The Decision
It started, as many things do, in a bar. In particular the Earth Bar of Vang Vieng, Laos. We were at a tiny table, overlooking a landscape of steaming vegetation cast in gold and green from the sunset. Ants were forming orderly lines to eat at the sticky spots on our tree stump table when the fateful words came out.
“We could do this”.
Ellie had articulated what we had both been thinking for the whole of that holiday. We could, should and would travel.
Ok back up, that all sort of started in the middle. Me and Ellie had been on several holidays to SE Asia before. We had gone around Cambodia (on a tour), gone up thorough Vietnam (on a tour) and travelled from Bangkok to Singapore (again another excellent tour) but this holiday we had planned it ourselves.
Three weeks around Thailand and Laos were flying by and everywhere we went, we were thinking the same two things:
This is incredible
Why do we only have two or three days here?
We were loving our time away, but felt we were only ever dipping our toes in to any one place. Each place we visited we got to see a quick fire tourist highlight reel. The brevity of our stays necessitated an almost checklist approach to each location. Chang mai - must go see elephant rescue, eat Khao Soi and do a zip-line. Vientiane, we have to go to Buddha park and visit the Patuxai arch, Luang Prabang, monks, temples, waterfalls and sunset at Utopia bar. We were not complaining but we always wished we could take it slower. We wanted the time to calm down and simply be in a place.
The way things were with our lives, and if we wanted to see all that we wanted to see then the whistle-stop approach was the only way. I had saved all of my annual leave up for this one trip. No days off for a year until November when we had set off to Bangkok. With our jobs and our hectic schedules in London, we just didn’t have the luxury of time.
But then again, "we could do this"...
Back in the evening air of Laos, helped along by a few beer Laos the idea was solidifying. We could leave our jobs and travel long term, do a massive combined trip, visiting countries all over the world, but taking it at our own pace. We could backpack and hostel our way into a more relaxed mode of travel.
That was the plan anyway. That was late 2018 and we all know what happened next! A global pandemic doesn’t care whether or not we think “we could do this”.
Thanks for reading, see our next post to see what happened next.
John & Ellie x
#adventuresofjellie
