Off to Southeast Asia

Friday December 28th, 2012
Tomorrow we leave for Vietnam. Zack will pick us up at home in the early afternoon and drive us to the Ottawa airport. At 8 pm we fly to Toronto. From there we fly to Frankfurt, Germany, then to Bangkok, Thailand and finally to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. We arrive there on Monday morning at around 9 am (New Years Eve). Dylan will meet us at the airport and take us to the hotel he has reserved for us in HCMC. After a visit at Christmas with Josh, Zack and Annie, now we'll get to see Dylan whom we haven't seen for 16 months.
Dylan has the week off work and school so we'll tour around the city and area with him until the following Saturday when he, his girlfriend Kasumi, and the two of us will travel to Mui Ne on the southeast coast of Vietnam for the weekend. On the Monday, we go back to HCMC and that's the end of our bookings so far.
After that we'll be making it up as we go along. Once again we each have our backpacks which we've tried to keep light but somehow with backpack and daypack my total is around 30 pounds and Anita's is around 20. That's not bad but lighter is always better. We'll ruthlessly repack again today to see if we can leave anything else out. With every piece of electronic equipment like netbook computer, kobo reader and camera, there's a charger or cable. Plus we have extra drugs for malaria and severe diarrhea, and we have insect repellent, sunscreen and so on. It all adds up. Our goal is to someday travel with only a credit card, passport and toothbrush but it looks like it won't be this trip.
After getting back to HCMC, we'll probably take a tour through the Mekong Delta and maybe out to Phu Quoc Island for a few days. Sometime around Monday, January 14th we plan to meet Anita's brother Tim and a couple of his old Combermere friends in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We'll likely tour around with them for a few days. At some point, we intend to spend time in Siem Reap, Battambang, Kep and Sihanoukville and maybe other places in Cambodia.
In Thailand, we'll go to Bangkok, Sukhothai and Chaing Mai plus maybe one of the islands in the south. No doubt our plans will change as we meet other travelers and compare experiences. Not knowing exactly where we're going is part of the fun.
Sometime in February we'll get to Laos including Luang Prabang and Vientiane. Then we'll travel back into Vietnam to Hanoi in the north in early March. We want to visit Sapa, Halong Bay and then work our way back down the coast of Vietnam through places like Hue, Hoi An and Dalat, then to HCMC where we'll visit with Dylan again for a few days and fly home on April 3rd. Our flight home takes us to Seoul, then Chicago and finally back to Ottawa so going to Vietnam and back we are literally traveling around the world in one direction.
That's the plan. We'll keep posting.