We'll try this again!!!!
Here I am looking over my last attempt at keeping a blog of my travels through Eastern Europe and my failure to type at the same breakneck speed as our journey through 6 or 7 countries in less than a month.
While I always start out with good intentions I invariably find myself fighting shitty internet speeds or no internet at all and I give up.
Will my next trip be any different? Who the heck knows.
Sunday night we are entering seriously uncharted waters as we head for Pearson ( Lester B Pearson Airport in Toronto) perhaps the most shining example of how not to build an airport anywhere as it has the most dysfunctional flow of any flight centre on the planet.
If you are lucky you can actually catch a plane without finding out your previously assigned gate has been changed to the one furthest away and you have 10 minutes to do a 1/2 mile sprint, only to discover that your flight has been delayed because your pilot just arrived from Vancouver and he's also at the wrong end of the terminal.
Our Cathay Pacific plane is scheduled to depart at 1:20am(Monday) and is scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong, some 16 hours later at roughly 6am local time (Tuesday).
After a couple of hours layover we backtrack slightly and end up in Siem Reap, Cambodia at 10am.
If all goes well we will present our passport photos at customs and they will issue us Visas without going into hysterics at my " should I or shouldn't I smile" photos. ( Mine makes me look like someone caught me in the middle of a seriously constipated crap, but Susanna's looks like she just spent 3 hours at the beauty salon, as she always does, but doesn't really need to.)
Assuming they DO let us into the country our hotel has supposedly sent us a driver who we will be able to identify as he will be holding a sign with my last name on it.
I'm praying that it isn't written in Cambodian, which as a written language looks like 30 snakes having group sex. And even if it is in English, I'm not expecting any degree of accuracy given the 50 different ways various English speaking people have managed to butcher my last name.
And that, in a nutshell is how we will commence an almost 35 day journey which will take us from the temples of Angkor Wat to the capital city of Phnom Penh and then across the border to Vietnam and the city formerly known as Saigon.
After a day or so there loitering around on our own or maybe just catching up on lost sleep we will join a small group tour that will take us mostly north for approx. 2 weeks, arriving in Hanoi at the beginning of March. A week later we will make a dash back to Hong Kong where we will spend just over a week revisiting a city that has probably changed significantly since my last visit in 1984.
After planning this trip for close to 5 months it is almost scary to know that it will start in a little over 72 hours and I will have no-one but myself to blame if it fails to meet or exceed the standards of a G Adventures or Intrepid. And I am quite sure that I wont be the one telling me!!!!! LOL
As we reluctantly approach the start of our seventh decade on the planet, it is with some difficulty that we must acknowledge the fact that we are no longer teenagers who can do a 100 yard sprint for a departing train while dragging 30 pounds of luggage behind us.
While most of our extended family seem quite comfortable travelling with suitcases big enough to stow 3 months of clothing and two stowaway mexicans we have now downsized to a single carry on, which for me is only half filled with clothing, the other half being chargers, shoes, Pringles, peanuts, suntan lotion and electrical converters and adaptors.
Hopefully we arrive home as planned in mid-March, somewhat exhausted but happy in the knowledge that we can add another "been there, done that" to our ever growing travel list.
While I always start out with good intentions I invariably find myself fighting shitty internet speeds or no internet at all and I give up.
Will my next trip be any different? Who the heck knows.
Sunday night we are entering seriously uncharted waters as we head for Pearson ( Lester B Pearson Airport in Toronto) perhaps the most shining example of how not to build an airport anywhere as it has the most dysfunctional flow of any flight centre on the planet.
If you are lucky you can actually catch a plane without finding out your previously assigned gate has been changed to the one furthest away and you have 10 minutes to do a 1/2 mile sprint, only to discover that your flight has been delayed because your pilot just arrived from Vancouver and he's also at the wrong end of the terminal.
Our Cathay Pacific plane is scheduled to depart at 1:20am(Monday) and is scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong, some 16 hours later at roughly 6am local time (Tuesday).
After a couple of hours layover we backtrack slightly and end up in Siem Reap, Cambodia at 10am.
If all goes well we will present our passport photos at customs and they will issue us Visas without going into hysterics at my " should I or shouldn't I smile" photos. ( Mine makes me look like someone caught me in the middle of a seriously constipated crap, but Susanna's looks like she just spent 3 hours at the beauty salon, as she always does, but doesn't really need to.)
Assuming they DO let us into the country our hotel has supposedly sent us a driver who we will be able to identify as he will be holding a sign with my last name on it.
I'm praying that it isn't written in Cambodian, which as a written language looks like 30 snakes having group sex. And even if it is in English, I'm not expecting any degree of accuracy given the 50 different ways various English speaking people have managed to butcher my last name.
And that, in a nutshell is how we will commence an almost 35 day journey which will take us from the temples of Angkor Wat to the capital city of Phnom Penh and then across the border to Vietnam and the city formerly known as Saigon.
After a day or so there loitering around on our own or maybe just catching up on lost sleep we will join a small group tour that will take us mostly north for approx. 2 weeks, arriving in Hanoi at the beginning of March. A week later we will make a dash back to Hong Kong where we will spend just over a week revisiting a city that has probably changed significantly since my last visit in 1984.
After planning this trip for close to 5 months it is almost scary to know that it will start in a little over 72 hours and I will have no-one but myself to blame if it fails to meet or exceed the standards of a G Adventures or Intrepid. And I am quite sure that I wont be the one telling me!!!!! LOL
As we reluctantly approach the start of our seventh decade on the planet, it is with some difficulty that we must acknowledge the fact that we are no longer teenagers who can do a 100 yard sprint for a departing train while dragging 30 pounds of luggage behind us.
While most of our extended family seem quite comfortable travelling with suitcases big enough to stow 3 months of clothing and two stowaway mexicans we have now downsized to a single carry on, which for me is only half filled with clothing, the other half being chargers, shoes, Pringles, peanuts, suntan lotion and electrical converters and adaptors.
Hopefully we arrive home as planned in mid-March, somewhat exhausted but happy in the knowledge that we can add another "been there, done that" to our ever growing travel list.
Comments
Post a Comment