Another December, another trip to Southeast Asia! Shocker, right?
Having used only two weeks of vacation the entire year, I decided in September – while in Beirut, actually – to embark on another winter adventure. If you’re wondering why I keep doing this, see my post from last year because the reasons are just as relevant today. Given the success of working remotely last year and the appeal of being able to extend the trip, I pushed my luck a bit with my manager and told him I’d be gone for five weeks: three weeks of working remotely and two weeks of holiday. He was okay with the timing and remembered that I was quite productive when I did this last year, so I started making plans for my trip.
I looked into the same flights as last year: EVA Air from San Francisco to Bangkok, by way of Taipei. I would come back on New Years Day again, so Thanksgiving weekend was the obvious choice for a departure date since I was going to lose an entire day flying over the International Date Line. As luck would have it, my birthday fell on the Saturday after Thanksgiving this year, so if I flew out Thanksgiving night, I would arrive in Thailand on my birthday. As an added bonus, Black Friday – the symbol of the chaotic, frustrating, over-commercialized mess that the Christmas season has become – would simply not exist in my life this year and forever be lost in the ether. I loved the symbolism and bought my tickets immediately.
I scheduled two weeks in Chiang Mai and a week in Bangkok before that, since that’s where I wanted to be for my birthday. The end of the trip was also finalized; I had kept in touch with a friend I had met in Laos last year and we already made plans to travel together to Koh Phi-Phi at the end of December before going back to Bangkok for New Years weekend.
All these anchors on the calendar left a stretch of only nine days in mid-December where I could go anywhere and do anything. Like last year, I wanted to go somewhere new, and just like last year, I leaned very heavily towards Myanmar. I read a lot of travel resources, talked to friends who had been there, and even talked to my friend Bebee, who had recently moved back to her hometown in Shan state. However, the news coming out of Myanmar was horrible: the military government was carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in the western part of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh to escape execution, violence, sexual assault, and destruction of their villages and homes at the hands of the government.
Sometime in November, on the morning that I was supposed to buy plane tickets to Myanmar, my alarm went off and I lazily stayed in bed, flipping through the news on my phone. As fate would have it, my news feed contained an article about Myanmar written by a travel website. The author reiterated the (very valid) point that travelers have the power to vote with their money. On the one hand, money spent in Myanmar could go directly to locals who really need it; on the other hand, taxes, visa fees, plane tickets, and similar expenses would go directly to the government. In short, a trip to Myanmar would be directly funding the atrocities I kept seeing on the news.
After a lot of deliberation, I nixed the idea. Once again – and exactly like last year – I begrudgingly put Myanmar back on the bucket list.
Given that I was finishing the remote-work portion of the trip in Chiang Mai and was going to be meeting my friend in Bangkok, I started to look for a new place to visit that wasn’t too far from either city. A brief look at Google Maps revealed the obvious choice: southern Vietnam. I scrambled to research that part of the country, buy flights, and get a visa. Thankfully, Vietnam has recently implemented an e-visa program and website, which made the process cheap, fast, and easy.
An added bonus to all of this was the 11th-hour addition to the trip: my friend Laurie, who I know from San Francisco. She’s taking two months off from her job to travel (mostly in Southeast Asia) and it made perfect sense that we should try to meet up. She’ll be staying in Chiang Mai during my second week there and then we’ll be traveling together to a few places in Vietnam before I swing around back to Thailand to meet my Lao friend.
I also had an incredible stroke of fortune with respect to funding my trip. Just as with my previous multi-week trips, I was able to find someone to stay in my apartment while I was gone. This year, I found a nomadic, remote-working couple in their 30s who wanted to come up from the peninsula and spend an extended amount of time in San Francisco. (Well, really, they found me.) They had even just been to Koh Phi-Phi a month prior! We clicked immediately and I was very happy to have them stay in my place the entire time I was gone. They arrived the morning after I left and left a few hours before I returned home. The apartment was basically never empty and a massive portion (over half!) of my trip’s expenses was covered.
Fast forward to Thanksgiving day. After eating an irresponsible amount of potatoes, stuffing, cheese, and deviled eggs at my friends’ house, I spent the rest of the day burning all those calories while cleaning and packing and preparing for the trip. Even though I started at 3:00 in the afternoon and my flight wasn’t until midnight, I barely had a moment to rest before it was time to grab my bags and leave for the airport.
Who’s excited?
