Advertisement
Published: August 30th 2012
Looking forward to our big adventure:
Melbourne - London - Paris - Japan - South Korea - China - Vietnam - Cambodia - Laos - Thailand - Malaysia and back home to the sunny Aspendale Riviera...
At the moment Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet are our best friends.
Due to Dean's football commitments (and, to be honest, a reluctance to spend more than 10 hours in a plane to a climate colder than Melbourne's) Eleanor and I are flying from Melbourne to London and then on to Paris for a little bit of luxury time before hitting South East Asia. Two travel agents said it wasn't possible to do something like this for under $3000 EACH!!!! Well, that's quite crazy really. Luckily the Google machine exists because I found Etihad Airlines were quite willing to take us to London and then fly out of Paris to Tokyo for MUCH, MUCH less. So I quickly nabbed two tickets, booked the Eurostar leg from London to Paris and then set about searching for the best deal on our return leg.
Once I had made that decision, Dean was spurred into action. He promptly booked a one-way flight to Tokyo with Air Asia. So we now had a firm date for the beginning of our holidays. Eleanor and I would leave on the 18th September and Dean would depart Melbourne on the 1st October. We would meet up on the 2nd.
After looking at all the possibilites for flights home, we decided to fly out of KL with Air Asia (cheapest fares!) on the 26th January. That would give us a couple of days back at home to sort ourselves out before starting work on the 29th. Dean was all for coming back on the day before, but I quickly nipped that in the bud.
Once I started long service leave in the third term, I was able to dedicate myself to sourcing accommodation and transport options and visas. It was a bit surreal, really. Dean and I are experts in procrastination and I must admit that, at times, I did find it hard to drag myself away from the Love Boat reruns or coffee shop to spend quality time investigating all the magnificent things we could do in South East Asia. Deciding where to go, what to do, where to stay etc was doing my head in. Sometimes there were too many choices and I couldn't make a decision. So we decided to plan up until China and then wing it from there.
So with that in mind, I created accounts with what seemed like every travel club in the world (Trip Advisor, Agoda, Hotel Club, Booking.com, Hostelworld etc etc), borrowed all the Lonely Planets from our local library and set about establishing a realistic itinerary.
Easy.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.075s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 6; qc: 26; dbt: 0.0509s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Information overload!
lucy and chloe
non-member comment
HAPPY HOLIDAY COUSIN
Ellie we hope that you have the most amazing time in all your travels. We will miss you but we will watch your blog and email you. see you in January when we are starting Grade 6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!