Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Deciding where to go and what we wanted to do was , as you’d expect, the most fun part of the planning. We knew we’d be starting in South Korea and so most of Asia was at our fingertips. We knew we wanted to overland for the majority of our journey so we figured it would make sense to start in China. China has a comprehensive rail network that can basically take you anywhere you want to go in the country and we’ll be making full use of it. We are going to be taking trains between Beijing-Datong-Pingyao-Xi’an-Nanjing-Suzhou-Hangzhou-Shanghai and Hong Kong.

We chose the cities in China that we did based on a few things. We are fortunate enough to have great Chinese friends who were able to recommend or dissuade us from visiting some places. Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong obviously havesome big highlights and really can’t be missed on a trip through China. Datong, Pingyao, Suzhou and Hangzhou while not obvious choices all have some really unique things that we’d like to take in on this trip. We’re using Rough Guide to China which suggested the first two, the latter was suggested by our friend John.

We originally also wanted to include Tibet in our Chinese tour but after a bit of online research we decided it was just going to be too difficult. We are already on a tight budget both time and moneywise, and it’s expensive to go to Tibet because of all the permits and also takes a couple of weeks that we didn’t have to spare. We also felt okay cutting it from the original list because we feel that Tibet and all it has to offer would be enough to bring us back to the East on a dedicated trip. We also had wanted to go visit the Panda Nature Reserve in Chengdu but eventually realized that it was not going to be worth the traveling time it would take to go so far south and west.

After China we are mostly just following the logical path. We’re heading through Vietnam into Cambodia then into Thailand into Malaysia. We’ve decided to skip Laos. We had heard some good and bad things about it, but in the end, we just don’t have time for it.

Then the logical path stops. From Malaysia we’re flying to India. We’ve indlucded India in this tour because we were able to find really great flights using the ridiculously cheap asian airlines (Tiger Air and Air Asia) and we both have always wanted to visit India.

The last stop is Australia and surprisingly this didn’t actually make the cut, nor was it even considered, until a relatively late stage in the planning. We had always discounted Australia simply because it’s still quite far from where we are and we’re going back into western prices. We eventually reasoned with ourselves that a flight from Canada will cost more than our entire Australian journey and so it made the list.