Let me just preface the adventures of this trip with the fact that planning begun almost a year ago. My former roommates and a couple of friends all had coincidental vacation time and started to brainstorm ideas for a group trip. Would we ever have the possibility of traveling in a group of 8 again for longer than a weekend? I was highly skeptical and jumped on the bandwagon of pushing for a group vacation!
Asia was picked as the continent for exploration due to the inner foodies in all of us and our love for Asian desserts. Don’t get me wrong, I love desserts of all kinds, but I’ve only ever been able to hear about all the delicious sweet treats from Asia prior to this trip and wanted nothing more than to experience these for myself! Considering that 7/8 of the group had also never been to Asia before (myself included), we ruled out European and North American destinations.
Selecting the countries for travel was a bit tougher. A few of us were more opinionated than others when it came to specific cities to visit, but after many planning sessions over all-you-can-eat sushi dinners, we agreed on Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. With our luck, we purchased flight itineraries only days before the earthquakes in Japan and were back to the drawing board for destination selections. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Indonesia were top contenders for replacements but we ended up with selecting Korea due to the majority vote of the group.
Another big factor of the decisions made for this trip was the direct relationship to each traveler’s budgets. Some of the pockets were deeper than others, which made for interesting dinner discussions. We made sure to all agree to a bare-minimum budget before the purchasing or booking of anything. This made it a lot easier for all of us, as we knew exactly what financial constraints we were working with. It was also a bonus for us to have agreed to the type of trip we were hoping to experience. People may disagree with my opinions on this, but I was more than happy (maybe even a lot excited!) to be on a strict budget carrying nothing more than a 64L backpack and a tiny bit of pocket change for nice to have gifts. I had never been backpacking before and we were eager to explore!
I filled my backpack with 10 disposable outfits. These outfits are exactly what they sound like; 10 sets of outfits that I was willing to toss along the way if I needed the space in my backpack for newly acquired goods (e.g. Bug spray and extra toiletries). This is probably the biggest factor as to why I won’t be incorporating many outfit posts into my travel posts. I wasn’t packing to out-dress the fashionistas of Korea and this little backpack of mine is only capable of carrying so much!
After four weeks of being away and getting to experience all the sights, sounds, and smells of these countries while being extremely sleep deprived (also a lot more jet-lagged than I want to admit), I’m happy to be home. I hope you guys enjoy the little trip down memory lane over the next couple of weeks as I offload all the photos I’ve been hoarding on my SD cards while away!
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