11,241 miles, 3 airplanes, 1 8-hour layover, 1 tourist “mini-bus”, 3 Thai cities, 2 night markets, 5 temples, 1 elephant sanctuary, 1 cooking class, 1 guided bike tour, and 2 Thai massages: $653.19 OVER budget due to cost of flights and lodging in Bangkok.
As you might imagine, Southeast Asia is really far from Denver, Colorado. There really is no way to get there without flying for about 20 hours. The only choice you really have is where you want your layovers to be. We decided that since the actual flight time going over the Atlantic is not much more than going over the Pacific, we would fly over the Atlantic so that by the end of this trip we will have circumnavigated the globe (one of Marla’s bucket list items).
We left Denver on January 17th and flew 9.5 hours and 5,229 miles to Munich. We were originally supposed to only have a 3.5 hour layover in Munich, but that turned into an 8 hour layover before we got on a 10.5 hour 5,461 mile flight to Bangkok. We were really starting to question our choices by the time we boarded that second plane.
We finally landed in Bangkok at 11 a.m. ICT (Indochina Time: 14 hours ahead of Denver), bleary-eyed and delirious. We checked into our hotel and broke the cardinal rule of traveling overseas: stay awake! Instead, we laid down to take a nap at 2 p.m. and woke up 12 hours later. It took us 3 more days before we finally slept a normal schedule.
Southeast Asia is the part of this trip that is the furthest from anything we have previously experienced. We decided to use a travel agent for this part for all of our lodging and activity reservations, tour guides, and drivers across 15 different cities over 2 months. Using a travel agent is more expensive than making all of your own arrangements, but after the amount of time we spent doing that for ourselves all over Western Europe, the idea of “just showing up” and having someone else take care of the details makes this part feel like a vacation!
If you are ever looking for a travel agent for any reason, we worked with Diana Castellion from Culture Connections Travel to set up our trip. We’ve used her services for a family vacation to Ireland before and she is wonderful.
So here we are at the start of Part 3 ~ Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai in the north are our first two towns. Looking forward to lots of good food and learning about cultures on this side of the globe!
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