Asia Overview

After spending the holidays with our family and welcoming another addition (baby Peter!), we set out on our South East Asia adventure! Here is a brief itinerary.

Travel Dates: January 8th - March 4th 2015

• Hong Kong
• Taipei, Taiwan 
• Cebu, Philippines 
• Boracay, Philippines 
• Bali, Indonesia 
• Yogyakarta, Indonesia
• Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 
• Singapore, Singapore
• Bangkok, Thailand 

Our budget for this trip was $14,000 broken down like this:

Flights: $4400

Accommodations: $5000

Food/Fun: $4600

After researching multiple airlines and ticket sites for cheap multi stop tickets, we slowly realized that our budget might not be appropriate. The cheapest tickets we found online were around $4000 per ticket, $8000 for two. Alan to the rescue! He found an awesome site, airtreks.com. With airtreks we were able to cut our ticket prices in half to around $4400 total! That's for 12 flights! All you need to provide is your destinations and they will do the rest for no charge! Highly recommended.

For our accommodations, we relied on Airbnb and Agoda. We kept our budget tight and usually searched way under budget to splurge on areas we knew we wanted a nicer accommodation, specifically Bali and Singapore. 

We planned well in advance for our trip. Alan planned the sights and activities while I planned out what delicious and unusual things we had to try ;).

Our bumpy start

Departing from Orlando we were super excited for our adventures! Everything was prepared and ready, all bags were packed. On the ride to the airport we start listing off everything we packed, and eventually figured out that we didn't pack our GoPro!!!!!!!!!!! After making a few calls to the house to search for our GoPro, no one could find it in the house so there was not point in going back to get it. Solution... buy another GoPro (after Pear gave Alan the pissed off faced and the "I can't believe you forgot it" face).

Ok, everything was good, bought another GoPro, checked in, went through security, made our way to the gate, and.........our flight was delayed, for 2 hours! The first thing I did was calculate the time we would have landing in Chicago and transferring to our international flight, roughly one hour. Obviously airlines would be smart and check passengers with connecting flights right...to make sure that they all go on their connecting flights smoothly especially when it is an international flight...WRONG!

We landed in Chicago and sped through the gates like our life depended on it. Seeing a bunch of people do the same thing we had in our minds "rest assured, they can't leave 20 plus people.. impossible. " POSSIBLE. We all lined up through security and by the time everyone was there, the officer stood up and said the flight had already departed. WHAT? Um... we had 20 minutes!

Everyone was dumbstruck and started questioning the officer and he said to go deal with your flight operator. The thing is... it was 1am, if this was an international/ non american airport, of course you would be able to find your airline counter open. But this was Chicago, in the middle of winter at 1am. We were told we were rebooked on the next flight going out to Hong Kong, and that luckily that flight was in 12 hours. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?! After the crap you pulled, do you think any of us would believe that the airline was so kind to book all 20 plus passengers that they left behind on the next flight??? Without issuing us another ticket, just letting us sit on our asses until 7am until the airline counters open?

They were so kind as to give us a $50 hotel voucher but that was basically it. So we waited, slept in the airport, and were first in line when counters opened. After Alan told the officer what had happened, she was nice enough to upgrade us. Finally, we were on our way to Hong Kong, just twelve hours behind schedule. This is our reoccurring lesson from our trip as you will read on through our adventures, if something goes wrong, it will get fixed for the better.

Stay tuned for our first stop, HONG KONG!