You all know the scene: you’re on a round-the-world trip, having the time of your life, when suddenly you find yourself in a ramshackle, bug-infested hotel room making trip-changing decisions about your itinerary and questioning your overall mental health. No? Ok, maybe that was just me.
I’ve always wanted to go to Hong Kong. I even had it booked as a stopover on a trip I was supposed to take around three years ago which ended up getting cancelled. The passion to get there one day has never died. But it was never…never….on the itinerary for this round-the-world trip.
Then one day I found myself in Thailand (you remember how that worked out) wondering why I was spending my hard-earned cash travelling around places I felt I should be going to, rather than places I actually wanted to go to. Everyone always tells you that to get the most bang for your buck you should be travelling around South East Asia, otherwise your money will fritter away before you realise it. Well, even though I had loved Malaysia, it wasn’t exactly the cheapest of countries and neither, it had turned out, was Thai island hopping.
So it got me to wondering why, if I was still spending a reasonable amount of money for such a relatively cheap destination, I hadn’t just opted to visit places I had dreamt about for longer than I could remember, even if it meant my money running out faster than I had hoped? Surely if this is a “trip of a lifetime” it should be exactly the trip I wanted it to be, rather than a trip someone else before me had carefully carved out?
In a moment of erratic craziness in that terrible hotel room in Thailand, I had to think to myself: “If I had unlimited funds right now and money was no object, where would I fly to?” There were only two answers to that question. Hong Kong or Japan.
And so it was that after a frantic search on a flight comparison site, I found myself on a plane to Hong Kong. And I have to say that for the first time in a couple of months, I was actually excited about where I was going. Like a kid-at-Christmas kind of excited, which told me that I had done the right thing.
I spent months saving and selling and stressing over planning this trip. I’ll be damned if I return from it feeling as though I didn’t actually see the world as I wanted to see it. And those five exciting days I spent in Hong Kong were the beginning of a new way of thinking for this trip and any other I take in the future. We can all hope to spin out the amazing travelling lifestyle as long as we can, but if we aren’t happy while we’re doing it, is there really any point? You may as well be sat at an office desk in your home town dreaming about the beach scene on your screen saver. No-one ever regrets money spent on creating amazing memories, so as soon as I landed in Hong Kong I vowed to step away from my computer and my iPhone and completely immerse myself in being a tourist for a few days. I was thankful that I had taken the time to find a cheap Hong Kong hotel ahead of time. I found the most delicious restaurants to eat at and I enjoyed the wonderful culture all around me.
And it felt damn good.
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