The first time around (pre-COVID) we gave Asia a fair workout – particularly the south and southeast. Jointly we slept in over 50 cities in China over a 9 month period of detailed travelling, it was over 25 cities in India during an intense 4 months. Add to that visits to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Tibet, Sri Lanka and even got ourselves across to Kyrgyzstan. But this world has changed since our last foray.

Many of the countries that we hold fond memories of are now listed on Smartraveller as nations or destinations that are on the do not travel list and others have been elevated to the exercise a high degree of caution lists. So I guess we will not be heading back to Myanmar… due to ongoing civil unrest and armed conflict. This is highly distressing to us as Myanmar was one of our favourite countries and the people were the most friendly and welcoming.

The other things we have learned is that many of the great places, bars, restaurants and hotels did not survive the COVID world. By way of example, we had this stunning little place that we used to stay at in Siem Reap in Cambodia…when we started to redo the bookings it quickly became apparent that it did not survive. We also started hunting the guide books and found that they were all but useless as they were outdated and not accurate. Using this as our baseline we will revisit some of the old haunts and see what if anything survived the dead period and will report on what has risen to take its place.