The Wander Year

A little over 8 months.  251 days.  Sleeping in different beds and rooms every few nights.  Traveling on public transportation or walking everywhere we go.  Dealing with language and cultural barriers at each turn.  Eating strange food.  Not being able to drink water out  of a tap.  No family.  No friends.  No Imo’s.  No Cardinal baseball.  No Phish tour.

All of this, along with missing our family get-togethers on Father’s Day, missing our niece Julia’s 1st birthday (and most of the first year of her life), remembering my grandpa one year after he passed, and dealing with the first sickness of the trip (which is pretty lucky for both of us), has added up to create a weird few days for us.  We heard about travel burnout before we left, but I honestly dismissed it as ridiculous.  How can one possibly get burned out by not working for a whole year, seeing one awe-inspiring site and landscape after another, and experiencing new and exciting cultures on a regular basis?  It’s difficult to explain, but believe me, it does happen.

Now I’m certainly not looking for any sympathy here.  Quite the contrary.  I really just want to share that it’s not all rosy and wonderful all the time.  Yes, this is the trip of a lifetime, and I do realize how lucky we are to experience all this, but it’s not just a year long vacation of sitting on beaches and relaxing.  This long term travel  business can be hard work sometimes.   It hasn’t happened often, but sometimes we just hit a wall.  The last few days we seemed to have slammed head first into that wall.  Maybe it was talking to our families while they were celebrating Father’s Day, maybe it was not really digging Laos like we thought we would, maybe it was just the fact that we crave some familiarity in a place where there is nothing familiar.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but we are missing home more than any other time on the trip.

So what to do?  How does a long term traveler get out of this funk?  I can see my father-in-law reading this right now and screaming “Just come home!!!!” at his computer screen.  And while that does sound really appealing right about now, I‘ve always been taught not to be a quitter.  So we’ve decided to change plans a bit.

One thing we were really looking forward to on this portion of the trip was the freedom to do what we want when we wanted.  Unlike any other time in the trip, we have nothing at all booked.  No flights, no apartments, no treks, nothing.  Sure, we had a rough plan of what we wanted to do, but we didn’t HAVE to be anywhere.  And while we were both really excited about this, I think we got a little lazy and complacent.  After my mom and sister left us in  Chiang Mai, we’ve spent the better part of the last month not really doing much.  And while we both enjoy not doing much and being lazy, I think the lack of activity had a really  negative effect  on us.  It’s another thing that contributed to our feeling of burnout.

So we’re changing the plans starting tomorrow.  We were originally planning on spending the next couple weeks in southern Laos.  For one reason or another (and I’m not blaming Laos), we are just not feeling it here.  We heard so many great things about this country, and while it hasn’t been bad, there’s just something missing.  We really can’t put our fingers on it, but after much discussion and changing of plans on a minute by minute basis, we have decided to scrap the rest of our time in Laos and head back to Bangkok.  We leave tomorrow afternoon and take a bus/overnight train combo back to Bangkok from Vientiane.

We also booked a flight from Bangkok to Hanoi, Vietnam on July 7.  So we have a little less than two weeks to play with.  First things first, we have to arrange our Vietnamese and Indian visas while in Bangkok (if you’re reading this  because you’re planning a similar trip that includes India, look into visa requirements; they’re a pain, and it will be helpful to know this beforehand instead of scrambling).  We had originally planned on going to Cambodia after Vietnam, but it’s looking  like we might head into Cambodia and see Angkor Wat, one of the few “must-see’s” we had when planning the trip, before we go to Vietnam.  We may still go into Cambodia and see more after Vietnam, but that remains to be seen.  Also, Indonesia, which was never even talked about when planning, is looking more and more likely before we head to India.

While it was difficult to scrap the rest of Laos, I think we both feel good about our plans over the next few weeks and are starting to get excited again.  While the freedom to decide on the fly is good, there’s something to be said about having a bit of a plan sometimes.  That freedom gave way to indecision and became the topic of one frustrating conversation after another.

So tomorrow we head back to Thailand.  Within a week it looks like we are going to see one of the world’s most amazing sights in Angkor Wat.  After that, it’s off to Vietnam.  Before we know it, the plans for the end of the trip are going to have to be solidified, which is both frightening and exciting.  The end of the trip has been looked at in a negative manner (especially by me) for most of the trip.  Talk of extending it has been a topic of discussion all along.  Now it’s different.  Even before this “travel burnout” set in, I’ve turned the corner in a way.  While I know when this is all over I will go through periods of longing to be in exotic places doing exciting things, I’ve also realized how much I truly love home.  I have always known this, obviously, but I think I have really come to appreciate our home, family, and friends instead of taking it all for granted.  While four months seems like a long time, we’ll be home before you know it, and for the first time since we left, I am really excited at that prospect.

Until next time…