Thoughts on returning home after backpacking around Southeast Asia for 90 days

Or … why you can never really ‘do’ a country

Sunset on the Kinabatangan River in Borneo

We’ve been back now for six weeks after our 90 days travelling in south east Asia. I’ve been working out some numbers; in all, we stayed at 37 places and visited 8 countries:

North East India getting stuck in thunder storms on tea estates and watching rhinos
Northern Thailand in the beautiful old town of Chiang Mai
Laos to beautiful places on the river Mekong
Vietnam – okay I got a bit sick here but the seaplane landing at Halong Bay was thrilling and a visit to the Saigon opera house was a real treat
Myanmar visiting the awesome temples in Bagan
Singapore, drinking slings and buying perfume (we were not good backpackers)
Malaysia seeing orangutans in Sepilok and egg-laying turtles on a breath-takingly beautiful island called Selingan
Indonesia (Bali, Lombok and Gili Air. I still need to write these posts up)

In all we took 21 boats, 19 flights, 16 mopeds, 12 buses, 3 bicycles, 2 horse and carts and 1 sea-plane and over 32 blog posts, with some more to come. Whilst I am happy about the amount of blogging I did and managing to not get divorced (here are some tips on blogging while traveling with a partner), I do hold some flight-shame about the carbon emissions, something I’m going to have to offset somehow.

Before I left a friend of mine asked me ‘what do you expect to achieve?’ The question threw me because I never challenged the ability of travel to inspire, open our eyes and minds, see how other people live and understand the commonality of humans and our values.

Travel is the best thing in the world, with the possible exception of cake.

This really was one hell of a journey, I was almost tempted to use exclamation marks on blogposts. It was an utter privilege to have been able to do something like this, a special passage of time I know we will never ever forget.

A beach on Selingan Island near Borneo — Selingan Island, Borneo

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I have also realised that looking at the stats in the opening line of this post …

We stayed on average 2.4 days in each place we visited.
We stayed on average 11.2 days in each country (we spent just two nights in the smallest country we visited, Singapore, and in long linear countries like Laos and Vietnam, we spent close to two weeks.)
On a whim, we were able to stay longer when we found a very special place, or needed some rest and recuperation. We extended our stays to 5 days in Bagan in Myanmar and in Gill Air, a tiny island in Indonesia just off Lombok).

Waterfalls in Laos — Waterfalls near Luang Prabang, Laos

But here’s the thing: I still have that urge to go back to those places again one day, see how they have changed and explore a little deeper. I do though hope to avoid the hospitals of Danang and Hué next time.

People say, ‘we did Vietnam,’ ‘we did Peru’, but the truth is, you can never actually ‘do’ a country as a traveller. You can only ever skim its surface, especially in the constraints of modern living.

But in the constraints of modern living, 11.2 days in each country, 2.4 days per stay, is a taster, a thali just enough of a bite to entice you, to inspire you, fill you with a desire to would want to go back again.

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This post is part of the series called ’90 Days in South East Asia’ was written on-the-road (mainly on buses, boats and planes) except for this one which was written in a cafe on a rainy day in south London.