For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to travel throughout Asia-Pacific as a multi-month journey of adventure and discovery.
My grand plan has always been to start in the northwest, such as India and Nepal, then travel progressively southeast and end in Oceania’s Australia and New Zealand, and to do this in a timeframe of over 6 months. But given that I need to be in Australia for my sister’s wedding in February and I’ve been itching to start my travels, I decided that I’ll do my trip in the reverse order of what I initially intended. So, I’m going to start in Australia and New Zealand, and then head north through southeast Asia and eventually land in India and Nepal.
In the process of taking the filaments of my imagination and spinning them into lived reality, I knew I’d need to decide on a few things in order to give the trip some structure (other than a general travel path), because otherwise, I could spend my whole life travelling from one place to another and still not see everything there is to see. So, what are my goals? What are my guardrails? What do I want to get out of this journey? What are things and places I want to see? And most importantly, what’s my grand objective? Why do I even want to do this big trip?
Well, regardless of how long I’ve thought about this, I ironically haven’t actually been able to come up with any half good answers to those questions. I’m mostly following this deep-seated feeling that I have to do this trip otherwise my life will feel unfulfilled. That’s likely because I’ve definitely leaned on the idea of this trip as a form of escapism from present-day reality.
But now that I’ve decided to lean into the allure of adventure in actually proceeding with seeing my imagination fulfilled, I need to decide on what my terms & conditions are so that I can ensure the journey is completed to the satisfaction of my past and future selves.
In terms of an overall objective, I know it can’t be to “see everything” because that’s impossible, unaffordable, and unnecessary. Perhaps to experience the cultures then? But then to what degree do we define that? One week of cultural experience to one month of cultural experience can be vastly different depending on where you go and what you do… And then there’s money and budgeting which are definitely good, and necessary, types of guardrails, but there needs to be an inner decisive part of me that decides which experiences I don’t mind spending more money on compared to others… so what would drive those decisions?
Well, I’ve decided on three pillars: 1) fluidity, 2) stretch my savings, 3) don’t over-plan.
An important piece of this trip for me is: fluidity. I want to travel from one country to the next in geographical order as best I can. In doing so, I want to limit the amount of flights I take (for environmental and affordability reasons), and I think culturally it would be more interesting to do it that way – experience the transcendence of cultures, rather than get whiplash from travelling between vastly different places. One of the challenges I’ll likely face with fluidity will be trying to avoid monsoon season as I travel.
Another important piece is to stretch my savings as much as possible – try to see as much as possible with as little as possible. I’ve heard Asia is cheap to travel, but how cheap? I won’t know what’s realistic until I’m actually there. Since I don’t have an exact time limit on my grand journey, other than the amount of money in my possession that I’m willing to spend, the rate at which I spend money will greatly influence the amount of time I can spend travelling. All that to say, the more I save, the more I can travel, and the higher my chances will be in successfully getting from point A (Australia) to point B (India) in one long trip.
Lastly, I’ve decided that this time around I want to prevent myself from over-planning in order to follow the flow of adventurous spontaneity. As a chronic over-planner this is going to be challenging, but if successful, I believe it’ll make the trip a lot more meaningful since some of the best stories and adventures come from unplanned, spur-of-the-moment decisions and experiences. In taking inspiration from Michael A. Singer’s The Surrender Experiment, I want to loosen the reins on my tendency to plan in order to surrender myself to the journey, and in doing so, leave room for external inputs to influence my journey’s path. I still have a general idea of where I want to go and a general time frame of where I want to be when, but I want to prevent myself from micro planning as much as possible in order to remain flexible. I think this will be easier to do in more geographically contained countries, like Cambodia, where my strategy will likely be to start in a main city and go from there. But for places with variable geographical limits, like Indonesia – which consists of many islands, I think I’ll need to decide on which islands I want to see prior to going.
So, I guess my grand objective for this lengthy travel expedition is to spend over 6 months in getting from Australia to India in a continuous travel path and to see as many countries as possible between those two destinations with what I can reasonably spend.
It’s been a long-held dream of mind that I’ve decided to finally put into action. It’s either now or never! So, let’s see where I end up if I follow the flow of the journey. Who will I meet? Where will I go? What will I see?