Alright so the official countdown is 2 months and 6 days until I get on a plane to SE Asia and essentially spend my entire summer there. So where is it that I'm going exactly?
The trip begins on May 19th, 1:40am when I will be flying to Jakarta, Indonesia with Elena and Brianna. Our actual trip doesn't begin until the May 22nd so we'll have some time to look around and try to recover from the 20+ hour flight as well as get used to the time change.
Our Indonesia trip is 20 days in total and our route can be seen in the above map. The places we get to visit are: Jakarta, Pangandaran, Yogyakarta, Mt. Rinjani, The Gili Islands and finish at Kuta, in Bali. Indonesia will be a constant supply of beaches and we even camp out in a crater of a volcano!
From there me and Elena head to Thailand and spend 40 days (!!!) exploring 7 different locations, mainly islands on both the east and west coast. We'll get to visit Bangkok, Koh Phi Phi (where The Beach was filmed), Koh Lipe and spend the longest time on Koh Phangan. The trip finishes off with a Full Moon party which I am incredibly excited for! I've heard that these things get absolutely insane with mass amounts of people partying all day and all night and alcohol you can drink out of little buckets. Thailand is definitely the destination I am most excited for so I'm glad that we're spending the majority of our trip there and this is where me and Elena will be celebrating our 21st birthdays, within a few hours of each other, so I sense another week long bender (maybe even more intense then the week long birthday celebration we had in London this past summer) in order to properly celebrate being officially legal worldwide.
From island hopping in Thailand we move onto the Laos, Cambodia and Northern Thailand (LTC) portion of the trip. This part of the trip will be 25 days and it'll have less of a focus on beaches and more of a focus on roughing it. We visit a few main cultural sites such as Angkor Wat to watch the sunset and explore the beautiful ruins. In Laos we'll get to go tubing down a river which has its shores filled with little bar huts. They basically throw you a rope, pull you in, and you buy your self some beer! Did I mention that we also get to go on a 2-day terk where we get to ride elephants, see local tribes and swim under waterfalls?
The entire trip is organized by a company called
Free and Easy Travelers , which was started back in 2000 by a 20-year-old. Impressive, right? They give their clients the freedom to basically do whatever they want in the areas they tour, in order for everyone to experience each country exactly how they want to, which is exactly what me and Elena had envisioned when we started planning this trip about 8 months ago. I also forgot to mention that we'll also get a handmade hammock from this trip! Beach hut, hammock, sunset, drink in hand...yup, sounds good to me ;) The one I picked out can be seen to the right!
Our trip doesn't end with the LTC trip, from there me and Elena will be moving on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to spend a couple days in one more country before heading back home. By this point I'm sure we'll be absolutely exhausted and probably missing all the people that we'd have spent so much time with so these few days in KL will be filled with shopping (I'm looking at you, Topshop!) and lazing around by the pool.
In total the trip is 89 days long. 3 months. My entire summer. It's recently begun to dawn on me just how long that actually is. When I think about it its roughly the same length as a semester at school, which always seems so long. Don't get me wrong though, I'm still really excited and it's definitely going to be one of those life changing trips.
Everything has been paid off and I've gone to the travel clinic to get my Typhoid shot and Malaria pills. All that's left is the Thailand visitor visa I need to get for myself as well as some supply shopping (backpack and all those other little travel things I'll be needing). Just 2 months and 6 days left...
Oh, and you can look at Elena's blog
here for her updates about our trip!
From there me and Elena head to Thailand and spend 40 days (!!!) exploring 7 different locations, mainly islands on both the east and west coast. We'll get to visit Bangkok, Koh Phi Phi (where The Beach was filmed), Koh Lipe and spend the longest time on Koh Phangan. The trip finishes off with a Full Moon party which I am incredibly excited for! I've heard that these things get absolutely insane with mass amounts of people partying all day and all night and alcohol you can drink out of little buckets. Thailand is definitely the destination I am most excited for so I'm glad that we're spending the majority of our trip there and this is where me and Elena will be celebrating our 21st birthdays, within a few hours of each other, so I sense another week long bender (maybe even more intense then the week long birthday celebration we had in London this past summer) in order to properly celebrate being officially legal worldwide.
From island hopping in Thailand we move onto the Laos, Cambodia and Northern Thailand (LTC) portion of the trip. This part of the trip will be 25 days and it'll have less of a focus on beaches and more of a focus on roughing it. We visit a few main cultural sites such as Angkor Wat to watch the sunset and explore the beautiful ruins. In Laos we'll get to go tubing down a river which has its shores filled with little bar huts. They basically throw you a rope, pull you in, and you buy your self some beer! Did I mention that we also get to go on a 2-day terk where we get to ride elephants, see local tribes and swim under waterfalls?
