Where are we going, what are we doing?
This will just be a short post, but I want to provide a introduction to this trip, how it came to be, and where we are planning to travel over the next 4 months. If you don’t want to read this, most of the information here is also on the itinerary page.
We have been looking into moving to the US for a couple of years now, originally thinking we could make the move in early 2023. When we do this, we will be quitting our jobs, and getting our lives in Australia packed up, so it’s the perfect opportunity to take an extended holiday. This started out as a year, and the main destination we were looking at was South America. Well, it turned out that getting everything ready to move to a new country is more difficult at 30 than it was at 22 when I moved to Australia. Early 2023 quickly became early 2025, and a year of travelling has been condensed into four months.
By around mid-2023, we felt that we were ready to start getting prepared to leave, and we could be ready to go by Sept/Oct 2024. We did a little bit of research over the next couple of months and had a rough idea of where we wanted to go by September. We were ready to start booking flights about a year out so we could make the most of the airline points we built up over the last couple of years. And a month later, we booked our first flight to Sri Lanka, setting the date that we would leave Australia. The next thing we booked was an over water villa at a nice resort in Maldives, because it’s our honeymoon and we needed some time to enjoy that in a tropical resort (and to do some diving) before going to Europe in Winter for 6 weeks.
The six-week stint in Europe was mostly booked because we wanted to wait for southern hemisphere summer before heading to South America. The best way to fly from Asia to south America was through Europe, and we thought we should spend some time there while we wait for the seasons to change. We have traveled to a good amount of western Europe, and since we are travelling for 4 months, we are trying to save a bit where we can, so we settled on a train, bus and car trip from Prague to Athens.
You can skip to the last paragraph now if you don’t want the details of everywhere we are going. There will also be an itinerary page on this site at some point.
We start this part of the trip slowly, with 4-5 days in each of Prague, Vienna and Budapest, then once we get to Slovenia, we aren’t staying in the same place for more than two nights until we get to Athens. Those two weeks will be non-stop with hiking in Slovenia, exploring the beaches through Croatia in the wrong season, then back to hiking in Albania, and northern Greece, before we land in Athens for another couple of days exploring the city.
By the time we reach Athens, it will be the end of November, and the start of Winter in Europe, so naturally the next destination we booked was just below the Arctic circle in Finland… It’s the peak in the solar activity cycle this year, and the best time to see the northern lights this decade, so we have a week here, staying in cabins with glass ceilings, where we can play in the snow during the 2 hours of daylight each day, and watch the aurora from our hot tub during the long nights.
I mentioned it earlier, but this trip was organized around the best points flights, and the best flight to South America from Europe was Madrid to Lima. Having to leave from Madrid means we are staying in Spain for five days to get my Spanish speaking skills warmed up, and to take a short trip up to Basque country to see the coast and to stop in Rioja for some tempranillo wine.
Once we get to Peru, we hop straight onto a domestic flight through to Cusco (again getting the best use out of our points). In Cusco, we have 3 days to get used to the altitude (3,399 m / 11,150 ft) before we go hiking on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. After Machu Picchu, we have a few more days in that region before flying back to Lima to see the city and explore the local beaches. Our last day in Peru will be Christmas day, then we fly to Santiago on Boxing Day where we meet up with Ash and Yianni.
With Ash and Yianni, we go up to the Atacama Desert to see the dirt and the stars, then we fly to Patagonia, where we will immediately pick up our hiking gear from the rental shop, and bus up to Torres del Paine National Park to hike the W track. After hiking the W Track, we have another 2 weeks on the Argentina side of Patagonia to do more hiking, climbing and exploring.
Following Patagonia, we continue the adventure with a short trip to Iguazu falls at the very top of Argentina, before we finally slow down with a few days in Buenos Aires. At this point, we anticipate being exhausted and have booked a weeklong stay at a nice Uruguayan beach to decompress before we fly to Bolivia for another nonstop two weeks of adventuring.
It took a long time for this trip to all come together and we had to change the plan a couple of times to get the best points flights, but nearly all the flights and hotels are booked. We have quit our jobs, sold our house, and said goodbye to our Australian friends and family, and it’s time to set off for four months meandering the wrong way around the world until we eventually land in the US.
