Storyline: Home to home westward
Alright, our first (there’ll be more?? – Alex) accidental around the world (RTW) trip is about to begin. Accidental? Because this one wasn’t planned and it is only touching a few countries, far less than plan A, from few years ago. It just happens that by the time we fly back to Toronto we will have flown the full circle. So theoretically it qualifies.
Plan A: Some 3 or 4 years ago I planned an RTW trip by train wherever possible. It was to be one of our first big trips in retirement. We would fly to Europe, take trains to Moscow, take the Trans Siberian (sooner the Trans Mongolian) all the way to Beijing, then take trains to and through Vietnam, buses through Cambodia, perhaps Laos, then Thailand, trains through Thailand and Malaysia, all the way to Singapore. Fly to Darwin Australia, take The Ghan (the 3-day train trip through the Australian desert) to Adelaide, tour Australia, then fly and tour New Zealand and from there fly home…
But then, there came the Trump effect! With the current geopolitical situation, and more recent deterioration of Canada-China relations, we put all this on hold.
So… Plan B: It really wasn’t a plan, it just amorphously evolved around a spontaneous decision to use our Aeroplan points to fly while they still have value. Who knows what will happen in 2020 when Air Canada migrates from Aeroplan to its new loyalty program? The feud between Aeroplan and Air Canada is supposedly resolved with AC’s takeover, however the final product is unclear. We had enough points for a return flight to the South Pacific region, economy class. We could pay to upgrade. Yet no flights on points were available for our timeframe. After some research and discussions with Aeroplan we booked a one-way flight to Auckland, NZ business class. Really! I was ecstatic. We are going!? Note: Business class is usually out of our reach…we’ve only flown this way once before and that was an upgrade because the airline messed up our prepaid seat assignment.
Next step? Book a cabin on The Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin. The availability of affordable (a relative term – it is after all a luxury journey) cabins in the train more or less determined the rest. We booked the train for mid-May.
Hurray! Finally, it was happening. Time constraints weren’t an issue, but we do have budget limitations. With this in mind I spent a fair amount of time last November and December planning the itinerary. We still could do at least part of the planned RTW trip, though westward. We could at least take it to Vietnam.
You know how it is when one tries to bring a vision all the way to planning and implementation. The final product rarely matches the initial idea. It’s a win when it even resembles the initial idea.
As much as I wanted to spend about 2 months wandering in NZ and at least a month in Australia (scratching the surface) the budget was already cracking. So, about a month in NZ and same in Australia it is. From Darwin we’ll fly to Singapore. The plan still was to take the trains from Singapore through Malaysia to Thailand then onwards through Cambodia and Vietnam all the way to Hanoi. We can’t be rushed. That is at least two months during the wet season. Perhaps we were trying to bite off more than we could chew. Perhaps, given the expected heat and humidity, we should take it a step at a time. How about spending a month in Malaysia and Thailand? Check if we can manage all the heat and humidity there and try to go to plan A later.
But this was not all. On its travel advisory page, our government advised against passing through some parts of Thailand. This is exactly where the train would take us. What exactly does “Avoid all travel” mean? Often, governments may advise a higher level of precaution than is perhaps necessary, preferring to err towards safety. However, “avoid all travel” means that if anything happens, anything unrelated to the situation there, for example one of us gets sick or falls and break a leg, our travel medical insurance is not valid. Basically, we are on our own. At our age we did not want to take the risk.
Thus, we have to fly from Malaysia to Bangkok. This shaped the rest of our journey. We’ll move with buses and trains through Malaysia, fly to Bangkok and decide on our means of transportation within Thailand later.
Next step? How do we get back home without breaking the bank? One-way tickets can often be more expensive than a return. And so, it was with many major airlines, like Air Canada, Air France, etc. Here, Kiwi.com, Skyscanner and Google fights came to our aid. Using Kiwi, I found a very good flight to Helsinki with Finnair. And checking the airline itself – they had a good (in terms of cost) flight that will take us from Bangkok to Helsinki, then onwards to Toronto via London. Being an uncomfortable flyer (motion sickness), I prefer to have a few stops instead of a very long flight. This and the cost determined the last important part of our trip – the return.
And… our train travel around the world gets shunted to a siding. For now. Maybe another time if the geopolitical situation becomes more favourable.
And so, this is the beginning of a new storyline “Home to home westward”. We’ll try to update our status as much as we can from the road without compromising our experiences.
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