Goodbye for now, Asia!

The time has come. After fourteen amazing weeks, we are now leaving Southeast Asia. Just as it did in Africa, our time here has gone by quickly, but we leave feeling a little stronger, a little wiser, and a little more cultured. 

When we started planning for this trip, we had not had South East Asia on our radar. We knew we wanted to hike in Nepal, but that was about it. However, after hearing how much people enjoyed travelling through this part of the world, we knew we needed to reassess. We are so grateful to all of the people who encouraged us to change our minds! After adding SE Asia to the travel list, we decided to spend six weeks here. This is where the value of not booking and planning in advance was highlighted most for us! As we travelled along, learning about new places to visit and being given recommendations by others, we realized six weeks would never do. We extended the time planned in each country, and even added a few countries as we went. We certainly see why travelling here came so highly recommended! We had thought we would travel through Vietnam as well, but with so much to see and do there, we have decided to save it for a separate trip entirely. We have left a lot of countries untouched in this part of the world, so we will certainly be back.

We have had so many amazing experiences here in Asia. We have hiked for days on end. We have seen more temples than we can count: tall temples, wide temples, small temples, temples on hilltops, temples under construction, temples inside caves, elephant temples, temples taken over by trees. We have eaten the most delicious noodle and rice dishes. We have explored malls that have 6 floors. We have travelled by tuktuk, bus, canoe, cable car, ferry, elephant, jeep, car, slow boat, scooter, speedboat, train, minibus, regular bus, sleeper bus, tube, bicycle, plane, and on foot. We have been very, very hot and also quite chilly. As we noted when we said goodbye to Africa, we realize travelling to these six countries doesn’t provide a complete picture of Asia, but it sure has taught us a lot. It has been a bit of a blur of different currencies, languages and traditions, but we have continued to experience daily reminders to stay open and grateful.

There has been so much to love, but also a few things we might not miss so much. Without being specific about which is which, here’s a mixed bag list of things we are now saying goodbye to:

• Bamboo huts on stilts
• People bathing in rivers
• Temples
• Garbage fires
• Grammatical mistakes on signs
• Signs with symbols we can’t read
• Roosters crowing every morning around 5:00am
• Elephant patterned print pants/wrap skirts
• Bottled water (for a little bit, anyways)
• Delicious cheap food
• Cheap travel (seriously. It was less expensive to travel across the entire country of Cambodia stretched out on a fairly comfortable bed than it is to travel the 20km from the airport to our hostel in New Zealand. We have some serious adjusting to do!)
• Stray dogs and cats
• Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You (we have heard this nearly every day, at least once, for nine weeks)
• THAT smell (if you’ve ever walked the streets in an Asian city, you know what we are talking about)
• Mysterious green veggie (similar to spinach) that’s included in nearly every dish
• Hoping to get across the road safely while dodging between cars and motorcycles
• Will standing out as a giant 

Just as we did wrapping up our time in Africa, we thought we would pull together some numbers from the countries we visited here (converted into CAD):

	Taxi	Dinner for 2	Coffee	Beer	Toilet	Laundry	Misc.
Nepal	8.5	4-11	3-7 thermos of tea	3	0	3/kg	1 ice cream 3 Mars roll
Malaysia	.6-4.7 (Uber/Grab)	6.3-14*	1.90	1.25	.30	1.90/kg	2.85 Breakfast
Myanmar	6	9.25	.50	1.85	.30	2/kg	14.80 most expensive meal we had
Thailand	4.70-11.70	8.60-21 (avg 10	1.55	2.30	0	n/a	1 smoothie
Laos	4.50	7.50-15	1.80	3	0	3/kg	1.50 smoothie
Cambodia	12.50-25	8-22 (avg 13)	1.85	1-2.50	0	1.25/kg

*We searched for decent priced food in KL, as it was really touristy and much more expensive. If you really looked, you could find it!

We left plans more open-ended here, and were grateful for that. When we did book flights out ahead of time because of visa requirements, we often found ourselves wishing we had a few more days to explore. We still haven’t brought ourselves to show up in a city without a place booked to stay for the night, but there’s still time to change our ways. Baby steps.

Highlight of each country:

Nepal: hiking the Annapurna circuit

Malaysia: enjoying the amazing food in Georgetown

Myanmar: exploring Inle Lake

Thailand: visiting the blue temple

Laos: travelling by slow boat and seeing locals doing their thing down by the river

Cambodia: temples of Siem Reap

Food we will be saying goodbye to:

After writing about our hiking in Nepal, it was brought to my attention how much I wrote about the delicious treats we were consuming. Ever since then, I have been conscious of how often I write about new foods we’ve tried, great chats we’ve had in restaurants, and loungy cafe sits we’ve enjoyed. We’ve just felt so spoiled by the delicious food on this continent! We’ve also realized that food- trying new foods, finding comfort foods, doing cooking lessons with local ingredients- has been a big, important part of our travels.

In case you feel like I haven’t mentioned it enough, we have seriously enjoyed the food in this part of the world. We’ve enjoyed it so much that we spent part of one recent dinner discussion ranking the countries by the deliciousness of their food:

• Malaysia
• Myanmar
• Thailand
• Nepal
• Laos
• Cambodia

Mmm Mars rolls

I’m finished talking about food for a while now.

Asian countries we want to visit next: Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Southern Thailand, Malaysia (Borneo)

We end our time in Asia with a 12-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur before squishing Will into his seat on our last AirAsia flights. We are now prepared to jump ahead time zones, listen to some amazing accents, and explore a couple large islands!