One of the reasons we started this blog was to help pay it forward. The travel tips, inspiration and cool places to go for other travelers. I remember the first travel blog I read, The World is Not Flat by Lee and Sachi LeFever.. After reading their travels for the first time it really made it seem possible to do in my mind.

I read many other peoples travel blogs while we were traveling. When I read Gillian and Jason’s report of Soppong and the Cave Lodge I decided we had to go check it out!

I really loved Chiang Pai and Soppong in Thailand, they were some of the most beautiful, relaxed and adventurous places in Thailand. The vendors really didn’t push hard and Pai is more of an artists hangout than anything with hilltribes surrounding it. Because it’s a crazy 5 hour 500 turn journey from Chiang Mai, it doesn’t get as many travelers and maintains a smaller town feel. It’s all designed for tourists, but you can get out of the town center and see beautiful countryside and get a feeling of being “off the beaten path” – as much as that’s really possible in a tourist area.



I just heard that Ryan and Liz from Pause The Moment are in Chiang Pai and liked my recommendation! I’m glad to be able to pay it forward after receiving great advice from Gillian about the area.

What about you? How do you figure out where you go while traveling? Do you value the advice of blogs over guidebooks? Is there one site that’s inspired you?

Luckily for once we can announce no total failure! Just lots of changes. Read On:

It’s nice to have some down time to plan things out. With such a busy travel schedule all summer there wasn’t a lot of extra time to do planning ahead of where we’re going to next. So now with a nice break in travel and generous relatives letting us stay at their place until we can easily figured out where to go next. With a strong and free Internet connection, access to a fantastic espresso machine and fresh groceries in the fridge, it was the perfect time to sit down and figure things out.

We had a general route figured out earlier to go through Turkey, Egypt, India and then on to Thailand and the rest of Asia. But we didn’t know the costs of travel and accommodation so it took some time to decide what we’d do next. One thing was we spent more money than expected in Europe, with the Euro to Canadian exchange rate being poor and sticker prices being the same or more as back home. Sandwiches in Ireland were €9, beers were often €5-€7 and so on. Basically, we paid the same money as we do back home on things as we did in Europe, which with anyone’s vacation plans that is not what you expect. One tends to travel to places that are cheaper then home. It wasn’t something that we had prepared for, I thought things would just be a bit cheaper. Apparently I was wrong.

We very much wanted to visit Istanbul and see the open-air markets. And go to the Valley of the Kings and view the inscriptions. See the Taj Mahjal and experience the crazy city of Mumbai. But we had to ask ourselves where we really wanted to go, and SE Asia was an area that we just couldn’t miss since it’s an area of the world we have been dreaming about for years. With a clear direction we could start making a plan of where to go and ensure the costs while traveling. With the great exchange rate the Canadian dollar gets in Asia it was looking to be a very easy place to go to on a now very tight budget.

Dee once again used her magic and managed one awesome surprise. While we were looking for the cheapest airline tickets to Bangkok she somehow found some random site we never used before with her amazing Google search skills and low and behold there was an Egypt Air flight out of Frankfurt that had a layover in Cairo that was cheaper then any other flight option on the net. After some investigation we managed to turn that layover into a 6 day stop over in Cairo! The one thing I had really wanted to see this trip was the Pyramids (especially after I saw the movie Zeitgeist), and when it was scratched off our list due to funds I was quietly disappointed. But now after seeing the chance to stay in Cairo and see the Pyramids we booked the flights right away, with the great bonus of it being the cheapest way for us to get to Bangkok!

I really don’t think we would have found this flight unless we had the time to wind down and do some searching while resting. I’m glad that Dee managed to do some good searching on the net and found it! So now our Itinerary looks something like this:

Cairo – 6 nights
Thailand – 60 – 90 days
Cambodia – 15 – 20 days
Vietnam – 20 – 30 days
Laos – 15 – 30 days

Europe has been great, but really it’s similar to life back home. I’m excited to explore something new in Asia, where both language and cultures are extremely different.

And this ends our tales from Europe!! Hope you can enjoyed them and you can look forward to some upcoming exciting posts from our culture shocking time in Cairo, Egypt!!

Off we go to Cairo!!