We flew home yesterday. The flight was pretty uneventful, and luckily was only about half full. Yanmei was able to move to an empty row and lie down and sleep across three seats for most of the flight, which is good because she is still battling that cough.
Our trip ended up being 76 days long. It felt much longer, and I mean that in a good way. When we were sitting in the Beijing airport reminiscing about our trip we both felt like the stuff we did at the beginning (New Zealand, etc.) happened a year ago. I think most people have had the experience of time passing faster as you get older. For example you suddenly realize it’s almost Christmas and it feels like Labor Day was just a couple of weeks ago. I think routine causes this feeling. When you do the same thing everyday it all blurs together. But when you travel and every day is full of new experiences it subjectively feels longer.
Compared to our trip in 2015 we did some things better and some worse. First the worse, this time we were a bit over confident. In 2015 Yanmei read several travel books and I researched the countries online a lot. We used the same flexible style of not booking anything too far ahead, but in 2015 we’d done a lot more research and preparation. We both wish we’d spent more time in New Zealand (and I wanted more in Australia too), but we were constrained by our plan to go to India and we knew we’d have to go there by early March to avoid bad weather. We couldn’t leave much earlier either because we had to wait for Yanmei to get her US passport. So we ended up rushing a bit as usual.
We also cut several countries from the itinerary. For example I wanted to go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and I brought Malaria medicine and everything. It is very close to Kuala Lumpur (2 hour flight), but we went to Sri Lanka instead. Then we had a second chance to go there, since it is not far from Kunming, China either. We actually went to a travel agency in Kunming and looked at Cambodia, but by that time I was exhausted and couldn’t muster any excitement for it (Yanmei has been to Angkor Wat before, so it wasn’t a big deal for her). This leads me to another mistake I think we made, which was not setting an end date. In 2015 we didn’t either, but Yanmei’s travel visas gave us a de facto end date. An end date gives you something to look forward to when you get tired or frustrated.
For better I think we packed better, I brought less useless stuff. I actually had a great plan and brought mostly expendable clothes with the plan that I would gradually replace and throw away the old clothes with new stuff I bought on the trip. The problem was the airlines are much more restrictive now than 2015, not only must your carry-on bag meet the size limits, it generally must be under 7kg. Even packing lightly, when you add a camera plus lenses and an iPad my backpack was 10+kg. We had flights where the overhead compartments were more than half empty because everyone was forced to check everything. So we bought a big suitcase and offloaded a lot to that so I only ended up throwing out one shirt on the trip, but we had checked luggage every flight which was frustrating compared to 2015. At least we never lost a bag.
We also definitely did better with food this trip. One of my regrets from the 2015 trip is we often went with “safe” restaurants instead of really trying the local cuisine. This time we did a lot more of randomly stopping in a local restaurant that looked good, and we had some really good experiences because of it.
We stayed almost entirely in Airbnb’s this time. The only hotels were in Ella and Delhi (and technically 1 night in KL when we stayed overnight at the airport hotel because we had a very early flight). Nepal was a hotel too although it was booked through Airbnb and they let Yanmei use their kitchen. Airbnb’s have three big advantages over hotels, if you pick the right ones.
- Kitchen to cook your own meals
- Laundry to wash your clothes
- Local host to give to recommendations and assistance
Anyway to summarize we went to Kauai, Hawaii, then New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, and China.
David
