Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia

January 25, 2020 Podcasts 30:57
Just put my dragon’s den on Airbnb

January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week’s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about that kind of extreme travel planning. All this and more at the direct link to the podcast file or listening to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here is the transcript of TravelCommons podcast #159:

  • Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
  • Coming to you today from the TravelCommons studio in Chicago, Illinois having finished 3 weeks of traveling down to Phoenix with one more to go. It’s been a mild winter — for Chicago — especially when compared to last winter, which means it’s been in the 20’s and 30’s as opposed to -23 as it was one morning last January. But even with a mild winter, I still appreciate the 70 degree days in Phoenix.
  • It’s a 4-hr flight between Chicago and Phoenix. I normally enjoy that amount of “unplugged” time to just read, listen to music, listen to podcasts. But a couple of weeks ago, I tweaked my back during a workout — not a big thing, I’ve done it many times before. But this time, the pain didn’t go away, it’s hung around on my left side, moving from back to hip to thigh, making it very uncomfortable to sit for long periods of time — like 4 hrs. Which has made me notice how long US carriers keep the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign on — like, forever. By the time that seatbelt sign finally goes off, my back is screaming — and the person next to me in the middle seat is pretty annoyed at my constant shifting. Back in episode #152, I talked about Southwest flights between Chicago and Nashville keeping the seatbelt sign on the entire hour-and-20-minutes. It hasn’t been that bad, but it’s easily been 45 minutes. And it isn’t just Southwest; United is doing the same thing. Quite a difference from, say, when Andrew and I flew Air Baltic back in October. 10,000 ft and “bing” that seat belt sign would go off, and we’d still be climbing. It doesn’t need to turn off that fast, but there’s gotta be a happy medium there somewhere.
  • With the mild winter and a little bit of luck, my flights to and from Phoenix have been pretty dependable — except for this week. On Monday, I started getting delay notices for my United 7:40pm flight right after lunch. United was doing their typical rolling delay exercise — it’s a 30 minutes; no, really an hour; no, we’re leaving at 9pm; just kidding, it’s really 9:40. I was OK with the 30 and 60-minute delays, but then when I get two more delays in a 40-minute span — now, something’s up. I call United. I get the Premier desk, which the guy tells me is in Chicago. I tell him the story — rolling delays have now gotten to 2 hrs; I don’t trust that this flight is going off, and I need to get to PHX tonight. The guy says, “Yup, I got it. Makes sense.” He tries to find me routings through LAX and SFO, but the connections don’t work. So he cancels and refunds my ticket — no hassle, no questions, no change fee. I love this guy. I pivot to Southwest and American, which both have 8:40 flights. I look at American’s seat map — nothing but middle seats. That’s just not going to work with my back, so it’s over to Southwest. I’m A-List, so I know with their open seating I’ll get an aisle seat. (Exhale) Haven’t done that dance in a while, so was a bit out of shape. But with one more trip to PHX left, I’m not looking to get back into that shape.
  • Bridge Music — Revolve mix by cinematrik (c) copyright 2005 Licensed under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hisboyelroy/430

Following Up

  • Before writing a podcast, I go through all the interaction channels — website comments, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, Twitter replies, e-mails, … and inevitably I miss something. Which I have done since October when Arnoud Heijnis and I traded Twitter direct messages about travel converters. In episode #155, I’d talked about having to rummage around for European plug adaptors before my Krakow and Budapest trip, and how I’m always leaving them behind. Arnoud wrote –
    • Hi Mark, just caught up on your last two episodes. I also did the travel converter dance until someone recommended the Power Bagel. It’s so small and comes in handy not only as a travel adapter but also in hotel rooms with not enough power plugs, conference tables with one outlet etc. Iit never leaves my bag so thought I’d share.
  • A very belated thanks, Arnoud! Clicking through the link that Arnoud sent, the Power Bagel is a compact circular power strip of universal plugs and a couple of USB ports. They say that the circular design keeps large power adapters, like a Macbook power supply, from blocking outlets like they do on straight power strips. And then in the center hole, they store a universal plug adapter so you can plug the Power Bagel in most international outlets. Cool design and Arnoud vouches for it. Clicking around the web site, the company MOGICS seems to be a 3-person design company based in Singapore. They got started a few years back on Kickstarter and are in the middle of a new campaign for an upgraded version of the Power Bagel, called, of course, the Super Bagel that upgrades the plug adapter and adds a on-trend USB-C port. Kickstarter says the campaign ends on Feb 25th. I’ll include a link in the show notes for anyone interested.
  • Kickstarter seems to be the place for these things. I sent Arnoud a link to a travel adapter campaign that I joined. The Passport Go is a more traditional travel adapter — a big cube that will plug into most international outlets and has 3 USB-A and 1 USB-C plugs and one universal plug receptacle. I used it on my Baltics trip. For personal travel, most of my power needs seem to now be driven by USB cords rather than plugs — my iPhone did a rapid charge off the USB-C port, my tablet and headphones off the USB-A ports and since I don’t have enough hair to justify a blow dryer or curling iron, I never used the plug receptacle. Indeed, if I’d brought my Macbook Air, I could’ve powered that up off the USB-C port rather than bringing its power adapter. I’ll include a link to their Kickstarter page.
  • Back in episode #156, I talked about how I really liked electric scooters, using them to run around in Chicago and Charlottesville and DC, and down here in Phoenix. Whereas Chicago wrapped up their e-scooter pilot in October — which made sense; I don’t think those scooters would do well in the snow — Phoenix seemed the perfect place with perfect weather — no snow, not a lot of rain. And they seemed to have nailed one of the main problems with e-scooters — people leaving them lying everywhere, especially in the middle of sidewalks. In downtown Phoenix, you have to park them in designated areas, typically near sidewalk corners, inside a painted box. So it surprised me when I started coming down here in December that I saw only 2 scooter companies — Lime (which is partnered with Uber) and Spin (which is owned by the car company Ford). But then, a couple of weeks ago, Lime announced that they were pulling out — that they couldn’t make money in Phoenix — and a day or so later, all their scooters were gone. I don’t know what the right balance between scooter availability and public right-of-way is, but I hope Chicago and Phoenix and other cities can figure it out. This whole micro-mobility space — bike shares, e-scooters — is an important part of the urban transit mix. And, when the weather’s nice, they’re fun too!
  • In that same episode, I talked about buying a smaller bag, a TravelPro Maxlite 5 international carry-on size, to meet the smaller carry-on size and weight requirements of AirBaltic, which Andrew and I would be using to hop between Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki on our Baltics beer and sauna tour. I said back then that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it because I’d only be using it for this Baltics trip and maybe some short couple-of-day trips, that my big Victorinox 22-incher would remain my primary bag. But as it turns out, I’ve been using the smaller TravelPro for these 4-day/3-night trips to Phoenix. Now, with temperatures in 70’s, I’m not having to bring heavy, thick clothes with me, but still, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I can pack into that smaller TravelPro. But, I think I’ll be back to the Victorinox for next week’s trip — I’m vectoring through Durango, CO for a ski weekend on the way home. Little colder, little more clothing; I think I’ll need all the space I can get.
  • And if you have any travel stories, questions, comments, tips, rants – the voice of the traveler, send ’em along — text or audio comment to comments@travelcommons.com — you can send a Twitter message to mpeacock, post your thoughts on the TravelCommons’ Facebook page or our Instagram account at travelcommons — or you can post comments on the web site at TravelCommons.com.
  • Bridge Music — Velvet Green of Mystery (Instrumental) by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/48114 Ft: Kthugha, Jeris, Martijn de Boer

Planning the Trip of a Lifetime

  • We’ve talked on past episodes about trip planning — using guidebooks, social media, Google algorithms, shooting the gaps between bipolar TripAdvisor reviews, casting runes, consulting tarot cards,… And all that for a week’s vacation, maybe two. What about a 9-week vacation, a paid sabbatical that you’ve worked and waited 7 years for? Well, that’s the extreme travel planning that long-time TravelCommons listener and even longer time friend Allan Marko and his wife Chris Chufo faced last year. And with January being a big travel planning month, I asked Allan to talk to us about how he and Chris planned for a trip of a lifetime.
    • Mark: Allan. Thanks for joining us. It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation and this is the January episode because a lot of folks in January start to think start to make plans.
    • Allan: Yeah, it was a year ago. We left two days after Christmas, so we were gone from December 27th to February 27th, 2019. I’m getting daily reminders from Facebook.
    • Mark: So give us a little bit of background on the trip. It was a sabbatical. How long was it? What were some of your thoughts on it?
    • Allan: Well, her company allows, after seven years of employment, you could take a chunk of time off. In the case of her company, you’re allowed to take a number of weeks off. And if you take it at a certain time of year, the Christmas holidays, you could get an extra week and you can clamp on two weeks of vacation. So that would give us a total of nine weeks, which was a very attractive option to take that much time off in one chunk, never having done anything longer than a three-week vacation.
    • Mark: Nine weeks; trip of a lifetime. There’re two sides of that one is Wow, that’s pretty exciting: The other side of that is – Wow, what am I going to do? And how do I start to wrap my head around it?
    • Allan: It’s like it’s exciting to think about it first. Then it’s kind of daunting to think about. It’s kind of like — it’s this huge thing to plan. It’s a mountain to climb. It’s just almost overwhelming. When you start thinking about all the details that you’re gonna have to figure out.
    • Mark: So, unpack that. How did you start to climb that mountain?
    • Allan: We decided that we really wanted to do one big chunk of time like you said. Trip of a lifetime is a really good way to put it, because that’s how we were thinking about it. We’re also thinking about let’s go someplace we haven’t been before. We wanted to do something that would be more difficult to do when we’re older, when we’re retired, and we like warm weather vacations. So, knowing we had to take it during the holiday time, to get the advantage of those extra weeks. We decided that it’s kind of naturally pointing towards Southeast Asia for us.
    • Mark: So at least that sort of narrowed it down to a quarter of the globe. Right?
    • Allan: Yeah, it’s also like, where could we go for that much time? Right? And so you’ve got a lace a few destinations together, and through our planning, it kind of even made more sense to go through adjacent countries in Southeast Asia.
    • Mark: So now we’ve got it. We’ve gone from a complete blank slate to at least an area. So after you’ve got it narrowed down to an area to Southeast Asia, what was your what was your next thought process? So how did you then begin to piece the details together?
    • Allan: We definitely had a hit list of countries who wanted to visit. We knew we wanted to go to Vietnam. We knew we wanted to spend some time on the beaches in Thailand and speaking with some good friends of ours who have traveled extensively and lived for many years at a time in that part of the world. We had a few meetings with them where we did some brainstorming. Also, in part of my research, I found itinerary. I mean, there’s a ton of information available online. I kept coming back to reference to banana pancake route that a lot of Backpackers took. And it’s kind of this classic route through Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
    • Mark: So how did like banana pancake route, is that just Is that just the shape of the route? Or it was there. Is there a pancake house somewhere that like?
    • Allan: I think I looked that up originally, and I can’t remember why it has that name, but it’s quite interesting. I basically took that and modified it to our further discussions with our friends and between Chris and I. Some things we weren’t really interested in. We didn’t have enough time to do the complete routing. There were certain things I didn’t want to do, like spending several days getting from Siem Reap in Cambodia into northern Thailand. I didn’t want to take bus travel. It was pretty primitive routing. So, there are certain things we opted to fly rather take a bus. Things like that like; a normal backpacker would take it. We’re gonna be adult backpackers. Wanted a little bit higher level of comfort.
    • Mark: There is a difference between your twenties and your fifties from a travel standpoint.
    • Allan: Although we wanted to travel with everything on our backs. We actually carried 40-liter backpacks on our back and 20-liter backpacks carried on the front.
    • Mark: How did that work for you guys?
    • Allan: It was great. It was hard to get used to at first, but it’s very efficient when you’re traveling. Part of that is you can carry everything on when we were taking flight. It just gives you a lot of freedom. And you’re kind of in control of your own destiny. So, you don’t have to deal with lost luggage kind of thing, which is a major concern when you’re that far away from home, losing everything.
    • Mark: I think if you’re doing point-to-point travel, that also could be a challenge. Because even if you lose something, somebody finds it, getting it caught up to you can be a challenge.
    • Allan: Right. As we were packing, when we were leaving the US, I started thinking about the luggage tags. We had luggage tags on our bags, of course, but we also had them inside the bags, and I start thinking — it’s not gonna help to have my home address on that, and my home phone number, because if it gets lost somewhere in Southeast Asia, they’re not gonna be able to get a hold of me. So, I printed out our first set of tags with our hotel address and the phone number of the hotel on their email address. and my email address. So, as we progressed along the way, we had kind of this ritual at breakfast the morning we were leaving. We would redo our luggage tags with the information of the destination we were going to that day, so if it got lost somehow in transit, it knew where to find out, right? They knew where to find us. Think about the old steamer trunks that were on ocean liners. They always had the destination, not the home address.
    • Mark: That’s interesting. That’s a good insight. Two questions… Were there some things you packed that, in hindsight, you didn’t need? And then the flip side of that, were there a couple of things that you said, “Wow, I really wish I had packed that.”
    • Allan: When you’re only bringing that much stuff, which isn’t that much for eight weeks, you’ve got to think through a few things. You’ve got to justify everything that you put in that pack we knew in advance. We’re gonna be going to a cold weather location in Hanoi that time of year. It could be in the 40’s-low 50’s and we ended up bringing some light down jackets and base layers that we typically used for skiing, things like that. Never having been to Hanoi before, once we got there, you can literally buy any of that stuff on the streets for $5. It would have been something where you just buy it there and leave it there. But we have spent considerably more money on that, or we brought some of our ski base layers with us that took up valuable space when we didn’t need to do that.
    • Mark: Flip side of that. Was there something that you didn’t have that you said, “Damn, I wish I had that” and that you couldn’t buy anywhere.
    • Allan: Right. We can’t buy your way out of the jam. We have never said that. I don’t remember saying that during the trip, that we ever wished we had something that we didn’t have. I got to tell you, there was a lot of thought put into the packing. Multiple use, whether it be pants or shirts, you’ve got to make sure almost everything is compatible with everything else. So you kind of keep it to a limited color range. A lot of black, you know, that kind of thing.
    • Mark: I’m a big fan of black.
    • Allan: You know, it works.
    • Mark: Goes with everything and it doesn’t show stains.
    • Allan: And a lot of wool clothing. The 72-hour wool T shirts. We were going to be in very, very hot, humid climates for most of the trip. And we brought a lot of things that we could wash in our hotel. But also, when you get to Southeast Asia, hotel laundry is very inexpensive. So there were a couple of times where we would just send out our entire backpack. It was literally like US$5 to get it all cleaned.
    • Mark: I had that same experience when we went thio. We went to Vietnam. We went in July. It was just, like, hugely hot. We did exactly the same thing. It was like, you know, let’s ship all this stuff out. We took it across the street. It was probably about US$3-5. Everything came back amazingly clean, but amazingly stiff. Like they had just beat the hell out of it.
    • Allan: Yes, we’d be in Thailand on island after we just sent our laundry and you’re driving down the street. And there’s some garage where you see three industrial washers and all these clothes hanging on a line. It’s like, I wonder if that’s our stuff.
    • Mark: You didn’t recognize your underwear or anything hanging. I guess that’s a good thing.
    • Allan: You’re going away for eight weeks. You certainly can’t bring that many pairs of underwear. You know you’re gonna be doing laundry in the hotel room sink, and you’ve got a plan accordingly.
    • Mark: When you are planning this, you know where you’re gonna want to go. You said, “OK, I’ve got a set of things and places I want to see. I’ve got some sort of structure, some sort of sequence that other folks have done, so it sort of makes sense.” So the next step, then, is how much travel did you book ahead of time versus how much was just sort of ad hoc; that you sorta let flow.
    • Allan: We thought about this a lot before we left. And deliberately, we decided we wanted to have our travel booked for our outbound and inbound flights. For the beginning and the end of the trip, I wanted to use miles for business class seats. But in between, we decided we just wanted to keep some flexibility to the trip and book as we went. And that, as being people that are really focused on details, it was an interesting challenge for us to let go like that. But it was in the end, it was very liberating to do it that way.
    • Mark: Did that ever catch you any anywhere along the way?
    • Allan: We talked that through before we left, and we decided that might be the price we pay to keep flexibility. You know, there were plenty of places to stay. There was one accommodation in Thailand where we actually booked the last room that was available. But it did work to our advantage a few times, not having booked in advance because as, an example, when we were on a cruise in Halong Bay in Vietnam, our next destination was gonna be the Central Coast. And some folks that we were traveling with on the same cruise, we were chatting them up, and they told us that they had just come from that area and there were just torrential rainstorms. And we looked at the weather. It was gonna be the same way for a week or so we decided to just avoid that part of the country. And we just flew directly to Ho Chin Minh City instead. So there were a couple of things like that, where our initial thoughts on itinerary, we decided to reroute.
    • Mark: That makes sense.
    • Allan: And so then we had our routing loosely established. We would spend a night every few days doing our advanced booking. So I always try to stay two steps ahead, about a week in advance. Sometimes your first choice accommodation would open up. We were just very loose that way. We’re covering a lot of ground, and one of the major things realized as we were going is, even though we had 8 weeks, it was still a limited time to see what we wanted to see. So I determined that we didn’t want to spend more than half a day transiting, if at all possible, between destinations. So, like I was saying earlier, instead of taking a 2-day bus ride where we would be in the middle of nowhere, we would just fly that and gain some time given the fact that in Southeast Asia, flights are very inexpensive and there are lots of flights going everywhere.
    • Mark: Was there a certain airline that you tended to use there? Was there one or did you just tend to use the national carriers?
    • Allan: I would do reviews of the national carriers and their safety records and things like that. The beginning of the trip, I was trying to use Vietnam Airlines. They have a fairly decent record, and they covered the first couple of countries we were in. When we got into Thailand, Thai was easy enough to use and they are Star Alliance. I’ve got a lot of United miles, so I’d stay on that wherever possible. And also the type of plane they were flying. I didn’t want to take a lot of regional jets if we could avoid doing that.
    • Mark: That probably makes it easier from a carry-on standpoint.
    • Allan: Yeah, exactly
    • Mark: Any visa issues that you had hopping between countries or did you line those all up before you left?
    • Allan: I did a lot of research on visas, and we had to get our visa before we left for Vietnam. We did that here in San Francisco. They give you a lot of options. I also decided to do a 2-entry/exit visa for Vietnam. You know, you never know what’s gonna happen when you’re in these countries that far away from home. And I wanted to have a way out if we had to exit into another country for whatever reason, political unrest or who knows what — typhoon storms, whatever. So I had the availability to go back into Vietnam, which I thought would be fairly easy to get back to the US from should we have to do something like that. It cost a little more, but I thought that was a good insurance policy to have. Most of the visas that we needed we could just obtain upon arrival. Again, I did a lot of research to make sure that was the case.
    • Mark: How much time do you think you invested in planning?
    • Allan: We knew we had a deadline as far as we knew what year we had to take the trip. And I knew in advance that I wanted to book our airline reservations for the business class seats approximately a year ahead of time. We were researching this trip for about 18 months. There’s a lot of research that goes into figuring out how long you spend in each place. And I found that had to be managed as we were going along. I thought about what we wanted to see. We’d talk about how long we wanted to spend in certain places. And there weren’t a lot of times where we said, “I wish we had an extra day here” because we had done that kind of legwork in advance, and we did the homework. But that comes with the time in the planning.
    • Mark: Well, Allan Marko, thank you very much. Thanks for sharing those stories with us on the TravelCommons podcast. Appreciate it.
    • Allan: It was fun. Thanks for having me. It was great to take the opportunity, doing research for this podcast to go through my old notes. And again, it was a year ago, and it’s just bringing back a lot of great memories.

Closing

  • Closing music — Pictures of You by Evangeline
  • OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #159
  • I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
  • Link to TravelCommons Vietnam video
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