As an aside before I get back to the job of reporting on my next location, sorry in advance if this post is completely self-indulgent! But I will let you in on my big secret--I am a planner at heart. I make spreadsheets compulsively. I love stats of all kinds. I consume content and turn it into outlines for no reason other than they make me happy. For all of you who thought that just because I like to travel that that automatically makes me spontaneous, I'm about to burst that bubble completely.
So even though I had booked basically nothing ahead of time before I jetted off, I did have a route burned into my brain that I thought I'd take on my grand tour of Southeast Asia. No small amount of planning went into creating this route either! I spent countless hours reading travel blogs, searching through itineraries of tours I never planned on taking, and consulting guidebooks in Barnes & Noble. And because I have no shortage of ego, leaving the states, I was sure I was completely sure I was cutting the definitive path through everything I wanted to see.
After Lisa flew home, during which I allowed myself the briefest moments of self-pity that I was really traveling solo again, the next stop on my journey was to be eastern Cambodia. I had even booked a stay with the Elephant Valley Project a couple days before Lee got to Cambodia, and was really excited to head out there. But then something happened. I started looking for ways to get straight to the EVP and not have to stop at any of the towns in between. I started dreading the few stops in the route after the EVP, which would have put me in southern Laos. Because both eastern Cambodia and southern Laos are two of the more "off-the-beaten path" destinations in SE Asia, and it had suddenly become very clear to me that that wasn't what I was looking for for my next few weeks of travel. I wanted people! I wanted socializing! I wanted bars that stayed open past sunset!
So I spent the next few days in Siem Reap planning myself a new journey. Instead of heading east, I decided to forge west into Bangkok, then north into Laos. Instead of sleepy towns, I was heading into backpacker central. Instead of places where the thing to do is watch the river meander by, I was going to Khoa San Road* and Luang Prabang.
*In honor of this sudden change of plans, I even book-exchanged myself The Beach, which I know every good traveller should have read, and it was injuring my pride that I hadn't yet.
And all of a sudden, I was excited again! I had new things to plan! I hadn't expected to be in Bangkok for at least a month, and all of a sudden, I was taking a bus there TOMORROW. I hadn't even thought about that city since The Flight Debacle of 2008,** and now I needed to know what was in it, where to stay, things to see, and how long I'd want to be there before catching the sleeper train out of town. Have I mentioned how much I love the planning part of traveling?!***
**If you have ever been in a conversation with me where Thailand came up, I'm sure you regretted it immediately, because I probably launched into a schpeil about how Megan and I had the best Thai vacation ever planned, and it turned into a mess when riots took over the city and closed the airport down. Twenty-four hours before we were set to leave, we spent agonizing hours on the phone with Continental and eventually ended up changing our tickets to visit Belize instead. This has caused many subsequent hours of teeth grinding for me over the past five years, especially when someone mentions that they were in Thailand, and all I can think is how I was meant to have been there, too! Although, maybe if that never happened, I wouldn't be here right now.
***Seriously, tell me your time frame and budget, and I will be more than happy to plan your next trip for you!
So the other big change that this new route is going to make is to my budget. The post-recession millennial I am, I had planned my budget really carefully. I had $50 a day to spend for 120 days. And through Day 40, I was doing great at $43/day, and not wanting for anything. But I had expected that Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were going to be the cheapest places I visited. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia (not to mention Singapore and Hong Kong) were going to balance that out at the end of the trip. Except now I'm skipping some of the cheapest parts of my original plan. Soooo...that either means I need to cut corners a bit and go back to sleeping in dorms, or maybe come home a week or two before I thought I would.
But whatever ends up happening, I'm happy. It took me more than a few days to realize it, but it's okay to change your plans. That probably seemed evident to you immediately, but it took me way longer than it did to write this blog post to figure it out!