We finally did it!!
If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you may have seen this already, but...After months of talking, changing our minds, saving money, and changing our minds again David and I are finally, definitely, officially on our way to travelling around Southeast Asia for 3 months!
I've talked a bit before about how David and I decided to go travelling in S/E Asia instead of going to work in Canada for a year, and it feels so surreal to actually being a huge step closer to starting our travels! We grabbed the bull by its horns last weekend and booked our flights to Bangkok, pretty much just on a whim. We hadn't planned to book flights last weekend. At that stage we hadn't even decided on what date we were leaving, it wasn't something that we had sat down and decided on doing.
Instead, David was on my laptop while I was colouring in (adulthood, right? The Enchanted Forest one is amazing!) and he decided to take a look at how much our flights would cost, purely out of curiousity. We were surprised by how decent the prices actually were and decided that we may aswell take the leap and just book them!
So that's exactly what we did!
We are now the proud owners of one-way flights from Dublin, Ireland to Bangkok, Thailand on Tuesday 1st March 2016!!!
I'm not going to lie, it's been a week since we booked them and I still can't really wrap my head around it.
I will say this though, it's been a great kick up the butt to start getting our stuff together! Knowing that we have a definitive leaving date has been such a motivator in terms of vaccinations, route planning, visa research, packing research...The list is practically endless!
In the last week I've read more backpacking tips, travel blogs, packing tips, essential info, and top 10 things to do posts than I care to count. On Saturday, David and I spent the entire day eating bacon, drinking tea, coffee and hot chocolate and reading, researching and watching everything helpful that we could find, both on the internet and in Lonely Planets "Southeast Asia On A Shoestring" travel guide. It was a great day but I've read so many packing lists and checklists I'm surprised they're not coming out of my ears!
Everything we've read and watched has been super helpful though, especially as neither of us have ever done anything remotely like this before, so we really do need all the help we can get! It's been really nice getting to sit down together and decide where we want to go, for how long and where we want to go next. I've been in my absolute element, writing lists upon lists about everything from packing to places to visit to potential routes...it's been great for the stationery lover in me!
We've been in touch with our Travel Nurse about vaccinations, so I'm sure we will both have some ache-y arms in the next week or so. Then next on the agenda is sorting out which Visas we need to arrange before we fly out! Our general route at the minute is Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and back to Thailand, and I'm pretty sure that the only visa we need to pre-arrange is for Vietnam which isn't so bad. The rest we can get on crossing the borders into each country, and for Thailand we get a 30-day passport stamp, which means we don't need a visa! It does mean, however, that we need to plan what dates we are going to be in Vietnam for, which is slightly annoying but there isn't much that can be done about it!
After that, I'm not sure what comes next, to be honest. We'll need to book our accomodation in Bangkok for arriving in the city, so we're planning on staying there for 3, maybe 4 days, but after that we will just be booking into places as we arrive. Again, I'm not going to lie, this still pretty much terrifies me! I'm no control freak, but I do like to know where I'm going and have things at least partly planned out! I guess it will be very interesting to see how I deal with this way of travelling, and you never know I may end up completely loving it!
So, yeah I guess that's where we're at right now! We're both so excited that we've finally made this step, that we've been brave, gone ahead and booked our tickets. There's no backing out now! Eek!
Have you been to Southeast Asia? Or been backpacking in general? If you have any travel or backpacking tips, I would absolutely love it if you could leave some in the comments, or give me a message on social media!
♥
