Where next? That’s an excellent question!

Just in case you’ve recently joined us or fancy a reminder, this has been our route so far…

…but we also thought it was about time to give an update on our plans – it’s been a while!

Late January to late March 🇻🇳🇰🇭🇹🇭🇱🇦🇲🇾🇸🇬

We’ve been keeping a close eye on the Chinese borders and available ferry connections since we arrived in Seoul on 23rd November, but sadly it doesn’t look like things are changing quickly enough for us to continue our journey over land and sea. So, we are reluctantly boarding a flight to leapfrog China and take us towards Southeast Asia. Although we’re not delighted at taking another flight, at least this comes at the end of two full months of travel through South Korea and Japan. Our goal to minimise our carbon emissions is definitely encouraging us to think carefully about our route and we’ve flown much less frequently than we would have done otherwise.

So, it’s onto Southeast Asia, where we plan to spend at least two months making our way from Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, to the city state of Singapore. We’ll be resisting temptation to take any of the cheap flight connections around the region and are looking forward to some marathon bus and train journeys. After being spoilt with a very clean and comfortable couple of months in South Korea and Japan, it’s back to some more intrepid travel for us!

We plan to move south through Vietnam, passing through the hectic old town of Hanoi, the ancient capital Hue, the relaxed fishing village of An Bang, and the colonial hilltop town of Dalat before reaching the chaos of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We’re then planning to have a ‘holiday’ (ha!) in the tiny Con Dao archipelago. Next, we’ll turn north into Cambodia and Thailand, then briefly cross into Laos before heading south again through Thailand towards peninsular Malaysia and finally Singapore. We’ve visited a few of these countries previously, so we’ll be trying to resist temptation to only revisit lovely places we’ve been before and find some new spots! We are incredibly excited about the food (no change there).

Disclaimer: this route is definitely subject to change!

April and early May 🇳🇿

After Southeast Asia, our plans are even more open, but we have the vague idea that we’d like to go ‘all the way around’. So, we spent a long time looking at sea connections to Indonesia or the Philippines and then onto Australia to continue our route this way, but there are quite a lot of pirate-infested waters around this region 😬 I’m assuming that walking the plank isn’t actually as fun as it sounds, so we might give this a miss. Instead, we’ll probably head to New Zealand in time for autumn and spend April and part of May there.

We considered whether to fly from Singapore to Cairns, travel down the east coast of Australia towards Melbourne (a city we’re both keen to visit) and then fly from Melbourne to Auckland, in order to minimise our time in the air.

However, our calculations suggested that the difference in carbon emissions between taking one direct flight or taking two shorter flights would have been minimal. Once we took into account the estimated emissions from our overland travel too, it was actually slightly better to fly the whole way from Singapore to Auckland (1171 vs 1185 kgCO2e). This wasn’t what we expected, so we’re glad we checked! Based on these carbon calculations and the fact that we’re a bit tight for time to get to New Zealand before winter sets in, we’ll have to save Melbourne for next time we travel around the world 😉

Mid-May onwards 🇺🇸🇨🇦

Next, it’ll be on to North America to cross the continent before flying home to see friends and family for a while around August time. We really wanted to take a trip on the Queen Mary II (the world’s only ocean liner), which would have taken us from New York to Southampton in style and without flying, but sadly, it turns out that cruise ships emit at least twice as much carbon as flying. Having discovered the astronomical carbon emissions of this type of ship, it doesn’t sound like such an appealing alternative any more!

As always, our plans are very fluid but we’d be delighted to pick up any waifs and strays who might find themselves near our route – just let us know…