We’ve been travelling for exactly 6 months now and have slept in 69 places (take whatever message you want from that).
That’s an average of two and a half days per location. We’ve had 6 places where we’ve spent more than 5 nights (2 of them were with family in Australia), in some cases up to almost 2 weeks in one place; and countless times we’ve slept just 1 night before moving on.
Both of us have always had quite stable living situations, so it’s been a weird and cool experience.
There have been some lovely highlights. We stayed on Bondi beach in a beautiful apartment leant to us by my cousin and his wife who were away for Christmas. A whole apartment in a flashy area to ourselves!
We stayed at the Gili Teak resort in the tropical paradise of the Gili Islands. There we had a beautiful bungalow beside a pool, and our his and hers showers were surrounded by fountains into a pond. Not sure the fish appreciated the soapy water though!
We stayed with my old uni friend Ben and his wife Zanna in a beautiful old Malay style shophouse converted into a stylish modern home. We woke in the morning to breakfast smoothies made for us by their home helper, who did all of our horrible laundry after Nepal.
Some of the Himalayan lodges had dining rooms with breathtaking panoramic views of the some of the highest mountains in the world.
In Australia we’ve slept in a campervan beside beaches, under brilliant starry skies.
Meanwhile, some places we’ve stayed have been pretty gross.
In Vietnam, when we left an ‘average’ review for a hotel, the owner sent is a tirade of messages including that we were poisonous people and that the wrath of the Vietnamese people would be upon us. Maybe that explains the food poisoning we got the next day?!
In Nepal we found leeches in the shower and went to the toilet squatting over filthy holes in the ground in sub-zero temperatures.
In Tonsai in Thailand we shared our wooden hut with a good number of cockroaches and mosquitoes, with cold water, brutal heat and electricity only for a few hours a day.
A Vietnamese hotel manager tried to take cash out of my hand while processing my card payment online.
And we learned that Thai people on holiday like late nights and loud music, not great if your windows don’t close.
We’ve also slept in some odd places. We had our first experience on a night bus, as well as a night ferry where you just slept on the floor of the ferry with a hundred other people. We also found a great spot behind some plant pots at Delhi airport! In Kangsar in Nepal we stayed at a lodge where the owner tried to set his own wooden hotel on fire.
We’ve learned that sleeping in a room with no windows is very strange, since the total absence of daylight makes for a very weird wake-up; and also that lots of people in the tropics sleep on a bed with no sheet over the top of them, obvious I suppose but a really weird sensation.
It took a while, but we are now very used to a lifestyle where we pack up our whole world every other day and move to a new place. It was a challenge to adjust to the practicalities and the instability, but it’s hard to imagine anything else now.
We have just arrived in New Zealand and bought a campervan (called Kenji). For the next 2 months we’ll be staying in Kenji, making use of freedom camping in New Zealand where you can camp pretty much wherever you want. We had a lot of fun last night totally unpacking our bags into the van, free of repacking for 2 whole months!! Van life is a new experience and one we’re really excited for!
