Protected: Southeast Asia: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Part 1
Protected: Southeast Asia: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Part 2
Protected: Southeast Asia: Hoi An, Vietnam
Trip Planning and Itineraries
We’re about to head out to countries 60 – 64: Qatar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Considering the number of countries and locations on this trip, we’ve been asked multiple times whether we used an adventure travel firm to plan this.
Hell no.
One of the great joys in life is navigating the variables associated with international travel, and bringing order – and a fulfilling itinerary – out of the chaos of infinite options and decision paralysis. For one of us, life exists in an X and Y axis. All information and variables can be accommodated, analyzed, sorted, filtered, and ultimately presented on such a grid.
Specifically, in a spreadsheet.
WolfeStreetTravel runs on Excel.
Logistically, our Christmas Southeast Asia trip (because who doesn’t think of Christmas when one thinks of Cambodia?), has been a complex planning process. But because we’re getting from one place to another by plane, this hasn’t been nearly as much as a challenge as when we’re dealing with trains, planes, automobiles, AND ferries that don’t run every day, as was the case (with the exception of trains) for our foray into Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro more than a dozen years ago.
So, for our Southeast Asia trip, the itinerary has (mostly) been refined and looks like this, in the world of X and Y axes:
Red is travel time, green free time, and blue represents engagements. The yellow layover is a yet to be addressed long – but not really long – layover in Bangkok on the way back.
There’s another tab (two actually – one for planning and one for packing) that contains matrices of hotel choices, activities options, URLs to travel articles, and screenshots of (mostly) flight options and maps. One table, though, really exemplifies our planning for this trip – which locations were served by nonstop flights, versus connections, which dictated where we’d go and the sequence in which we would travel:
Greens are acceptable options, yellow are candidates (but not great), and red are unacceptable. Blue is a critical path item (the only real option if we were to include Ho Chi MInh city with the other locations we had prioritized). NS is nonstop, 1S is one stop, and the numbers are the total flight duration. We determined candidate locations to visit based on travel articles and blogs, but based our final trip on the data in this table.
Previous examples include the only travel agent-planned trip last year in Southern Africa (much simpler, as a result):
And our legendary MicroNations road trip in 2017, where travel time was everything:
Hopefully, our upcoming trip will work out as planned, but now you know how it looks before we leave!
We Missed a Micronation!
Our friend Bill last night forwarded an article on a micronation previously unknown to us that we totally could have visited during our Tiniest 5 for the Big 5-0 trip in 2017. During that trip, we drove to all five European continental micronations – Vatican City, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Andorra.
We totally missed the Principality of Seborga!
The micronation (merely self-proclaimed, to be sure) is enclaved within Italy, just like San Marino:
Seborga’s claim that their principality is an independent nation and not a part of Italy is based on a sale document that was never fully executed in 1729:
“Allegedly on 20 January 1729, this independent principality was sold to the Savoy dynasty and became a protectorate of theirs. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna overlooked Seborga in its redistribution of European territories after the Napoleonic Wars, and there is no mention of Seborga in the Act of Unification for the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. . . The argument for Seborga’s present-day status as an independent state is based on the claim that the 1729 sale was never registered by its new owners, resulting in the principality falling into what has been described as a legal twilight zone.”
The principality is not recognized diplomatically, and so does not meet one of the actual micronation definition. However, Seborga does indulge in micronation practices, such as producing their own currency, that we’ve seen in other self-proclaimed tiny countries, like the Republic of Vevčani in North Macedonia, where we began our third day of riding during our Biking the Balkans trip earlier this year.
The micronation also is located in the extreme west of Italy, just ~12 miles from Monaco, so we totally could have visited Seborga in 2017 . . .
A fuller history and an absolutely entertaining read on the Principality of Seborga (and the reigning prince) can be found here, on Vice.
Thanks, Bill, for the great story – we’ll try to drop by the principality the next time we’re in the area!
Protected: A Weekend in Paris (Virginia)
Morocco: Trip Overview
We just concluded 9 days in Morocco and its funky cool medinas. Pretty interesting trip! We planned this for over the Labor Day holiday instead of Memorial Day for reasons noted here. (That said, we still ended up staying in a dry riad in Fez and faced a paucity of wine and beers throughout our trip [not that it matters, of course . . .]).
Our itinerary across the country is outlined below:
Beginning at 11:00 on the map above and moving clockwise, our trip entailed the following:
A. Upon arrival in Casablanca, head directly to Fez (nothing to see in Casablanca since Bogart left . . .)
B. Spend 3 nights in Fez. We spent much of our time exploring the astonishing warren-like medina and all of the crazy stuff you encounter there:
C. On last day in Fez, take a day trip to the Roman ruins at Volubilis and the old royal city of Meknes:
D. The next morning, head to the Sahara and trek by camel through the desert; glamp overnight:
E. The next morning, ride our camels back out of the desert, and make it half way to Marrakech in the aftermath of some massive rains (which overflowed rivers and almost washed out the bridge below – we paid some enthusiastic local kids to push us across in order to keep our engine off, so it wouldn’t get flooded):
F. Continue our journey from Fez to Marrakech with a segment through the Atlas mountains, stopping at, among other places, the fortified Berber village (ksar) of Ait-Ben-Haddou – an amazing place (plus the site of an early scene in Gladiator and a bunch of other movies):
G. Finally, spend 3 nights in Marrakech:
We’ll be posting pics from each leg of the trip soon (but need to post the rest from the Biking the Balkans trip first . . .).
One last note: do NOT eat a freshly ground meat kefta sandwich from an open-air butcher in the Atlas Mountains!
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