In 2016 during a week in Wales we formulated the plan for our 6 month trip.
The Travelling Bees on Porthor Beach – October 2016
During crisp Autumn evenings sitting in a caravan on top of a mountain we poured over guidebooks for our chosen countries.
Travel Guidebooks – photos by Adam Groffman
Taking into consideration the weather in each country, transport options (we wanted to travel overland in some places if we could) and must see we settled on this plan:
- Bangkok – 3 nights
- Travel by overnight train to Chiang Mai
- Chiang Mai – 3 nights including one night at The Elephant Nature Park
- Koh Samui – 3 nights
- Koh PaNang – 14 nights
- Penang – 3 nights
- Langkawi – 1 night
- Travel by ferry and train
- Kuala Lumper – 5 nights
- Singapore – 3 nights
- Tasmania – 17 nights
- Sydney – 3 nights
- New Zealand – around 8 weeks
- Japan – 5 nights
- India – Golden Triangle 2 weeks
- India – Tea Plantation 4 nights
- Travel overland into Nepal
- Nepal – 3 weeks
We could have taken the easy option, stuck to tried and tested tourist routs and stayed in top class family friendly resorts but where would the fun have been in that!
Heading back home we had a sense of anticipation and emailed our plan over to our Travel Counsellor – Kirsty Fisher so she could begin to consider flights for us and advise us on our budget.
At this point we had…£17,000 saved due to Daddy Bee taking redundancy from his 20 year career in Further Education (that’s a topic for another blog) and £20,000 was going to come from releasing equity in our house. So our total budget was £37,000 – fingers crossed we had enough!