Dodging winter

3rd March 2011

Today was a fairly relaxed day. We mooched around Torndirrup NP, rugged coastal scenery on a day of bright sunshine and blustery wind. Too windy for a long walk, we snuck home early and caught up with chores. So today’s blog is an itinerary update. We’re on the third of our four continents now, but how close have we stuck to our original plans?

Of the flights booked on our RTW ticket, we’ve hardly changed a thing. The one alteration is between Australia and New Zealand. Originally we simply aimed to travel always west to east, so starting in Australia then flying on to New Zealand. But having huddled in cold lodgings on chilly South African evenings and shivered in Nepalese trek lodges, it dawned on us that we’d be arriving in NZ at about the time it begins to get wintry. To go to New Zealand first would have made sense but it was expensive, so we compromised: still Perth and Western Australia first, but then we fly from Perth to New Zealand’s south island, then back to Sydney to visit east and south Australia, then finally back to Auckland on the north island for just a few days before heading on to South America as planned. The idea is that we should now enjoy the last of summer on south island. As it turned out, we had a lucky escape. Had we gone to NZ first we would have been in the vicinity of Christchurch during their devastating earthquake. Cyclone Carlos which scuppered some of our plans for Western Australia is definitely the lesser of two evils.

And that’s pretty much it.

We’ve read about plenty of round-the-world travellers who end up stopping in one place for weeks longer than they intended to, and it’s interesting that we haven’t done that. There are certainly places we’ve liked enough that we wanted to: Tillietudlem and the eastern parts of South Africa, Chiang Mai and Ko Yao Noi in Thailand or Amed on Bali. But since we only have a year, that would have meant scratching some other place out of our itinerary. I think we just love visiting and seeing new places too much to do that. Miss out Tasmania? Only two weeks for all of Chile? No way. Once we’ve seen everything there is to see in the world, then we can go back and re-visit the places we really liked for longer! ; )

Oh yes, just remembered one other change. Our original plan for Nepal was to go straight into a long 20+ day trek and then visit Tibet and Bardia at the end. However, meeting up with Ann and John for their two week visit in the middle of our Nepal time left us with no window of 20 days for a long trek. And boy are we glad about that! We barely managed and scarcely enjoyed our 10 day trek to Langtang, so heartfelt thanks to Ann and John for sparing us from our own naivety in wanting a longer one!

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 1:48 am and is filed under Australia, Itinerary updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.