Long-term travel
Last year, we spent a whole month in Thailand as part of our six-month backpacking trip. If we started with the idea of staying within a budget, we quickly realised that we didn’t want our trip to be entirely dictated by money. We kept our budget loose, without going crazy either, even if it meant that we needed to re-think our itinerary.
We absolutely loved Vietnam, where we spent six weeks, visiting my brother in Ho Chi Minh and exploring other cities. I have gathered here some of our best pictures from our stay in this beautiful country and which depict slices of life, in other words, moments of the ordinary life through scenes in the streets of Vietnam. These pictures bring great memories to us and represent some of the aspects of life there.
A lifetime wouldn’t be enough to discover everything a country, as small as it might be, has to offer. In three weeks (19 days precisely), we wanted to be able to see a bit of everything that makes Sri Lanka such a diverse country. We came up with an itinerary combining cultural aspects and outdoor wonders from tea plantations to the seaside.
I have been living in Texas for almost three months and the pieces of my new life are slowly coming together. I am getting used to a new lifestyle, my green card and work permit are hopefully on their way and I am really looking forward to having my friends and family coming from France to show them around.
We met in Paris, then met up in Scotland, we took holidays in Jamaica, backpacked through Asia and we are now settling in America. Our relationship has been shaped by discoveries of new cultures and places. Like everything else in life, travel comes with less glorious moments. I gathered here some of these stories. I must say though that even if we gave ourselves good scares, we never found ourselves in life-threatening or other really bad situations.
We knew Japan would be expensive so we initially had a budget of $95 per day. We quickly decided that we didn’t want our trip to be entirely dictated by a budget so we kept it loose, without going crazy either. We were able to more or less stick to it, spending close to $110 per day (or $55 per person). We were surprised to notice that we spent almost the same as in Hawaii, where we flew from, but without restricting ourselves as much.
Since we’re travelling as a couple, the averages described below are for two people per day and are actually rounded up.
Ever since the moment we met in Paris five years ago, Simon and I travelled quite a lot. When we were leaving apart in different countries, we would visit each other, we went on holidays together and more recently, we spent six months backpacking through Asia. Even though you don’t pack the same way for a week of holidays or a long-term backpacking trip, we have developed some habits and there are a few things that we can’t travel without anymore.
Vietnam is a wonderful country that we can highly recommend to other travellers. While we usually stayed one month in each country we visited on our long trip through Asia, we actually spent 6 weeks in Vietnam.
If you are like me and are not a big fan of fancy suitcase tags or passport covers (to be fair, you have to remove them most of the time when you go through customs in a new country), you will be able to find other gifts ideas for the travellers in your life.
It has now been four months since we left our jobs and home in France to travel and, despite some moments of doubt, it’s been as amazing as I thought it would be. It’s difficult to imagine what life on the road is like until you really experience it though.
