We are beyond excited to officially announce some long-term traveling plans.
We will be traveling Asia for a year!!!
Starting at the end of this summer, we will be heading to the eastern hemisphere to further fulfill our traveling dreams in a part of the world that neither of us have really visited before.
This is something we’ve thought about for a while, but didn’t think it would happen quite so soon. However, after we opened our minds to the idea of such a trip in an earlier timeframe, the pros heavily outweighed the cons, and we figured we might as well just go for it! Let us further explain our big life decision:
Why Asia?
It’s new.
Like we’ve mentioned before, it’s a part of the world that neither of us have really seen. Even though Julie was born in China, she was too young to travel around very much, especially to other countries. Both of us have only been to Hong Kong and limited parts of mainland China (fun fact: Carlos has visited more cities in China than Julie). So this is an amazing opportunity to expand our horizons, so to speak.
It’s far.
Every trip to Asia from North America takes almost an entire day; it takes even longer from South America since you have to connect via another continent. Add on the jet lag, the high prices on flights, and it’s clear that you have to stay at least a few weeks to make the trip really worth it. We figured it would be hard to make regular trips to Asia in the future using vacation days. This way, we can tour the whole continent in one extended trip, along with the luxury of going at our own pace and enjoying our time there.
It’s cheap.
We both come from middle-class families and recently graduated college – thus this trip is entirely funded by what both of us have saved up in this past year. Needless to say, we cannot afford to travel in expensive places for long. Luckily, it doesn’t take much money to live in most of Asia (especially compared to New York) so this is a perfect fit for our budget.
It’s fun.
There are some places in the world where you can enjoy when you’re 90, while other places are best traveled when you’re young. We feel like the most meaningful way to experience Asia for us is to backpack through the countries in our 20s.
Why now?
There will never be a perfect time to travel – it’s easy to make excuses about why this is not a good time to take that trip you’ve always wanted to take. So while we’re young, with no real obligations in life and not much of a career to give up, we want to just go for it and make it happen. In short: Because we can. Because life is too short to not live your dream.
Where in Asia will we be traveling?
Well, first of all, we should clarify that the term “Asia” is loosely used. We are not completely set on the list of countries – after all, being flexible is key to successful traveling, especially in our case where there is nowhere we absolutely need to be at any given point. Here is a map of all the countries that we may visit highlighted in light blue:
As you can see, it includes South Asia, SE Asia, and Oceania. We will keep referring to the trip as “Asia” because it’s easier, even though it’s not entirely accurate. Obviously we would love to go to every single country in the map, but the final destinations will really depend on visas, flights, costs, and other such logistics.
We cannot express how excited we are for this once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Follow us in the Travel Blog section of the website for the latest posts!