Daily Archives: December 17, 2012

Sweet Cravings

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This is going to be a little hard to explain, so please bear with me.

Our plan for the trip included a certain amount of “flashpacking”. Loosely defined, this involves slumming it for most of the trip – sleeping on floors, taking overnight buses, finding interesting backpacker haunts in the high mountains and on white sand beaches, spending next to nothing in awe-inspiring and remote places. The flash part is then taking the money we have saved as a result and checking into the occasional lovely hotel – we aren’t students any more after all, and there are some beautiful hotels in the world where we hoped to benefit from cheap third world prices. Our plan was to check in, unpack the collared shirts and high heels, hand our filthy backpacks in toto to the laundry, hop in the shower and drink shockingly cheap cocktails until everything comes back clean and we can head back into the wilderness. And it hasn’t really worked.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, our “slumming it” turned out to be shockingly expensive: beer might be cheap in parts of the world, but petrol isn’t (OK, so it’s free in Turkmenistan, but that’s another story). A large part of our budget has been taken up by internal flights in countries where there is no other option. Cars and buses to take us to the out-of-the-way places on our itinerary don’t come particularly cheap either. And Papua New Guinea showed us that even $180 hotel rooms come complete with filthy sheets and cockroaches. Secondly, hoteliers are no fools, and a beer in an international standard hotel costs pretty much the same all around the world no matter what the base price of the beer is in that country. Hotel laundries worldwide play the same game: I have written about this before, but hotel prices for washing clothes make me angry and I refuse to pay them on point of principle, in Vanuatu as well as in Vegas. As a result, we have done some flashy things (hopefully not unforgiveably so) but we haven’t ever checked into a nice holiday resort and lapped up luxury for a few days.

So the conversation (when it happened) didn’t take either of us by surprise. We were sleeping on (yet another) floor, this time on a two day trek through local villages to Inle Lake in Myanmar. The trek was nice, but nothing extraordinary, and we both decided that (i) we are just too old to sleep on floors anymore and (ii) we have perhaps had just a little too much of it on this journey. We will always make exceptions for exceptional things – take us to Rwanda to see gorillas, for example, and we’ll happily sleep wedged in the fork of a tree if we have to – but as a way of life, we would like a comfortable bed and our own bathroom, please.

So yes, for the next few weeks at least, screw the honorable ruggedness. I’d like a Mai Tai and a chilled bottle of water please – you’ll find us by the pool.

Perfectly nice accommodation, although the see-through walls, the lack of bedding and the smoky fire under the floor could perhaps be improved on

Perfectly nice accommodation, although the see-through walls, the lack of bedding and the smoky fire under the floor could perhaps be improved on

Somewhat better accommodation – although our private balcony over the lake was perhaps a little shady, and it was a long walk to the bar(!)

Somewhat better accommodation – although our private balcony over the lake was perhaps a little shady, and it was a long walk to the bar(!)

James & Lucy Turn For Home

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A slightly out of sequence blog post, seeing as how this happened yesterday, and we normally run a week or more behind. The timing is relevant, however…

The last of the elephants disappeared up the hill in the bright sunshine, dragging a one-ton teak log behind it on long rusty chains. We had been up since before dawn, waking up in a forest rangers’ hut before heading out into the jungle to track down the elephants which had been feeding overnight. There is another blog post coming on the teak logging camp; the relevance of the moment I describe is that logging with elephants is our last must-do in Myanmar, and therefore the end of this activity is the moment that we turn for home. We have been on the road for nearly seven months – the next formal stop on the itinerary is a cruise in Antarctica, but before that we have ten days at home with family for Christmas. Home. Family. Christmas.

To say we are looking forward to it is an understatement. We are loving our travels, but there is something strong to be said for knowing where the light switches are. So we are heading home, even if only for a few days before we fly off again. Our trip’s furthest point from home in terms of absolute remoteness was halfway up a volcano on a remote island in Vanuatu. Myanmar, on the other hand, is relatively well connected so all we need to do to get home is:

  • Back of a truck to Taungoo (mattresses laid out in the open air – sunbathing and snoozing most of the way)
  • Back of a motorbike at dawn to the bus station (actually, the back of two motorbikes, but who’s counting?)
  • Bus to Yangon (stopping for dinner in the best restaurant in Myanmar, obviously)
  • Short flight to Bangkok (picking up various items of tailoring and a cocktail or two on the way)
  • Slightly longer flight to Hong Kong (and an evening with our friends Kean and Nyree in their new apartment)
  • 16 hours of heavy drinking in new pyjamas courtesy of Cathay Pacific on the way to London
  • Lucy is then home (for a long-delayed engagement party with the family – hooray!)
  • For me, there is then a cross channel trip on Eurostar, a taxi across Paris, a further French train ride and 45 minutes in the back of my parents’ car to go.

So, seven full days of travel. It says something about the slightly schizophrenic nature of our trip that getting home includes both riding on the back of a tiny motorbike wearing 20lbs of rucksack and seat 1A on a Cathay 747. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

From Elephants…

From Elephants…

… to Home

… to Home