Southeast Asia: The Plan

Well, the tickets have been bought. Josh and I are going to Thailand (and Malaysia and Singapore). We booked our flight with China Airlines. We'll depart from SFO on January 26th at 12:05am (yeah, midnight) and return on February 15th. If you want our exact flight numbers and stuff to track us or whatever just ask. We haven't booked any hostels yet, but we'll start that soon.

As we did with our Europe trip, we (mostly me, Stephanie), will update this blog a few times as we plan, as many times as possible from the road, and possibly once or twice afterward. Subscribe! You can receive an email notification every time we update. Our updates from the road may be more spread out on this trip due to the undeveloped nature of some of the regions we may visit, but we'll do our best.

The itinerary is in the very early planning stages. But you can view my map to follow it as I make changes. When we get things nailed down and start booking things, will put up the completed and detailed itinerary.

Right now this is a rough idea of what we want to do. In Thailand we are going to spend a few days in Bangkok with a day trip to Ko Kret. We also want to go further inland to the ancient city of Ayutthaya and Lopburi, which is famous for it's roaming monkeys.

We plan on flying down to Singapore after that. We are considering a day trip (or an over night stay) on the nearby island Bintan, which just happens to be in another country (Indonesia). It sounds like an interesting place, but it is a tad out of the way. We also want to take a bus up to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. To get back to Singapore for our flight home we want to take the famous Jungle Train, which, I admit, is probably the thing I'm looking forward to most on the whole trip. When stations are described as "platform[s] in the middle of the jungle," how can I not want to go there?

We should return to Singapore in time for the Chinese New Year, which is apparently pretty neat there. Right after we celebrate the near year we'll hop on a flight home. If we are not completely dead at that point we'll spend our 8 hour layover in Taipei, Taiwan. We'll probably only have time to see Taipei 101 and maybe grab a lunch, but hey, this would mean we'll have seen the two tallest (completed) buildings in the world in one trip (the other being the Petronas Towers in KL).

This is all wide open right now though and if somebody has suggestions before I start booking the rest of it, please chime in! In the meantime, subscribe! We only leave in three months.