After several years of attempting to check off a couple of Nancy’s bucket items we finally planned and executed a trip to Thailand, to ride an elephant and see the Golden Triangle; India, to see the Taj Mahal and the Ganges River; Nepal, to visit Kathmandu; and Indonesia, to revisit Bali. I know that was a long sentence but it was a long trip. None of these places are in, on, or anywhere near my bucket list so I told Nancy that where we went and what she saw was to be entirely up to her. I would take care of the logistics i.e. … flights, hotels, VISAs, etc. With that agreement we took out maps, search engines, and advertisements and worked out where we would go, for how long, and what we would see. Here’s a MACRO map of the trip.
In a nutshell, we drove down to Brisbane and caught a flight to Bangkok, Thailand. We overnighted in Brisbane before our flight and celebrated our anniversary at Gino’s Italian Cafe … nice evening. We departed from Brisbane, had an aircraft change in Denpasar, Indonesia, and arrived in Bangkok, Thailand. A couple days and an elephant ride later we flew up to Chiang Rai, rented a cab, drove up to a little village by the Golden Triangle and spent the night. Later the next day we traveled back to Chiang Rai and spent a couple days visiting temples and other sites there. From Chiang Rai we flew back to Bangkok just for an overnighter and a connection to New Delhi in India. Once in India we spent one night in New Delhi and flew to Agra the next day to see the Taj Mahal. After two nights in Agra we flew to Varanasi, India to see and visit the sights there including the Ganges River. From Varanasi we flew back to New Delhi and took a day off, spent the next day touring, and prepared to travel to Nepal the following. We flew to Kathmandu in Nepal, spent two nights there, and then flew to Denpasar on Bali, in Indonesia. After two nights there we flew home to Brisbane and drove home.
Saw and enjoyed many things during the three plus weeks we were traveling. To avoid this post from being too long I am going to post each country separately. They will be listed under this initial post, will include many pictures and a more inclusive description of what we saw and did.
Hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed the trip. While there were many hotels, flights, and VISAs we were fortunate to have not encountered any difficulties so we had a good time, saw many interesting things, and are pleased we took the trip. All in all we had 10 different hotels stays, 10 different flights, and three sets of VISAs to get during the 24 days we were “on the road”. See you in “Thailand”!
