So, this week marks one year since we left Australia. Woop woop woop!
 |
| It feels like only yesterday! Also, check out my sad little proto-beard! |
While we've been travelling, we've learned a lot of things along the way, and in honour of our travel anniversary (traversary?), I'd like to share with you my top lesson we've learned from each country we've visited. I know most of these are really obvious, and any travel blogger worth their salt won't even bother writing most of these down because they're plastered all over the internet like a bad wallpapering job. But you know what? This is my list, so I can do what I want. Ner ner.
New Zealand
Well, pretty much everything from the ground up. It taught us that we're the kind of people who are ok with dorms and hostels, that we prefer busing around to more expensive, self-driven travel. It taught us to make up plans on the fly, to change and adapt as necessary, and a beginner's view of Couch Surfing. New Zealand was a great place for us, because we've both been there multiple times before, so it meant the country was very forgiving, and we could skip a lot of the heavy tourist attractions to focus on what we wanted to see.
 |
| Okay, sometimes we wanted to see the touristy things too! |
Basically, what I'm saying is this: Start out long-term travel somewhere a little bit forgiving - where they speak the same language as you, where the laws are a bit more relaxed and the transit system is reasonably easy to navigate. Or, just start in New Zealand, whoever you are.
 |
| Seriously! It's like 'My First Country'! |
Thailand
You don't have to do the touristy thing just because you're in another country. When we first got in to Bangkok, I don't think we were 100% sure what we were supposed to do next. We'd planned to travel south, to Phuket and some of the islands, before heading north and spending time in Chiang Mai, but that's what it was - a plan. We knew what we were going to do, but we were less sure how to do it. In Bangkok, it was easy enough - we wanted to do the same things as basically 90% of the tourists around, so we were happy to just go with the flow.
 |
| Pictured: Goin' with the flow... |
It wasn't until we reached Kata Beach, Phuket that we found ourselves at odds with the multitudes of drunken Aussies and Russians, and had to change our way of travelling. We cancelled our remaining nights in Kata Beach and booked accomodation in the middle of Phuket Town, and it was the best decision we could have made. Although the locals shot us some strange looks on the street, we were way happier being away from the drunken idiots and having a much better time.
Laos
It's better to spend time somewhere you really like being, than feeling the need to rush around and see everything a country has to offer on the first try. You can come back some time, it's okay. If you're too busy rushing from place to place, you'll end up with pretty pictures of famous things, and absolutely no memory of having seen them. When your entire travel experience can be recreated with a Google Image Search, something's gone wrong.
 |
| Just like being there? |
 | |
| Seriously, I could have stayed in this city for a month, easy. |
Vietnam
Talk to the people that you meet. Spending time in the museums and landmarks, it was both fascinating and confronting to see the Vietnamese government's official perspective of the 'French' and 'American' wars, since it was so distinctly different from what we've read in textbooks and seen in movies and TV in Australia. Obviously every source is going to be biased towards their own perspective, but seeing the Vietnam War referred to with terms like 'invaders', 'reclamation' and 'liberation army' - terms which generally get a sarcastic eye-roll in the Western world - really reinforced an uncomfortable feeling in southern Vietnam that the South is still very much being occupied by the Northern government. There are posters and signs everywhere talking about how happy and prosperous the unified Vietnam is, but actually talking to the locals painted a very different, if hushed, picture. Of course, our own perspective also has its share of spin and propaganda, no one's arguing that - but seeing someone else's spin and propaganda was confronting, especially when we got to peek around the edges of it.
 |
| A War Memorial a good two hours outside Ho Chi Minh City |
Equally cool, though, was speaking to our two tour guides on two different days. The first was the son of a former South Vietnamese police constable and his mother's life was saved by an Australian Army medic during the conflict, so he looks at the war as the invasion of the sovereign South by the communist North, ending in an occupation that is still going on. The second, on the other hand, was much younger, and had grown up in central Vietnam - in a specific area more neutral during conflict and for who "uniting" the country has given his family some clear benefits. Hearing his talk of French and American invaders and the North's glorious and peaceful reunification of Vietnam was incredibly interesting (even if the language used was more than slightly zealous). Funnily enough, while his hackles raised ever so slightly talking about Americans, he didn't seem to have a problem with Australians. I've met plenty of Americans who didn't realise that any countries other than the USA were involved in the Vietnam War, but it was interesting to see a Vietnamese who thought the same thing.
Cambodia
Craving a touch of home isn't a bad thing. Look, there's all sorts of things I could say about Cambodia. After Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, it was a shock to the system to see Phnom Penh - a major city that's so... empty. The city's not particularly small - while not built up anywhere as much as Bangkok or HCMC, it still covers a large enough area - but it's just run down and dusty in a way that the others aren't. The major 'tourist attractions' - even though it feels so wrong to call them that - are so... heavy. The moment when you look around and realise - even if you already knew - that there are so few old people in Cambodia. And then the almost palpable sense of loss and emptiness that hangs in the air starts to click into place. There's so much that could be said about these parts of Cambodia, but much, much better writers than me have done it much, much better than I could hope to.
So instead, I'm going to focus on the thing that makes anything better: Pizza! By the time we hit Siem Reap, we'd been missing Western food so bad - not craving home, so much as we were sick of noodles. So. Many. Noodles. So we ended up at Siem Reap's chain pizza joint, or the local KFC (which delivers!!!!) for, I think, basically every meal. At first it felt bad, like we were somehow travelling wrong, but after a day or two, we started to feel better. We'd been run down, tired, even downright grumpy (or was that just me?), but it all started to pick back up. The lesson - sometimes, when you've been on the road in an unfamiliar place for a while, you'll start to crave little touches of familiarity. And that's okay.
 |
| Pizza > Fried bugs |
Denmark
A change of plans can be just what you need sometimes. Originally, Denmark wasn't part of the plan. After South East Asia, we had planned to head up across the Vietnamese border into China, and then take the train from Beijing to Moscow. Unfortunately, that plan fell through as soon as we realised that our visas weren't going to line up quite as we had intended. As we have previously explained, we decided to hightail it to Copenhagen. By the time we reached Denmark, we'd been travelling pretty intensively for the last 5 months. We hadn't spent more than a handful of days in any one place since we left Kaikoura in October (or Luang Prabang, but serious illness shouldn't count!). We had gotten pretty into the habit of arriving in a city, using our first night to plan the 3 or so things we could afford to see, seeing them and then leaving. And let me tell you, that gets exhausting.
 |
| They tried to make us think we hadn't left - but we weren't fooled! |
While we were in Denmark, however, we were able to take some time to just do nothing. Well, I say 'able' - I really should say 'forced'. On the flight over from Siem Reap to Copenhagen, I picked up a particularly horrible case of food poisoning - my own fault, Tash said not to eat the airline food, but I did! - which meant that I was barely able to leave the house where we were AirBnb-ing for a week and a half. That ended up being okay, though, because we were getting worn out by the travel. We were getting sick of South East Asian street food, of the ubiquitous crowds and of the oppressive heat. After 3 months of that, the fancy (if expensive) touches of Western Europe were just as refreshing as the (admittedly mild) Scandinavian winter.
 |
| This was taken around 3pm - God bless you, Scandinavian winter! |
Oh yeah, that's the other thing we (re)learned from Denmark. We really, really like the cold.
United Kingdom
Don't define a country by its biggest cities. On first arriving in the UK, I wasn't that impressed. Don't get me wrong, London is a lovely city, and geeking out about being in the city of Sherlock and Doctor Who was awesome - but while we were there, London was just a city. It probably didn't help that we were trying to do London on the cheap (spoiler alert: you can't) and trying to get our Irish visas took up most of every day, but London just wasn't that impressive. After we left London to travel the UK for a bit, we went to Cambridge and Bath, and they were alright - but it wasn't until we hit Salisbury and Glastonbury that we started to feel truly awesome about being in the UK.
 |
| Yes, that store is called 'The Psychic Piglet'. Glastonbury, ladies and gentlemen. |
This trend - that the biggest cities were so much less impressive than the small towns - continued with us all the way through England and into Wales. I'm sure we would have liked the small seaside town of Swansea, had it not been practically underwater at the time, and I absolutely adored Cardiff. "But Alex!" you cry! "Isn't Cardiff the capital of Wales? I thought you said the major cities were underwhelming!" Oh, dear reader - have you ever heard an English person talk about Cardiff? Trust me, as far as the UK is concerned, Cardiff might as well be a small country town. So it counts.
 |
| Pictured: The middle of nowhere (apparently) |
Interestingly, though, Scotland was both the proof and exception to this rule. Our first stop in Scotland was to spend 2 nights in Glasgow, which was just disappointing in basically every way. Admittedly, the hostel in Glasgow was the worst hostel we've ever stayed in, which may have soured our mood somewhat. But even so, Glasgow is a boring, dreary, dull city with next to nothing interesting to see and next to no personality of its own. The sole point of interest for us was the 16-storey cinema complex, where we may have gone to the movies 3 times in 3 days - maybe. Edinburgh, however, was the complete opposite. While neither city can hold a candle to small, highland Inverness, Edinburgh has everything Glasgow doesn't - a friendly atmosphere, interesting buildings, good hostels and plenty of things to see. Edinburgh was hands-down my favourite city in the UK, and it really deserves an article all to itself. And considering our current plan is to be working in Scotland by next Christmas, it will probably get one sooner or later.
 |
| We'll be back, Edinburgh - just you wait... |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for reading. If you liked the article and want to see more like it – let us know down in the comments. If you want to follow along with us - you can subscribe to our email feed down below, and be sure to check us out on facebook or follow us on twitter.
If the pretty pictures caught your eye and you would like to see more travel photography hop on over to flickr or for our daily oddities check out our instagram feed.
As always – Don’t Forget To Be Awesome!
No comments:
Post a Comment