If Valparaiso had left us feeling good about the world, our ride up to the big city of Santiago brought us down to earth. Summer fires were raging in the hills and covering the land in smoke. In a city already smog-handicapped by its valley floor location, this added a sinister, choking, eye-watering layer to the misery. It would, we decided, be a waste of money taking the teleférico up to a mirador overlooking the city.

We had picked our accommodation in Santiago with some care as this was to be the last stop on this journey and there was much administration to do. Hostal Casa Matte does not advertise on any of the usual accommodation sites and didn't even have a sign out front to make it easy to find. It relied on word of mouth for its custom and those passing on the word rely on coordinates and not signs to find their way. Cristian and Francisca let us in through the well locked front gates and showed us our comfortable room. When Jo commented that there was no lock on the door Cristian replied simply that this was a hostal for motorcycle travellers only. Security was taken care of by rule #1: no backpackers allowed.

The place was in a constant stir of people of all ages coming and going on bikes. Some had flown in and were preparing to buy bikes locally to start their travels, others were ending and selling their bike. Some, like us, were shipping out. Others shipping in. Some were just resident for a while because, if you were a bike traveller, it was an intoxicating place to be.

Days at Casa Matte were extraordinarily busy. While we found a shipping agent to fly Elephant home and worked out the detail of getting the whole Elephant circus out to Australia, we caught up with old travelling friends, passed on what information we could to those just starting in South America, helped new chums with their purchase of a new bike, gave impromptu classes in bike maintenance or tyre changing on the road, and generally enjoyed the company of our tribe.

It took two full days to clean Elephant for travel before we rode out to the airport freight terminal, drained the last of the fuel from the tank, removed the battery and strapped our small world onto a pallet. We paid our freight bill, then watched a forklift carry away the packaged Elephant and finally accepted the reality that we had reached an ending.

It was ten years almost to the day between Elephant's Santiago pack and our first decision to ship a bike to Europe in 2007. For that ten years the bike and the journey it enabled have been the central theme of our lives. We have done other things of course, but the journey has been the main thing to which everything else was anchored. Our 10 years has disappeared in the blink if an eye. We started the journey by making a decision when our lives were at a crossroads. It seemed, however, that all the years and kilometres had done was to deliver us to another crossroads; a crossroads where the choices are apparently different but in essence the same.

So,all that remains in this last Team Elephant blog is to try and make some sense of our journey between decisions, not for you the reader, but for ourselves. Perhaps you will see this as a self indulgent justification for our bad decisions or, perhaps, there is something here for others that makes it worth the writing.

Those who have been with us from the get-go will know that we didn't set out to do the sorts of travel we ended doing. We intended only to ride our bike around Europe for a few months while we attended the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France. But, it didn't turn out that way. As we travelled we became used to life on the road and, little by little, we started to adapt and change. Then, as now, we were being sustained by the journey itself, by the search for enlightenment that every true journey entails, and by the way the journey bonded us together against the world.

We have certainly been changed by the experience but like much about a journey explaining how is a little complicated. Perhaps the simplest measure of this change is the way we started to lose any sense of what is different in each place we go. There are, of course, differences everywhere and if asked to do so we could no doubt think up lots of things that are different about any place we have been. But somehow, these aren't the things that we notice in a new place. The thing that strikes us most is how much everything is the same; how much people are the same; how much of the lives they create for themselves rest on the same aspirations and hopes and relationships.

How could it be otherwise for us. For a quarter of a million kilometres through 46 countries we have been treated only with kindness and respect. Even at our most vulnerable we have been protected and assisted. I don't think we have been lucky in this. We protect ourselves and take precautions for our own security as every sensible person everywhere does. This isn't an argument about that. It is simply to say that the great question of the early 21st Century that exercises many millions every day is surely: how do we get the kids to soccer practice?

On the road we call ourselves Team Elephant and, as the name implies, teamwork is what keeps us moving. For us this has been a chance to live and work together in circumstances that can be stressful and where our reliance on each other has had its own rewards. Every day on the road I have been thankful for a partner who has been in the adventure up to her neck and it has been great to see her at work. It isn't that she is organised and thorough and stops me eating too much ice cream and getting fat. No, that stuff is all good but what really matters is that Jo is tough as a nail and brave as a lion; two characteristics I find irresistibly sexy in a woman. Without Jo there would be no Team Elephant and there could have been no journey.

Each time we end a journey we get a little depressed. It is easy to miss the simplicity and simple beauty of a motorcycle, a new country and no where to be any time soon. This time, however, the feeling of loss swept over both of us more quickly that usual. By the time we had got the last of our preparation done, purchased a couple of cheap suitcases, said our goodbyes and rode the subway out to the airport we were running on memory. We piled onto a Qantas flight to Sydney feeling flat and uncertain and, as soon as it was polite, ordered up a couple of glasses of wine. We clinked glasses and huddled close.

    “We'll just have to get through this together.” Jo said.

And so we shall... and so we shall.