A trip like ours of 33,000 miles and more is going to be a game of lots of halves (if you pardon the mathematical impossibility of that statement). The planning has been exactly the same with this week being a case in point.
In the final 2 weeks we have needed to finalise car hire in Canada and the USA, camper van for a month in Chile and Argentina, Nellie and Patch our 2 Jack Russells being fostered, Indian Visas, farewell parties and dinners with friends and family, getting the house sorted for our tenant, loading all our schedule onto Outlook, getting important documents photo'd and saved to 'the cloudy thingy' etc etc etc...... Inevitably the stuff you think is going to be really hard is actually done in an instant and the stuff you think is going to be easy looks like it is going to give us a headache till the night before we leave - if we're lucky! Fred is a member of the Radio Club with Newark Radio and on Monday he interviewed Dean and I, and his other radio club members interviewed him, for 2 x 5 minute slots that are going out on Radio Newark on Monday 20 June between 4 - 5pm. Rhyan Paul who organises and runs the Club has set up www.positivechangeworks.co.uk after years as a big club DJ to encourage young people to get involved in music, DJing and being creative. By lucky coincidence he will be in Miami at the same time we are for a 48 hour stop over & he's going to interview Fred - roof bar, cocktails and decks maybe involved! More challenging aspects this week has been the cooker not passing gas safety certificate because the lid, which we never use, is wrong (!) so we've bought and had installed at short notice a cheap and cheerful electric one, and much thanks to our new tenant to not making a fuss about our lovely professional cooker being replaced by this one. Intention when we come back is to donate the new cooker to a housing charity and get ours reinstalled. Saturday we visited some old acquaintances we've not had contact with for years who have offered, via connections on Facebook, to have the dogs. Having lost their Jack Russell aged 12 they have not had a dog for 2 years and are deciding if they want to have dogs again. Having ours will help them decide. We all trooped over to introduce the dogs to them, and the dogs had a wonderful time. Fred was delighted, as they are his most precious family members, and they've kindly agreed to take them from the day before we go until we come back. Newark based friends organised a leaving do at Oscars Inn on Saturday with the band Swing Nouveau who were fabulous. Much wine was drunk and the dancing was uninhibited. Thankfully for the packed pub we were not made to sing as had been threatened. Tuesday saw us at a leaving dinner with other friends who had been in Corsica at the weekend. Pablo one of our hosts, being Chilean, started us off with Pisco Sours which will apparently be plentiful after our landing in Santiago. Never mind Santiago they were plentiful on Tuesday night at The Lions B&B which led to a slight loss of cognitive function in work the next day - think I got away with it until now.... The Indian Visa saga continues. Two trips to the Peepul Centre in Leicester and we thought we had it sorted - but no. Dean has had a call today to say that whilst Dean and I have a 12 month multi entry visa granted we require an additional form for Fred. Worst comes to the worst we can leave him in Bangkok for 10 days and he can join us in Delhi later on a 30 day visa as he will be a very experienced 10 year old traveller by then (only joking...!). Consequently to try and keep to 6 weeks in India there is another trip to Leicester first thing in the morning to do another form. However it means there are only 4 working days to send the document from Leicester to Birmingham, get the paperwork processed in Birmingham and get Fred's passport and visa couriered to us. It is very tight and we'll be to the wire on this one. If disaster strikes and Fred's passport isn't going to make it back in time we will have to dash to Peterborough for a same day passport issue - eeeekkk.... Next week is the last 2 days at work and I shall really miss everyone. I've had a brilliant time with great people who are doing stuff that matters. Hopefully some of those are reading this now & to them I say - great job and keep it up :-) We love to have people to stay and therefore joined couchsurfing.com more than 5 years ago. We also provide digs for the local professional theatre and have had lots of actors, singers and musicians stay with us over the last few years - every Pantomime season we have one of the cast for 2 months which is always a hoot.
This Saturday I offered to provide accommodation for a member of Northern Harmony (northernharmony.pair.com) and we had JC a delightful female baker, lawyer, teaching assistant, farmer, musician, singer and much much more....... as our guest. As Northern Harmony sing sacred and secular music and the concert had been organised by my local Methodist Church I was expecting to settle JC in with a herbal tea at 11pm. At 1am we had cleaned up 3 bottles of wine and a rather fabulous cheese board. We had shared perspectives on American politics, drug issues in high schools, social services / health care provision in the UK vs USA, stories of their tour and weird places they had stayed - my particular favourites were the sex commune in Germany and the mad cat lady in England. At 8:30am an English cooked breakfast was on the table - black pudding, cumberland sausages, smoked bacon, portobello mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and poached eggs. More great conversation in the hour over breakfast before I had to drop her. Fred had also had a great time with JC - he'd joined me at the concert and we we let him stay up until 11pm when the conversation was turning to more adult topics and it was already way past his bedtime! My reflection on this fun 12 hours was we always (including Fred) have a great time when we have new people to stay, or stay with others - therefore I wanted to build couchsurfing into our 6 month backpack trip. What better way to get local perspectives and broaden our understanding of the people and the places we are going to visit. We were already off to a good start as friends from France who spend half their year in San Diego are having us to stay, as are my cousin in Sydney and old friend in Canberra. Since Sunday morning I've been searching and messaging couchsurfing hosts in Canada, USA, Argentina, Thailand, India and Rio. Responses have been quick, and if unable to host they've made recommendations for others in the area who may be able to help. So we will hopefully get some interesting couchsurfs to mix up with the camper van, motel, hostel and camping accommodation. Thanks to a US / Thai couple for coming back and saying we could stay on their remote farm in northern Thailand - looking forwards to meeting the pigs and chickens in the photos & finding out if the hot tub was really intended for them or they were just having a cheeky moment when the photos were taken! Since we booked our flights we've continued to research the details of what we want to do in each leg, and deal with the practicalities of visas, boarder crossings, avoiding peak monsoon etc.... A combination of stumbling blocks (getting an India visa for longer than 30 days issued before you start a trip of more than 6 months - long long story...) and reading the blogs of others has resulted in what I am referring to as a 're-calibration' (!) of the Asia leg.
The blogs of others has been hugely helpful, plus friends, work colleagues and family have all connected us to people who have experience of the countries we plan to visit, and those people have generously taken time to share their experiences. The result was me experiencing South East Asia fatigue before I'd even left my office. I had pushed for us to do Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, China and North Korea. However 2 weeks after booking our flights and having gone into some depth of research I knew I just didn't want to be spending 1 or 2 days in each place for 6 weeks trying to get round to key places in each country. I also had a vision of some sort of backpackers superhighway of hellish bus journeys and irritating border crossings being hassled for bribes leading to a Mexican standoff in sweltering humidity. We had something we were moving away from and no longer felt appealing. At the same time Thailand was starting to bubble up more and more in our planning. No one in our family had been particularly keen on Thailand, we saw it as a route into and out of the Asia trip by way of Bangkok. However the more we read, particularly Nomadic Matt's blog (click to see # nomadicmatt ), the more attractive it became. I think we had written off Thailand because its a place of package tours and I had a cliched view of Bangkok as a city full of ladyboys, ping pong bars, seedy western men shopping for Thai brides, and those making their way to and from full moon parties....... When I set my ill informed prejudices aside and got out the library books and re-visited blogs I found a country that seemed to have it all. Without exception we read that the people were friendly and welcoming, the food varied by region but consistently fabulous, the temples stunning (the daughter of a work colleague says better than Ankor Wat!), islands untouched by mass tourism or packaged 'partying', ecological diversity within several National Parks, and cities outside Bangkok that are vibrant and exciting to delve into. As a consequence we have now decided that from Sydney we will fly into Bangkok and spend 6 weeks exploring Thailand. We will visit a variety of cities, sights, and regions with the aim to get off the beaten track and really get under the skin of one country. Importantly we can also now apply for our 6 month India visa (which we need for our planned 6 weeks in India) in Bangkok and tour round Thailand coming back to Bangkok to pick up the visas before we fly to Delhi - result! Obviously this plan is subject to further changes (!) but when I think about the Asia leg - now known as the 'Thailand leg' - I feel invigorated not exhausted which tells me its the right decision (for now.......!). |
AuthorFor me this trip is all about having a great adventure with my family. Its taken years for us to finally stop talking about it and do it - simply because it both excites and frightens the life out me! So I'm stepping out of corporate life, where I singularly failed to achieve a work/life balance....to experience different cultures and spend time with those I love xx Archives
December 2016
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