hardened stereotypes about that country. As usual, they turned out to be entirely true.

They came to our home on January 1 as we were nursing a killer New Year’s Eve hangover. Tomer, a native of Ukraine, had flags of Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil stitched on his backpack. “I speak Portuguese,” he said, in a straining, unmistakably Semitic attempt at Portuguese.

“I speak some Hebrew,” I replied, and fired off three words that would win any schoolboy a swift reprimand. They both chortled and proceeded to teach me more complex obscenities.

“You’re so lucky,” people often tell me when they learn I’m taking a year off work to travel with Bianca. “I wish I could do that.”

The sentiment is understandable, but luck had nothing to do with it. I’m certainly fortunate to be in the position where I can do this. But it wasn’t luck.

Please allow us to introduce ourselves. We’re Roberto and Bianca. We’re a couple. We’re both from Brazil and we both chose Canada as our adopted nation. We’re also both journalists, and together we’ll travel around the world for one year starting February 2010.