Saturday, June 12, 2010
Website Change!!
Due to annoying formating restrictions on the Blogger site, I have moved to the more user-friendly Wordpress.com. Please visit austrolasianadventure.wordpress.com for all updates (many are there already!) and links to photos.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Our Itinerary
The benefit of planning a huge vacation with Jared has been that I haven't had to bear the burden of planning in the least, a change from most of my recent trips. In fact, for a while, I - often the perfectionist, type-A member of a group - felt like a bit of a slacker. Although we mutually decided on our planned itinerary, he took the lead in Vietnam and Cambodia, scheduling what should be awesome tours through Ha Long Bay and the Sapa Region in Northern Vietnam, the Mekong Delta in Southern Vietnam, and several days seeing the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I eventually became more active in the planning process and scheduled most of our activities in Thailand, which will include highlights of scuba diving and elephant trekking. We will be winging things a bit more after we leave Thailand, as Bali, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji will be a bit more relaxed and manageable.
For those of you (*cough* MOM) who want to know our exact itinerary, I've copied it below. Jared outlined our route in Google Earth above - I think our total mileage is somewhere around 27,000 miles! Our first stop is Hong Kong and I'm sure we'll have good internet there, so look for our first trip post in a few days.
| Code | Destination | Nights | Arrival Date | Departure Date | Departure Flight |
|
| Travel Day | 1 |
| 6/3/10 | Cathay Pacific CX841 |
| HKG | Hong Kong | 3 | 6/4/10 | 6/7/10 | Dragon Air CX6735 |
| HAN | Hanoi (Halong Bay, Sapa) | 6 | 6/7/10 | 6/13/10 | Jetstar 811 |
| SGN | Ho Chi Minh (Mekong Delta, Cuchi Tunnels) | 3 | 6/13/10 | 6/16/10 | Vietnam Airlines 9884 (Cambodia Angkor Air) |
| REP | Angkor Wat + Temples | 3 | 6/16/10 | 6/19/10 | Bangkok Airways 924,217 |
| CNX | Chiang Mai | 3 | 6/19/10 | 6/22/10 | Bangkok Airways 242 |
| USM | Koh Samui | 5 | 6/22/10 | 6/27/10 | Bangkok Airways PG962 to Bangkok |
| DPS | Bali | 5 | 6/28/10 | 7/3/10 | Jetstar 82 to Darwin, Jetstar 58 to Cairns |
| CNS | Barrier Reef (Cairns) | 3 | 7/4/10 | 7/7/10 | Quantas 2503 |
| HTI | Hamilton Island | 3 | 7/7/10 | 7/10/10 | Jetstar 855 to Brisbane |
| SYD | Sydney | 4 | 7/10/10 | 7/14/10 | Jetstar 151 |
| CHC | Arrive Christchurch | 7 | 7/15/10 | 7/22/10 | Inter Island Ferry |
| AKL | Depart from Auckland | 4 | 7/22/10 | 7/26/10 | Air NZ 54 |
| NAN | Fiji | 6 | 7/26/10 | 8/1/10 | Continental 950 connect to CO14 |
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Background...
"Two months traveling? How are you pulling THAT off?!"
Jared and I have heard those words countless times over the past couple of months, mostly uttered with a combination of wonder, bemusement, and barely-concealed jealousy. But for the few of you who haven't heard the background to our upcoming travels in person, I will put it down in print.
Jared and I were the beneficiaries of extremely well-timed career changes. In February, I flew to London for the final round of the WPP Fellowship Interviews, a program comprised of three year-long rotations through three WPP companies in three locations around the world. Although I was having an excellent experience at Lubin Lawrence, the opportunity to experiment with different jobs while living abroad was too much to pass up, and after two intense days of interviews, I was sent on my way with my fingers and toes crossed. Straight from the interviews, I met up with my mother's Smith College roommate and current Medieval Literature rock star, Linne, and took the train up to her lovely home in York. The next evening, after enjoying a bowl of praline Haagen Daaz, I recieved the congratulatory email I'd been hoping for (they chose 8 out of 1900 applicants this year).
Shortly after running downstairs to tell Linne and her husband John the good news, I began planning this trip, for when else would I be able to take months off and still have a job to come back to? Lucky for me, when I told Jared the good news, he then proceeded to tell me HIS good news - that he'd been accepted to Columbia Business School! His immediate impulse was also to leave his job early and travel, and there began the lengthy planning process for this trip. While I had originally considered Greece and Croatia, Jared had bigger aspirations, correctly arguing that we might as well take months off, not weeks, and with that kind of time, we should travel to areas that are well beyond the distance of a worthwhile week long vacation. Thus the decision to head to Austrolasia. Now all we had to do was plan.
Jared and I have heard those words countless times over the past couple of months, mostly uttered with a combination of wonder, bemusement, and barely-concealed jealousy. But for the few of you who haven't heard the background to our upcoming travels in person, I will put it down in print.
Jared and I were the beneficiaries of extremely well-timed career changes. In February, I flew to London for the final round of the WPP Fellowship Interviews, a program comprised of three year-long rotations through three WPP companies in three locations around the world. Although I was having an excellent experience at Lubin Lawrence, the opportunity to experiment with different jobs while living abroad was too much to pass up, and after two intense days of interviews, I was sent on my way with my fingers and toes crossed. Straight from the interviews, I met up with my mother's Smith College roommate and current Medieval Literature rock star, Linne, and took the train up to her lovely home in York. The next evening, after enjoying a bowl of praline Haagen Daaz, I recieved the congratulatory email I'd been hoping for (they chose 8 out of 1900 applicants this year).
Shortly after running downstairs to tell Linne and her husband John the good news, I began planning this trip, for when else would I be able to take months off and still have a job to come back to? Lucky for me, when I told Jared the good news, he then proceeded to tell me HIS good news - that he'd been accepted to Columbia Business School! His immediate impulse was also to leave his job early and travel, and there began the lengthy planning process for this trip. While I had originally considered Greece and Croatia, Jared had bigger aspirations, correctly arguing that we might as well take months off, not weeks, and with that kind of time, we should travel to areas that are well beyond the distance of a worthwhile week long vacation. Thus the decision to head to Austrolasia. Now all we had to do was plan.
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