Monday 4 June 2007

The itinerary

So, plenty of people are asking - about time we let on where we're going.

1st of all we're spending a month in exotic England (malaria, rabies, chavs etc) - spending a decent amount of time with friends and family before we set off in August for a week or 2 in Havana (hopefully before Castro kicks the bucket). Then we nip over to Cancun, and overland through Mexico for about 3 weeks to LA.

From LA, we fly through the Pacific Islands, stopping off in the Cook Islands and Fiji for 2 weeks each before spending 2 months each in NZ and OZ. We'll be doing NZ North to South (Auckland to Christchurch), then Australia South to North (Melbourne to Cairns). Again, plenty of friends and family here, so hopefully we can save on accommodation, and spend instead on a camper van for cruising around.

After that, we really hit the backpacking trail - Lombok, Bali, Sumatra, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (2 or 3 months overland), then we finish off in India (Chennai to Mumbai) before coming back to Amsterdam.

That at least is the plan. Of course, plans are elastic, and if we like somewhere, we'll definitely hang around a little longer and adapt our future itinerary to fit. It might also be that halfway round the world we find somewhere amazing/ some awesome opportunity to do some really cool work, and just have to stay there for longer, so maybe Amsterdam will have to wait...

We're looking at this trip in several ways. One is that we're reversing our time/ money continuum. We're currently cash rich but time poor. For the next 12 months it will be the other way round. We're really looking forward to this - it will force us to not just take the easy way out and buy our way out of problems; instead we'll have to live by our wits and actually think about our decisions a bit more.

Whatever happens, we know this is going to be a life-changing experience.

Ensign, set a course for the rest of the world...

Engage!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

i know some good places to stay in New Zealand :-)

Anonymous said...

Just had some fantastic news sent to us about two places in southern Caribbean - Cartagena Colombia is supposed to be fabuloso - v. safe and friendly - weirdly but top of the bill has to be the San Blas archipelago, the Kuna Yala, 400 islands belonging to Panama with indigenous people living on about 40 of them... paradise, I hear!

Ben and Debs said...

@ Toon: Super looking forward to NZ... and the rest!

@ Rob: Thanks for the tip, but it's unlikely we'll be able to make it over there - kinda pushed for time in that first month...