Step two: Location

Location:

Location was something I thought about after my initial decision on time frame. I thought Southeast Asia was an automatic shoe in because I haven’t been there and it would be a no brainer because I am currently living in South Korea but it was still stressful and required some thought. I have never seen Vietnam, Lao, Thailand or Cambodia and wanted to see them but I also finished reading Shantaram which is an awesome book by Gregory David Roberts about India. This new painted picture of India for me made me want to include India as well.

Brake! Stop…three and a half months is not long enough to see SE Asia and India. India would be at least 2 months in itself for me, so I was thinking about leaving SE Asia and doing just India instead. So I looked at some plane ticket prices to see what cost factors would help me decide and realized that it was pretty much the same. So I started researching and talking to friends about both. India is a developing and changing country and I wanted to see it while it’s still raw and not yet a developed tourist destination. Thailand and Southeast Asia is a pretty beaten tourist destination, except for Vietnam and Laos which are still more undeveloped. Hmmm. After talking with friends who have been to both places they believed that Vietnam was changing faster than India so I should see that in the next couple years first.

Done!

Now this opens a whole other can of worms….one way flights, visas, vaccines, ticket costs and how am I going to roughly plan how I am going to do my route while hitting everything I want to see, getting a cheap ticket out and meeting my boyfriend in Laos for three weeks in November, which is the most inopportune time and difficult place because I want a month in Vietnam and a month in Laos. Still working on this one…