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:

1. This is incredible

2. 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

The Plan

It’s all well and good coming to a decision in a bar in Laos, it’s quite another to turn that decision into a plan. 

We all take different approaches to planning. John is a more laid back kinda guy; let’s just turn up to a country and wing it. I however, like to take a more structured approach. My plans are much more involved, they include colour coded lists and sexy sexy spreadsheets. Our styles of travel and planning would have to be combined if we were to plan our way round the world. To start with, we knew we had to save for a few years, in the meantime I could research and plan. 

So there we were, post holiday blues in a chilly November 2018 deciding on how to make our travel dreams a reality. We started off trying to work out an itinerary. The first idea we had was to start our trip on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, travelling through Russia, Mongolia and China. This plan lasted as long as it took us to Google the cost of the train, at which point we swiftly moved onto other things.

Next plan was a big trip starting in China. I made spreadsheets, I made cost breakdowns, I found hostels, I checked train times. All of this took shape in the form of a very impressive Excel document. Then we decided to look into how to get a visa for China. This is where the issues began. It seems that to even apply for a Chinese Tourist Visa (at least in pre-Covid times) it is a lot more difficult than just turning up to the country. Our Chinese Visa friends would like to know exactly what your plans are, from detailing all your accommodation to letting them know exactly when and where you would be exiting the country. This would not be an issue for a two week holiday, but when you’re seeking long-term travel, and the flexibility that goes along with it, getting a visa for China becomes a bit of an issue. With China being more complicated than anticipated we had to rethink.

Dejected, I slunk off. My dreams of Excel spreadsheets and ordered plans in tatters. Defeated, I slumped onto the sofa. John joined me with beers and we decided to comfort watch travel YouTubers and so began the tradition of “Travel Sunday”. For the next few years, our Sunday afternoons would be spent in the company of cheap Lidl beer and an ever increasing selection of travel YouTubers. First came The Budgeteers. Thanks to them we added Sri Lanka and India to our list of desired destinations. Karl Watson forcibly added the Philippines into our consideration. Shoestring Vagabond convinced us (despite all physical evidence) that trekking in Nepal was a must do. Paddy Doyle, Mark Weins and The Roaming Cook showed us that there was so much more to Thailand than we had seen on our previous trips. Kinging-It, well Kinging-It are all kinds of beautiful crazy and just reinforced the wanderlust and stoked the fire to get off our arses and discover this beautiful planet. I must also give a big shout out to the What the Pho podcast who provided constant entertainment and inspiration on my morning runs around Tooting Bec common.

A few months down the line and reinvigorated, planning took off once again. Around that time however, someone in Wuhan started coughing. Plans were abandoned, and the world got smaller. John's office moved from the outskirts of London to a dining room table in Streatham and travel seemed like a distant memory. The only travel we could do was the government approved exercise i.e. close to home and not for too long, thank you very much! 

Our very cosy “home office”

The only upsides from a global pandemic were:

1. It was a lot easier to save money (less commuting and less opportunities to be distracted in pubs).

2. More research time; more countries and places were being read about/watched/seen on Instagram and being added to our lists.

3. Wanderlust paused is not wanderlust destroyed. The desire to travel was exponentially increasing with each month it was being denied.

During the lockdowns, my reading material changed. My escapism went from romantic chick lit to the Lonely Planet. Our travel guide collection started with just ‘South East Asia on a Shoestring’. From there we added a couple of Lonely Planet's (Thailand, India) and I swear they started to breed. Every time we looked round another country had been added to the collection and before too long we had a mighty library of guides stretching from Georgia to the Philippines. With YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and our books we were now experienced armchair travellers. 

Armed with this new knowledge, I took to Google Maps, creating a list of “Places to Visit”. Asia suddenly resembled a pin cushion as a forest of locations were added to the “adventure list”. 

Now all we had to do was wait until the world reopened….

John & Ellie x

#adventuresofjellie

The Departure

There were so many false starts. Every time we thought the pandemic might be coming to an end, England was hit by a fresh wave. Thinking back on it, it’s incredible. Christmas was cancelled, we spent two and a bit years working from home, the government told us when we could leave our houses and for what reasons. We were lucky where we were, near a high street and all its amenities, a lovely local community and a great park (Tooting Bec Common). But the blasted pandemic and the global lockdown meant that travel was out of the question. So we sat, worked and waited.

Finally, 2022 came around. Countries started to open up, and it looked like maybe, just maybe, international travel might become possible again. We decided to take the plunge and handed our 3 months notices into our jobs. We had a million plans, pins, countries, the only issue now was that this was still all in our heads. We had nothing booked beyond our imminent joblessness and needed a starting point. 

We settled on starting in Sri Lanka (thanks in large part to The Budgeteers). Ellie went straight into laser focus flight comparison mode, where she found that it was actually quite expensive to fly directly to Sri Lanka. Looking at possible connections, stopovers or other budget alternatives, Ellie discovered that going via Istanbul massively changed the price. On a whim we looked into accommodation as Istanbul is a city we had always wanted to visit. We quickly found that we could get extremely reasonable accommodation, and even a nice compact AirBnB for very little. So we decided to go to Sri Lanka via a week's stopover in Istanbul. This also had the bonus of starting our adventure in a city where we could literally walk from Europe to Asia!

The final weeks before departure were a hectic blur. Saying goodbye to family and friends, finishing our jobs and packing up our flat, left us in a constant state of panic and nerves (which was very disconcerting for me as John is usually as cool as a cucumber). Our realisation of how just clueless we were was further reinforced when we came to pack. We had bought lovely brand new 40 litre backpacks and it had somehow not occurred to us that they would pack less than our old 70 litre bags! Many hurried repacks, discarded clothes and questions to our own sanity followed. 

The sense of panic and anxiety was further deepened by the unfolding tragic situation in Sri Lanka, where an economic collapse has led to its worst economic crisis since independence. Travel advice for the country changed (and is changing) on a weekly basis, but our flights were already booked so we decided to just keep an eye on things as we really, really want to see Sri Lanka if at all possible. 

John had also made things slightly harder for himself in the final week, as he had decided (obviously without my knowledge) to propose to me before we left the UK. This led to a slightly surreal last evening, where I wondered why John was so preoccupied with why our pizza delivery was so late and what time the sun set, but in the end it worked out beautifully.  Our final Streatham sunset (indeed our final UK sunset) happened on a rooftop with John on one knee, the sun setting over London, Prosecco on hand and a ring presented. I obviously said yes (this would have been a very awkward start to the adventure otherwise)!

So in the space of 48 hours we had packed (several times), locked up all our belongings, left our flat, got engaged and departed from the UK. We’re writing this now from our tiny AirBnB in Beyoglu Istanbul surrounded by small cats. The stress of the last few weeks melting away with the realisation that the hardest thing to do is just jump. Once you’ve taken the plunge, you can enjoy the ride. 

Our adventure has finally begun! 

John & Ellie x

#adventuresofjellie