Not too long ago, I set a goal of visiting a new country yearly and other new places along with it if going abroad isn’t in the cards. When I caught a flash deal via SLC’s newest international direct flight to Seoul for around $700-something, I jumped on it…that is until another flash deal for 36k Skymiles (Delta “Main”) popped up and I made the switch. I can’t even get to Chicago for that, no brainer! The timing was off-peak in September once school and fall slate begins (would prefer summer but I follow the deal!).
I talked to my world traveling friends about potential itineraries and reached out to the family travel agent that helped us with a Viking cruise for tour options and prices. I realized that we had to whittle down our list significantly and that the tours were a whole lot more for an area that I thought was supposed to be more on the affordable side.
We opted to visit countries that Alli, my wife, hadn’t yet and to save the China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam and opted for southeast Asia. I took the top recommendations and tours and started reverse engineering, looking for as many direct flights as possible, adding tours via Viator, tracking and booking flights and hotels in centralized, accessible areas via Expedia (which had the highest Rakuten rebate %). We did choose to keep one tour that had a lot of components in Borneo, having to pre-pay to hold it as spots and date availability was limited and we planned around that in the middle of the two book-end flights. Doing so allowed savings of ~50% from the tour packages.
I’m going to reflect on each stop separately, but what resulted was an amazing trek of adventures prioritizing visiting exotic animals in their mostly native locales while still possible. It was designed to be a combination of cities, cultures, tours and downtime for personal activity choices.
We purposely didn’t try to come off as Americans, yet didn’t hide it when it came up in conversation and had a lot to dispel in a tense global political situation to say the least. In fact, there was a shooting involving a political zealot in Utah while we were there, which put us on the map in the wrong way. Hard to ignore the flare-ups happening despite our wishes of international immersion…
Not surprisingly, we ran into a ton of Brits as we visited many former British colonies. They always seems have a nearly unlimited amount of “holiday” time for vacations and a dry sense of humor about things. Often, there was just enough English and signs able to be picked up to get around and some accents were tough to work with.
All-in-all, it turned out to be 10 flights, 4 separate islands, 1 peninsula and ~ 3 days between places. The airports were cleaner, more efficient and effective to navigate through. Each new country required an Arrival Card submitted beforehand in place of needing visas. Weight more often than number of bags was the limitation (usually ~25 kilos per international flight). Once for a domestic flight we had to pay for more baggage. We tightly rolled and bagged clothes and should have opted for doing laundry vs. bringing enough to last as we had some bags breaking down and it always took awhile to re-pack.
It helped to convert cash into native currencies at my bank before going. We found that bigger businesses took credit cards but “mom and pops” shops were cash only. This happens to be the low point for the $ in a long time, but most places were still affordable at ranges.
Unforgettable memories resulted from a trip of a lifetime celebrating an anniversary and birthdays – stay tuned for the individual location breakdowns!
TRUE NORTH TEAM CONSULTING 