Original Date: 20/06/2019 – The Booking
So two days ago Martin and I walked into our local backpacker-friendly travel agency (you know who I mean). We were finally putting into motion the plan we have been alternating between loosely formulating and meticulously planning for the past 6 months.
I say we have been flitting between the two because I have a detailed spreadsheet of exactly how many days we are planning to spend in each country, but we had no idea of where any cities lie within these countries. We didn’t even know which cities actually had international airports.
Our original plan included 12 countries, 3 continents and 6 months.
Two days later, our plan included 9 countries and subsequently, about 10 hours less time spent in the air – you’re welcome planet earth. We were gutted about South Korea and The Philippines, but 6 months just isn’t as long as it seems when you get right down to it. In the image below, the purple lines show our original plan. In contrast, the blue shows the updated, far more sensible, route.
By taking South Korea, The Philippines and Paraguay out of the equation, we have managed to reduce the number of flights that we have had to endure. It also allowed us to rearrange our route in a way that just makes more sense. As you can see from the list above, we initially had to put Australia, which neither of us are particularly excited by, after New Zealand. This is a move which, if you are familiar with any map of the world, just doesn’t make any sense.
Now, as ridiculous as this might look, there was a good reason for it. In a word: Family.
I come from a big family. We always have a big Christmas celebration with all of us together for the majority of the festive season. So, of course, when Martin and I announced that we would not be home for Christmas this year. We would, in fact, be sunning ourselves in New Zealand or Australia or some other fancy location, they immediately cottoned on to the first thing I said:
NEW ZEALAND
The next thing I knew my mum was looking up flights to New Zealand for the 6 of them for Christmas. “Oooh maybe Nan and Granddad would like to come too?” and suddenly everyone is mega-excited for our first big family Christmas abroad! However, this suggestion was actually made before we looked at the dates. Turns out, if we were to leave mid-October, it wouldn’t be ideal for getting to New Zealand for Christmas. Especially as we were initially planning on doing the South America leg of our trip first.
So, here we are, South East Asia is our first destination. I am so excited about SEA. I’m a typical basic backpacker, and I’ve previously travelled a version of the Banana Pancake tour. I did not know it was called this at the time, I also did not have a single banana pancake my entire trip. I have also visited Sri Lanka and China. I have heard so many fascinating things about Japan and Indonesia.
As much as I was gutted that we were no longer planning on visiting South Korea; it did allow us to visit Australia first and still get to New Zealand (just) in time for Christmas. But, more importantly, we now have an extra 2 weeks to spend in South America!! This continent is by far the leg of the trip that we are both looking forward to the most and, as you can see from the table above, was looking very cramped time-wise.
For now, I am pretty happy with this new itinerary, I will probably change my mind sometime between now and October, but that’s the beauty of flexible flights – right?