100 Days In: Lessons Learned

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by. – Robert Frost

Today marks Day 100 of our RTW trip. More than three months ago, we said goodbye to our friends and family, shouldered our packs, and boarded a plane to Southeast Asia.  Since then, we’ve ridden elephants, floated down remote rivers, climbed ancient temples, and made some new friends.

It is hard to believe that our trip is already a quarter of the way done!  We’ve started to get accustomed to life on the road, developing a strategy and pattern for a lifestyle that doesn’t have any real boundaries.  So what are the lessons learned from our first 100 days on the road?  Or are we just as clueless as ever?  If you’ve got any questions that we don’t address below, feel free to shoot us a line in the comments or via email.

Packing lists are made to be re-evaluated

When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money. – Susan Heller

Our pre-trip packing list can be found here.  Since then, we’ve picked up some new items and ditched others.

What we sent home or threw away:

• Duct tape:  We held onto this for a couple weeks, never used it, and tossed it.
• Skyler’s black skirt:  too short, too hot, and I never wore it
• Jordan’s nice long-sleeved shirt:  also too hot, never got worn
• Our point and shoot camera:  met a watery death in Cambodia.  We miss it but don’t think we’ll replace it.

New stuff:

• Scarves:  Skyler picked up a light scarf/wrap in Laos and Jordan got a traditional checkered krama in Cambodia.  Really useful as blankets for cold bus rides or ill-equipped rooms; beach mats; towels; protection from blasting sand or hot sun; and stylish to boot.
• Wide-brimmed hat for Skyler
• Picked up a sewing kit at one of our hotels, useful for stitching up popped buttons or fraying seams.

We’re so glad we packed …

• Our head lamps!  Skyler’s mom bought us these for Christmas and we’ve used them to explore caves and find outhouses in the middle of the night
• Since we sold our iPhones…a cheap little plastic watch from Target.  It takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.  $5 well spent.
• The iPad and Kindle:  essential for long bus rides, whiling away afternoons in coffee shops, researching hotels and restaurants, and keeping in touch with folks back home
• Good quality sandals.  We wear them almost every day and they’re holding up really well.

We wish we’d brought …

• Business cards for our blog.  Exchanging business cards is a big part of life here in SE Asia.  We’d love to be able to pass these out to locals we meet and other travelers to keep in touch.
• A second Kindle:  we’ve developed a joint custody agreement on the one we have which is mutually unsatisfactory. Luckily, most guesthouses have a shelf of paperbacks to trade (even if 80% of them are in German).

Bring your own…

Some things have been difficult to find on the road (in SE Asia at least).  If you’re coming for a short trip, be sure to bring your own:

• Name brand medications (you can find medicines over here, but you need to know their generic names and it’s never clear if the quality is up to American standards);
• Beard trimmers; tampons; and contact lens solution.

Itineraries are also made to be re-evaluated

We’ve been talking for a long time about going to Africa, but we thought it would be out of reach for this trip. Too expensive and too difficult. Or so we thought! Between tracking every cent we spend and doing a bit more research, we’ve realized a trip through Africa will fit into the budget! So, we’re happy to announce that we will be spending 3 weeks overlanding from Victoria Falls to Cape Town, followed by a few weeks exploring South Africa in June and July! Unfortunately, this means we’ll have to skip the Middle East. The ancient city of Petra, the pyramids of Egypt, and the holy land of Israel are still very much on our travel bucket list, but they’ll have to wait for another trip. This also means that not booking an RTW airplane ticket was a good decision for us. Stay tuned for inevitable hilarity as Skyler kicks off her first ever camping trip … in Zimbabwe.

What we miss most about home ..

• Heidi! (Special message to Heidi: Stop over-eating at Grandma’s! You’ll never place in the Dachshund Dash again if you get fat. We love you, Mom and Dad)
• Spending time with our friends and family
• Atlanta: Our friends, church, apartment, herb garden, the farmers markets, taking Heidi to a Braves game with her friend Junebug, the dogwoods blooming, meals outside with our neighbors, neighborhood festivals, etc., etc.
• Good beer (thanks Danny Payne for offering to FedEx us a case of Hopslam)
• Vegetables (hard to find over here not slathered in sauce or fried)
• Home cooked, simple meals.  Sometimes we’d just kill for a tuna salad sandwich.

The hardest part has been…

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. – Cesare Pavese

We’re hitting the point of our trip where we’re a bit travel weary.  It is tiring to be always on the move, always in a new town, sleeping in a new bed, learning the rudiments of a new language.  Fighting off burnout and the wish for a little normalcy, a bit of familiarity, is tough.  We are still loving this trip, still cherishing this amazing opportunity to see the world, but we’re human and we sometimes get tired and cranky.

The antidote, we’ve found, is slow travel.  The actual traveling bit (via bus, plane, or train) is expensive, time-consuming and draining.  It also increases burnout.  So we’re trying to slow it down.  We spent a week in both Hanoi and Penang. We’ll be spending 8 days doing absolutely nothing on a Thai beach very soon.  This goes against our normal whirlwind pace, but then again, we’ve got the luxury of time.  Slower travel will end up saving us money and aggravation.

 How are you two getting along?

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. – Mark Twain

For our entire marriage prior to this trip, Jordan and I rarely spent more than three or four days in a row together.  He traveled for work, and my job kept me really busy.  Now, we’re together all day, every day.  We’ve blown a gasket on the other a few times, but it’s normally mostly because we’re tired, hungry, confused, frustrated, or some combination of all those.  Most of the time, it’s no problem.  We’re learning to work better as a team, have a better understanding of the other’s limits and triggers, and have learned to swallow (most of) our harsh words.

 What’s been the best thing about the trip?

Thankfully, this one is harder to pinpoint, because there have been so many things to love.  We still get excited to arrive in a new place, try strange new foods, make friends with people who speak little or no English, and meet fellow travelers.  We’re thrilled at the enthusiasm and support we’ve gotten from friends and family back home.

It’s fulfilling to be doing something we enjoy, and we’re proud that we had the courage to do it.

Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. – Steve Jobs

Most surprising thing …

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust

One of the most pleasant surprises is how much we enjoy working on the blog.  We launched it mostly so we’d have an online journal and place to share our adventure with family and friends.  But it’s evolved into an essential part of our trip.  It’s an interesting lesson:  it has an element of “work” to it —  crafting the posts is actually somewhat time consuming —  but it’s a project that we really enjoy, take pride in, and like working on together.  While lots of people dream of quitting their jobs, being completely idle on this trip proved unappealing.  People are meant to work, but doing something they enjoy (or at least don’t hate) is so important.

We’re embarrassed to admit that…

We can’t travel rough like we used to. We like our creature comforts:  hot showers, fast Wi-Fi, air conditioning.  So we’ve been avoiding the real cheap-o, bare bones places that many travellers like to brag about staying at.  The nice thing about Southeast Asia is that $25 a night can bag you a nice place:  private room, en-suite bathroom, and (nearly) all the comforts of home.  Call us soft if you want, but we’re a lot happier for realizing this and just plunking down the extra money.

We’re proud to announce that ….

100 days and we haven’t gotten sick once.  (Knock on wood multiple times — I feel like writing that is sending a case of e. coli straight our way.)  Anyone who follows this blog knows that Jordan and I can eat like baby dinosaurs.

But we do follow some simple, common sense rules when it comes to food:

• No tap water.  Period.
• When buying iced drinks, we try to make sure the ice comes from a block of ice (showing it was factory-made) and that the place looks clean.
• We only eat at food stalls or restaurants that are busy and cook food to order.  More people means that it’s well-regarded, the food is fresh, and hasn’t been sitting around all day.
• We (mostly) avoid salads and fresh, uncooked veggies and herbs because of questionable washing practices.  We break this rule sometimes when it seems safe to do so.
• Scoping a place out tells you a lot.  Is it busy?  Does it smell good?  Does the space look clean?  Does the person cooking your food look clean and healthy?  If it’s not appealing, we give it a pass.

We’ve actually been very lax on some of the food hygiene rules.  For example, no fruit you can’t peel yourself.  No ice.  I think we’re going to start following these rules in India.  We may even go vegetarian while we’re there!

Some simple things we’re re-learning …

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted. – Bill Bryson

Traveling forces you to cope with new and bewildering situations on a daily basis.  At least once a week, we’ll land in a new place where we don’t know a soul, don’t speak the language, don’t even know how to get from the bus station to our guesthouse. This can be stressful,  but as Bill Bryson notes above, there is charm in the un-knowing.  And there’s a gift in being constantly off-kilter:  we’re learning that we really ought to trust ourselves and listen to our gut instincts.  Doing this has led us to some destinations and people we’ve loved and, I’m convinced, helped us stay safe and healthy.  It has also taught us to take life as it comes.  Life back home was busy.  Work and email and flight details and errands and ….  We’ve been forced on this trip to learn the value of slowing down.  We don’t have our iPhones to kill those 15 minutes before our train comes, so instead we observe what’s around us, or talk to our neighbors, or poke around shops.  Sometimes trains or buses are late, and losing your temper doesn’t make them come any faster.  During a meal, dishes come out when they’re fresh and at their best, not in an orderly and paced manner. We’ve been watching more sunsets, talking to more people, reading more books, savoring more moments.  And we’re happier for it.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. – Samuel Johnson