After hanging around as a vague idea of something that we really should do when I retired, the notion of visiting our friends and relatives around the world suddenly became very real.
Although, when that retirement finally arrived at the end of March, travelling ‘Around the World’ never even entered our minds. We had a head full of ideas about what we wanted to do around Scotland. Having done all that work getting the van just right after all.
As far back as January we’d booked a trip to St Kilda, which also gave us a good excuse to re-visit Lewis. The last time we were there was just after the first Covid lockdown and although we had a great time, there were a few things we just couldn’t visit and then too there were also now Jenny and Mike to visit.
Still, when we booked it in January, we hadn’t held out much hope that it would happen - April in Scotland can still throw a bunch of weather at you. How wrong we were. In the end the weather was better than many a mid-summer’s day, probably even just as warm. The sun shone, the sea was flat calm and it was, well, St Kilda.
Anyway, that’s a post all of it’s own.
Even after St Kilda we weren’t thinking about much else than Scotland and particularly Shetland. Of course, for a few years now we’ve also always gone to Austria for the Bregenzer Festspiele in July and those were our main plans.
Then, something else came back to mind: hadn’t we been invited to Gina’s wedding?
Gina lives in New Zealand which might sound a long way for a wedding. Then, as I said before, we did always have that vague idea of visiting friends and family, so that turned into the idea of getting an ‘Around the World’ ticket. Yes, that was it. Now when was that wedding again? It was the middle of May, so we decided upon the 13th of December as our leaving date. We had a lot of planning to do.
Since this might be our last chance at such a big trip, we wanted to see as much as we could. However, we didn’t want to just run around ticking off all the must see sights. We wanted to stop long enough to get a real feel for the countries we were going to visit. Nonetheless, with that deadline in May there was always going to be a danger of trying to cram too much in and that’s exactly what we ended up doing.
We made a list of what we thought were our ‘must see’ places. Initially that included Egypt, Jordan, India, China and Japan. So, we planned 4-5 weeks in Egypt then a week in Jordan. Next it was 4 weeks in India and a minimum of 3 weeks in each of China and Japan. It was only we sat down and started booking our flights that we realised - that’s a bit of a rush. We hadn’t even thought about South East Asia and our flight arriving in Bangkok would leave us with just four weeks to get to Jogjakarta to catch our flight to Beijing via Singapore. On that schedule South East Asia was going to be full of compromises.
We got the bones of our flight arrangements all booked up. Glasgow to Cairo via London, with almost five weeks in Egypt before flying to Amman for a week. From Amman it was a flight to New Delhi and almost five weeks in India. Then, Delhi to Bangkok and making our own way to Jogjakarta to catch a Flight to Singapore and a two night stopover. We really did need to see Raffles and drink at least one Singapore sling! :-) Next it was a flight to Beijing. Now we had three weeks to make our own travel arrangements to get to Hong Kong for the flight to Tokyo.
Three weeks in Japan. Surely not enough, but sacrifices and compromises it had to be. We needed to get to Australia and then on to New Zealand in May. Thinking further ahead we did also book our flight to Chile. From Chile we would have about 5 months to make our way to Canada and our flights back home.
It felt just as hectic at the time as it now feels just writing about it. We didn’t even think about the Antipodes and the Americas after all that, we started trying to get the first six months of our trip together and just getting to New Zealand. We didn’t wanted to avoid having everything booked up like a package holiday, but then there was China. In order to even get a visa permitting us to visit China, we needed to have evidence of our flights in and out of the country and booked accommodation for every night of our stay there.
