We’ve met so many wonderful, friendly people on our travels. Some have become good friends who we’ve kept in touch with and even visited on our way home, and others like shopkeepers and market vendors we just got on really well with. As we got talking there were some common questions asked of us, especially when they enquired about how long our “holiday” was.. it usually went something like this:

Inquisitor: “Great, so how long are you here in [insert city / country]?”

Julie or I: “about a week/month.. we’re on a pretty long trip”

Inquisitor: “really? how long?”

Julie or I: “about two years”

Inquisitor:

Inquisitor: ..

Inquisitor: “Wow!”

Q: What’s your favourite country?

This is usually the first one and a really difficult question to answer because it’s so hard to choose! Our answer through Mongolia and most of China was Russia as our experiences were still fresh, but 19½ months and 25 countries later we now reply with “different countries for different reasons“..

• Russia is invariably the first country we’ll mention. It was so different to our expectations and the stereotypical western portrayal – the people are so warm and welcoming and everyone’s heard of the Trans Siberian Railway!
• Vietnam is Julie’s top choice for food – phở, prawn cakes and the best spring rolls in the world!
• Japan is Andrew’s top choice for food – the freshness and flavour of the sashimi and sushi is the best we’ve had, and we couldn’t pass through Kobe without stopping for Kobe beef!
• Mongolia for the overwhelming sense of space and nothingness. Gorgeous empty landscapes with no signs of human existence whatsoever meant we could experience the feeling of being completely alone in the world. It’s not really a destination for foodies though..
• Bangladesh is full of unabashedly curious and friendly people with amazing smiles who had nothing themselves, but did everything they could to make us feel welcome. We really loved capturing the life in the markets.
• Uzbekistan also makes our shortlist as it’s the best bits of Russia and Asia – the amazing hospitality and friendliness we experienced in Russia with the awesome architecture and history of the Silk Road. The weather was fantastic and we’ve already recommended it our friends Thom and Jess who loved it too!

Q: Which country did you like the least?

The first time we were asked this we really had to think hard about it, and even then we didn’t really come up with an answer – everywhere we’ve visited has had so many overwhelmingly positive traits that the odd negative things hardly register. As we found we were asked this question more frequently, we thought about it some more and came up with 2 for pretty much the same reason.. first was Singapore – we were only there for a week with the intention of recovering from the beautiful sensory overload that was Bangladesh, and we couldn’t have picked a more contrasting country to follow. Singapore was sterile, sensible, and spotless to our eyes. We enjoyed our time there, but it just doesn’t stack up against the other countries on our list for the kind of adventurous backpacking travel we love.
The second is on Andrew’s list for its initial impression having just arrived from Japan.. and it’s South Korea – this time the perfection of the Japanese, well, everything, had raised my expectations and South Korea was a little disappointing. But, it was a slow burner and the combination of Korean hospitality, history, culture and food won me over about a week or so into our month there. Would I go back? In a heartbeat!

Q: Which country surprised you the most?

As well as having our preconceived notions completely reset by Russia, the other surprising country was Japan – we expected it to be all skyscrapers and neon lights but that’s really just some districts of Tokyo – the country is so much greener than we were expecting. Like us, the Japanese love the outdoors so we did plenty of hiking followed by thermal onsen baths!

Q: How big are your bags / how much stuff are you carrying?

We read a lot of other travellers’ experience and advice about what to take and how much to take, and the oft-quoted wisdom that came up again and again was this:

“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller, NYT

And it’s sage advice. We didn’t quite adhere to Heller’s suggestion, and between us we carried 2 big rucksacks (65ltr, 65-75ltr), 2 smaller day sacks (35ltr, 12ltr) and Julie had a small handbag. We wrote about the kit we set off with, and I also did a quick review after a year or so, but in hindsight we could have travelled lighter!

Q: How many countries have you travelled to?

The total number of countries we visited on this two year trip is 25. Of those, 19 countries where new to us, and it brings our individual totals to 39 for Julie and 40 for me. If you like numbers, we have a full post of them you might want to check out!

Q: Haven’t you killed each other yet?!

We’re both pretty easy going (“yeah, right!” – Julie), but being in each other’s pockets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for two years meant we were bound to rub each other up the wrong way now and then. And they’ve been the things most couples usually argue about, like money; deciding between us which activities, museums and side trips we really wanted to do; how often we wanted to eat out; and just generally which countries to visit, which sights to see, and which routes to take through those countries. In hindsight we think we’ve disagreed very little during the trip and one of the main reasons for leaving our often more-than-full-time jobs to travel in the first place was so we could spend more time together :o)

Q: Which places that you’ve visited would you like to live in?

We like this question, and our friends half expected to receive a postcard from some far-flung place saying that we’d found paradise, bought a beach-house and if they wanted to see us again they’d have to jump on an aeroplane! It’s also a question we’d often ask ourselves of cities and countries as we walked around – “would we live here?” – and, of all the wonderful places we’ve experienced, a few stand out as having our perfect combination of culture (history, museums, theatres, street life and architecture), weather, and of course, food! In trip order, our ideal settling cities are:

• St Petersburg, Russia – a relaxed version of Moscow, with great museums, and a European influence of varied cuisines and fresh produce
• Hanoi, Vietnam – amazing food, Bia Hoi (fresh beer), and I’d love riding a scooter everywhere in the mayhem of Vietnamese traffic!
• Anywhere in Japan – amazing food, fascinating culture and history, beautiful countryside, everything runs to the second and Tokyo had the fastest internet access we’ve experienced!
• Palermo, Sicily – the freshness of the produce at the markets (can you tell that food is important yet?!), the language was easy to pick up and fun to speak, and it’s surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea so the weather’s warm too
• Bern, Switzerland – now that we’ve found Julie’s winter sport, we can add Switzerland to our list! Cheese? Wine? Stunning mountain hiking in the summer? And we’d see more of our long-time friends Heidi & Olivier.. Yes please!
• Amsterdam, Netherlands – we loved the architecture, the Dutch trading history which influenced the diversity of the food, the liberal, pragmatic, tolerant attitude towards everything, the museums, the Belgian-like beers and the cycling everywhere!

Q: Have you ever had anything stolen, or had anything bad happen to you on the road?

Of course! Even though we were pretty seasoned travellers before we embarked on this two year trip, we were still caught out by professional scammers or the odd con-artist now and then, and of course stuff goes missing and things don’t always go according to plan. Our previous experience has been that even though they’re unpleasant at the time, the bad circumstances often make the best stories! Here are a few mishaps and mis-steps from our trip..

• Missing our flight to Bangladesh – We booked our flight, turned up at the airport in Kuala Lumpur with a little over 2 hours before our original scheduled departure of 7pm to find that the Bangladeshi airline we’d booked with had rescheduled the flight to 6am that morning, without telling us! – no notification, no email, nothing. Apparently it’s a regular trick that particular airline pull, as we were told by the girl at the desk of the only other airline running a flight out of KL to Dhaka that night, which fortunately for us still had seats available!
• Scammed by a money changer in Uzbekistan – The exchange rate from US Dollar to Uzbek Som was ridiculous. We changed all of our money on the black market which meant standing in public counting fistfuls of money. To their credit, we were never rushed at all by any of the money changers when we insisted on double-counting each pre-bundled house-brick of notes. We’d gotten pretty adept at counting quickly and at our last money change in Fergana I had also gotten a little complacent with the changers as I handed a counted bundle back to the guy to hold and he must have creamed a little from it while we counted the last bundles. Oh well!
• Stolen? Or just misplaced? – From the kit we took, we only lost or had stolen Julie’s penknife and a necklace, my beat up metal Sigg water bottle, and a pair of socks with “Friday” written on them that didn’t come back from the hotel laundry!

Q: What was the hardest or most challenging country to visit?

There were a few for different reasons:

• Mongolia was difficult for the kind of independent travel we like to do because the people are nomadic which means there’s little infrastructure outside of Ulaanbaatar because there simply isn’t the demand for it. While there are busses to the centre of every aimag or province to and from the capital Ulaanbaatar, and local busses from each of those to the other towns in each aimag, Mongolia is still very difficult to navigate and travel independently of organised tours or private hire drivers. That said, we managed a couple of short trips from Ulaanbataar to Kharkhorin and Zuunmod under our own steam, even hitching a ride on a bus full of French pensioners to get to a campsite!
• Bangladesh was easier to visit from a planning and getting around point of view, but we missed a few creature comforts like clean running water, non-smelly toilets and pavements! Despite these, or more likely because of them, we absolutely loved it.
• Finally, China was challenging for communication. Our dear friends Isaac and Rebecca from Beijing did their very best to teach us some Mandarin as we bounced along the Mongolian steppe, but outside the capitals we found the Chinese to be very shy about speaking English when we’d try to ask for directions in patchy Chinese – so much so that even if they could they’d often prefer to shake their heads and duck away rather than try. That difference in culture is the reason to travel, but it makes asking for directions tricky! Also, the pronunciation is hard – we tried to buy train tickets at the English counter for Zhangjiajie and they had no idea what we were saying! (We tried to say it as we would read it in English, whereas it’s actually pronounced “Djang-Jar-Jay”!).

Q: Did you ever get homesick?

Yes and often. Missing family events and gatherings was hard, such as weddings, Christmas, and the birth of our niece Emma, and we both lost loved ones while we were away – those were some of the emotionally toughest times of the trip because we wanted to be home to share the comfort and the grief. We imagined the conversation with our dearly departed when we pondered the question “should we go back for the funeral?” only to hear them in our heads tell us in no uncertain terms to keep following our dreams.

Q: What’s the most exotic thing you’ve eaten?

We like to think we’re pretty adventurous eaters, and I don’t think we passed up the opportunity to try anything we saw or were offered on our trip. The most exotic things we tried would be silkworm larvae and crickets in Matsumoto, Japan, pig’s trotters in Chengdu, China, insect essence from a female water beetle used to flavour a dip for a steamed pancake wrap in Hanoi, Vietnam, and we’d read about a local speciality which we tried to ask for in Korean, but ended up with a bowl of boiled sheep’s intestines instead in Suwon, South Korea. I must confess that I tried the intestines but I left most of them and drank the broth.

Q: What’s the strangest place you’ve stayed?

While the capsule hostels in Japan were quirky, and the container hostel in Kuala Lumpur stands out, the winner goes to one of the first places we stayed in – the Hostel Hospital in Sabile, Latvia! As Norman commented: “that’s more Urbex than hostel :D”

Q: Did you get tired of living out of a suitcase?

Yes! That was a factor in our deciding to slow down our travel, taking a month or more in Thailand, Tokyo, Malta, Rome and Amsterdam.

Q: When are you going to write a book?

Even before we set off we were asked if we’d write a book! Let’s just say that while it’s not in our immediate plans, we haven’t ruled it out either. One question we’d have about writing a book is this: what would we put in it? We’ve already written about our travels here on this blog! (Answers on a postcard, or in the comments please!)

Q: Where are you going next?

We think we’re going to need another two years to catch up with our family and friends up and down the UK! In our first two weeks we’ve already been to London, York and Gateshead, and next week we’re off to Nottingham! Travel-wise, we’ve come back with a list just as long as when we left, from talking to other travellers.. but right now we’re enjoying hearing all of the news we missed from our loved ones ;o)

As we’ve travelled through Asia and Europe for two years, we’ve learnt a lot. I think that some of it can probably be called general life lessons whereas other things are more pertinent to travelling. Here they are, a mix of our thoughts and travel tips…

Ready to board our first train at Newcastle Station, excited about what the next two years would bring

• Having a guidebook to the country you’re visiting is really helpful. Of course all of the information is available online somewhere, but to get an overview of a place and its layout the guidebook is a good shortcut. We’ve also found that we prefer a paper guidebook rather than the ebook version as it’s easier to flip between maps and attraction information. Accommodation and restaurants are the exception, for the former we look online (TripAdvisor or the reviews on booking sites), for places to eat we just follow our noses!
  Without our Lonely Planet guide we might never have found out about the open air Pedvale Sculpture Park in Sabile, Latvia
• Walking a city is the best way to get your bearings and get a feel for distances between landmarks as well as being a good way to spot places to eat or drink.
  Getting an overview of Tallinn’s old town from the city walls
• We thought giving up our jobs to go travelling for two years was pretty adventurous but we were constantly meeting people far more adventurous than us, from the German vet who arrived in Mongolia, bought a horse and just set off, to the Japanese man who after travelling for a while bought himself a bike in Bishkek, Krgyzstan to continue his journey to Scotland by pedal power.
  We’re nowhere near adventurous (crazy?) enough to go canoeing in the icy sea like this group that we saw at Suomenlinna in Helsinki
• It’s quite possible to have an hour long “conversation” with someone even if you don’t have a shared language. Tourist charades, odd words, photos and even drawing pictures help a lot. If a random stranger tries to strike up a conversation with you in a language you don’t understand, the most likely correct answer to their first question is England (or whatever your country of origin might be). It’s really helpful to learn it in the local lingo – in Russian it’s Anglia.
  Andrew with Vasily on the train from Krasnoyarsk to Severobaikalsk. Despite only having about ten common words in a mixture of English, Russian and German they found out quite a bit about each other.
• Carry a ziploc bag of toilet roll in your daypack. You might carry it for ages without ever needing it but when you do you’ll be glad.
  Mongolian toilets are not the most luxurious that we’ve encountered during the two years but they do have the best views
• It’s pretty easy to find familiar brand names everywhere you go – Coca Cola is omnipresent, and Starbucks and McDonald’s almost so. I was surprised how easy it was to find our usual brands of toiletries – Pantene shampoos, Sure deodrant, Colgate toothpaste, etc. Of course the packaging is in a different language but I found the familiar styling to be reassuring. The only place we struggled was in Japan where anti-perspirant seemingly doesn’t exist.
  Sure it’s in Chinese, but you know that it’s Sprite don’t you?
• It’s surprisingly easy not to buy stuff (clothes, souvenirs, “wow that’s cool” things) when you know you’ll have to carry them for months and months. It’s a bit like being on a diet, less willpower is required for a blanket ‘no’ than for limiting your intake. It’ll be strange to readjust to buying things again but we’ve both come to appreciate how little “stuff” we actually need.
  I was very tempted at the jade market in Hong Kong, but managed to resist the urge and left with only a photo
• Smile at people. The response you get will definitely vary according to cultural differences but it will always be positive.
  Vietnamese street food vendor, we got some of the broadest return smiles here.
• Waterproof the contents of your bag, we learnt this the hard way on a boat trip in Cambodia. Although a lot of our stuff was in plastic bags or didn’t suffer from getting wet we lost a couple of books and about half of our med kit.
  Our boat from Battambang to Siem Riep in Cambodia before the rain clouds rolled in
• Carefully chosen tours are worth the money. Although we generally prefer the flexibility of travelling independently there are some things that can’t be done alone or are well worth doing as part of a tour. Good examples are getting out into the countryside in Mongolia, a street food tour in Hanoi, visiting the DMZ in South Korea, and seeing the remains of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.
  It was expensive, but one of the most memorable days of the trip was our day as elephant owners in Chiang Mai
• We’re pretty relaxed about where and what we eat believing that a large part of the joy of the trip comes from the food. We’ll eat street food, ice and salad as long as we follow the rules – are locals eating there, is there a fast turnover of food, is it freshly cooked.
  A vast array of satay skewers to choose from at a street stall in Kuala Lumpur
• People are essentially the same all over the world. Their priorities are just like yours – they love their family, they want to earn a living, and they’re curious about why foreigners are in their neighbourhood.
  That said, Bangladeshis definitely win the prize for most curious nation!
• With that in mind, there’s no need to expect that everyone you meet wants to mug you. Sure you need to be aware of your surroundings and take sensible precautions (like padlocking your valuables inside a bag when you’re out of your hotel room) but there’s no need to be obsessive, for example we don’t wear money belts.
• I used to be surprised by how many people chose their own bed as their luxury on the radio programme Desert Island Discs. That was before we slept in 199 over the course of two years and realised how crucial a comfortable bed and especially pillows can be in getting a decent night’s sleep and not waking up as twisted as a windswept tree.
  The blissfully comfortable bed that we found in our Airbnb room in Singapore, especially good after some uncomfortable nights in Bangladesh [photo credit: our host Diana, via Airbnb]
• History is much more interesting when you’re learning it where it happened rather than from a book, and it’s fascinating to see a different side of the story, e.g. Vietnam in what they know as the American War, Russia’s losses in WWII (the Great Patriotic War), and the consequences of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
  The humbling peace memorial at Hiroshima in Japan
• I love the adrenaline rush that I get on the first day in a new country – the assault on the senses of what is different, listening to the rhythms of a new language and trying to figure out how things work.
  One of our first meals in Busan, South Korea; completely different to anything we’d had before, especially all those kimchi side dishes
• Flights account for huge chunks of budget and we’ve enjoyed travelling overland wherever possible. Taking overnight trains is a great experience and saves on the price of a hotel while getting you from A to B.
  Settling in on a sleeper train in China
• Practice your mental arithmetic. Finding a simple way of converting to your home currency prevents nasty surprises later when working out how much something cost.
  The awards for most ridiculous currency: Vietnam had the most obscence exchange rate with £1 = 33,000 dong, but for sheer unusability the Uzbekistan som with £1 = 5000 som and the most common banknote at 1000 som, meant that we had to pay for everything with notes worth 20p and needed to carry a hefty bundle to cover the day’s expenses.
  Andrew with the equivalent of $100 (~£60) in Uzbek som!
• A sarong is a surprisingly versatile piece of kit. Mine has only rarely been used as a sarong but it has served time as a scarf, pillow, blanket, seat cover, headscarf, hot water bottle cover…
  Wearing the sarong as a headscarf while visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul
• Write a blog or keep a journal. We love reading back through our posts and reminiscing about where we’ve been, what we did and who we met.
  Julie at the kitchen table of our apartment in Malta on a blogging day – leaflets, guidebooks and plenty of coffee at the ready
• If you’re on a budget, keep track of your expenses. Every day. We use a notebook to jot things down during the day and then enter it into a spreadsheet each evening. It doesn’t take long but it gives us a sense of whether or not we’re on track before things get out of control.
  Market in Siracusa, Sicily. It’s especially important to keep a note of spending in markets where lots of purchases and few receipts are the order of the day.
• Not having a postal address isn’t easy, banks don’t like it for a start. Many thanks to our parents for being our post offices.
  Us sending postcards from the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City!
• Kit is important but it’s not at all important to have everything new. My 12 year old rucksack has functioned perfectly well and while I have occasionally been envious of the front opening zip panel on Andrew’s it is only slightly more effort to unpack.
  In borrowed salopettes and ski jackets in Switzerland (thanks Heidi and Olivier for letting us raid your wardrobe!)
• It’s very easy to be lazy if you speak English. There’s no need to be afraid to travel because you don’t speak the language. It’s nice to learn a few words of the local language – hello, thank you and numbers should be at the top of your list – but it’s quite possible to get by with a combination of English and tourist charades. Remember, if you want to eat or buy something, the vendor wants to sell you something – you both want it to work.
  Different kinds of baguettes in a French bakery. We were surprised how quickly the French we learned in school came back to us.
• Know that on arrival in a new country you will reflexively say thank you in the previous country’s language for several days while you reprogram yourself. It is shocking how quickly we forgot even the few basic phrases we learned.
• The more we travel, the longer the list of places we’d like to visit gets!
  Cathedral spires on Luxembourg City’s cathedral. A late addition to our list of stops.
• We’ve become very confident when crossing the street. In many countries pedestrians do not automatically have right of way, even on a zebra crossing with a green man. Checking the opposite direction is a good idea too as motorbikes and bicycles generally ignore even the scant road rules.
  Crossing the road in Amsterdam requires you to be aware of bicycles and silent electric trams as well as cars
• Adopt a football team. When we told people that we were from Newcastle we often got a response of “Newcastle United – Alan Shearer!”
  Asterix and friends chasing after a mouse, not a football, on a comic strip wall in Brussels

On the platform at St Pancras station in London. We’re home – old and wiser perhaps, but not looking too different to the day we departed.