Obviously we made it back home from the southern Caribbean. I should have made a blog post but forgot. I feel bad that I have not been updating this blog as much as I would like to be. I plan on starting to update more. I have started planning our next trip which is a very good thing since we leave in less than 6 weeks!
We are going to Asia! We decided we wanted to go on another major trip. We thought about Africa, Egypt, or Asia. Finally we decided that we really wanted to go to Asia and started planning this trip. The Asian culture has always fascinated me. Last year, we were planning on going to Asia but instead thought we would go to Australia first. We are now ready to visit Asia.
We are going on a 16 night Princess cruise starting in Singapore. Our ports of call include: Ko Samui Thailand, Bangkok Thailand, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, Da nang Vietnam, Hong Kong China, Taipei Taiwan, Okinawa Japan, and Shanghai China. We will get to visit 6 countries!
While looking into airfare, we realized that the flight to Singapore was 21hours of flying time! That would be a nightmare. Plus we thought if we go to Asia, don’t we have to see the Great Wall? So we decided to first fly to Beijing, spend a few days there then fly to Singapore. The flight to Beijing is only 13 hours of flying time. Flight to Singapore from Beijing is 6 hours. That seems a little more manageable.
I have been working on getting us visas for China and Vietnam. We got our China visa back last week. We used www.travisa.com and everything worked out smoothly. I would recommend them. Now we need a Vietnam visa because we are planning on leaving the ship in Vietnam to go on a 3 day tour. (If we were not leaving the ship, the cruise would issue us Vietnam visas while on board for a fee). We will avoid a sea day this way. Because we are going to so many countries, our trip does have several seas days. It was worth it to us because of all the new places we will get to visit.
I still have a lot of finalizing to do for this trip but I have a good idea of everything we plan to do. In Beijing, we hired a tour guide for a day to visit The Great Wall and Olympic village. We plan to go to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City on our own. Out hotel is near them so that should be okay.
In Singapore, we are going to again tour on our own. We might go on a night safari but nothing has been confirmed yet.
In Ko Samui, we are going to ride an elephant and visit Temple of Big Buddha.
In Bangkok, we are going on a tour with people we met on cruisecritic with a guide. We are spending the night in the city Bangkok. Our ship has an overnight there but the port is over an hour away so we are going to stay in the city and have a two day tour with guide. Bangkok is the city that I am looking forward to seeing the most.
For Vietnam, I am working with a tour company to arrange a 3 day 2 night tour for us. We would visit Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Hanoi, Hai An and Da Nang. This should be really cool too.
In Hong Kong, we plan to tour the city. We also heard that shopping is really good there so I will need to fit that in. We are there until 11pm so hopefully we can go to Victoria Peak to see the daily light show at night.
In Taipei, Brian has a friend who is originally from Taipei that might be there and if he is, we will spend the day with him touring.
In Okinawa, we are joining a tour that was arranged from people from cruisecritic. We will be visiting all the major tourist sites there.
Finally in Shanghai we will be spending the night there to see the city before flying home. I have not done too much research on Shanghai yet but will be working on it in the next few weeks.
We are getting excited about this trip. It will be like nothing else we have ever done before. More to come soon!
