Hard Truth: Change of Plans

Here's our hotel room on a recent night-before-departure.

This is hard for me to say but I made a mistake. I don’t even remember how or, specifically, why I made it. Fortunately, it hasn’t been hard to remedy. All I had to do was write two emails that included the word “cancel.” Here’s the rest of the story.

When we left the US on November 1, we had plans for everything up to March 14th, when a plane would carry us from Mauritius to Johannesberg, South Africa. We had booked a tour of Cambodia and Vietnam for three weeks in late February and early March. We had booked a resort for four nights in Mauritius because it turns out that it’s one of the ways you can fly from SE Asia to South Africa. We had booked a crazy “transit hotel” in the Singapore airport for an overnight layover between a flight from Hanoi and a flight to Mauritius. It was all nailed down.

I felt pretty good that this was a fair balance. We had done four months of domestic travel and we had planned four and a half months of international travel, leaving four and a half months of international travel mostly up for grabs. It turns out that I was wrong. Not a lot wrong but a little wrong in a significant way.

We’ve decided we need to slow down. I’d say Australia went really well and one of the major factors was that we spent about two weeks in Perth and two weeks in Melbourne, giving ourselves enough time to settle in and figure out our community. I’d say that the first half of our New Zealand trip was pretty rough because the RV lifestyle (or at least our approach to it) is the opposite. We rarely stayed somewhere for more than two nights and mostly it was just one. The second half of NZ went better, probably because we spent four nights in the first house and six in the second.

So let’s look at the choices: we’re committed to everything through March 7, when our Cambodia/Vietnam itinerary wraps up. In fact, we have two extra days in Hanoi before our flight to Singapore because of the way we set up to fly to Mauritius but that’s neither here nor there.

Elise and I looked at this and put all the cards on the table:

1. We would like to stay somewhere for at least two weeks. This is clearly an important ingredient to the good times we’ve had so far.

2. We would like to be around other people. Meeting other world schooling families has not only been delightful and informative but it is a boon to the kids when they get to socialize.

3. We would like to be in or near nature. Our kids come alive in the wild.

Let me pause for a moment and explain another piece of this puzzle. There’s a whole online world of families engaged in gap year and world school travel. Going on advice, we found the We Are Worldschoolers Facebook group and then followed a rabbit hole from there. Until you go down this path, you simply can’t imagine how much exists. There are meetups, some permanent, some very long-running and some very finite, all over the world. There are places where ex-pats (not just world schoolers) seem to congregate. 

Suddenly the problem facing us wasn’t, “how are we going to figure out where to go?” but “how are we going to choose from among these incredible options?” For example, there are online databases of schools that allow you to enroll your kids for a quarter, a month, a week or even a few days. It sounds really great to have six or seven hours a day without kids! There are co-ops where the members assemble a schedule of activities that they deliver with their own resources. There are meetups with only one or two weekly activities but unlimited opportunities to connect with other, co-located families.

A major contender was Bali. Yes, this is a popular party scene, especially for residents of Western Australia, as we learned while we lived in Perth. Yes, this is a popular expat destination, especially for yoga retreats and others seeking a low-cost tropical lifestyle. Yes, there are blogs that will terrify you with stories of taxi mafias, open sewers and other realities of third world living. There is a very strong world school community there. Many long-term traveling families have spent a considerable amount of time there. The lifestyle, mainly because of values espoused in Balinese culture, is a very strong draw. But there are downsides that came to loom too large for us. In short, it seemed likely that we would leave Bali with less energy than we arrived.

Coincidentally, we were flying over Bali while I was writing this.

Another major contender, with several options, was Thailand. There are numerous schools with short-term enrollment options. The cost of living is also very low. There is an advanced tourist economy that provides assurances of access to key resources, if needed. There are incredible opportunities to be in or very close to nature. You can easily fly anywhere from Bangkok. One new friend even brought our attention to a meetup scheduled to start around the same time that our Vietnam itinerary ends. It just about fell into our lap with a bow on it. 

There was Malaysia and specifically a meetup being held in March and April in Johor, which seems to be a suburb of Singapore and home to Legoland. This is a loosely-structured option, with a weekly meetup but overt co-location with appealing amenities like reliable air conditioning, wifi and a swimming pool. Probably a lot less nature, though.

There were also options that took us out of Asia: I found animal sanctuaries in eastern Africa where whole families can volunteer. There are multiweek minimums, which makes it hard to do as a typical holiday but this is definitely not a typical holiday. Compared to Malaysia, this would be nearly the opposite: no wifi, no AC, pure nature. In Spain there’s a near-permanent world schooling community in the Anducian city of Malaga on the Mediteranean coast. 

In other words, a few hours of internet research and you can face a overwhelming choice! Eventually, we settled on Malaysia. There are lots of reasons but one is that it offers easy escape routes. We have booked housing for two weeks with confidence that we can easily extend it. But we also know if that if the lack of nature becomes a problem, there are other places we can go without advanced reservations, from other parts of Malaysia to Thailand and other destinations in SE Asia. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are major airport hubs so it shouldn’t be hard to find flights, even on short notice. It also helps to imagine the kids getting to go to Legoland with the benefit of a membership/pass.

But hold on, there’s a wrinkle. Maybe you (or, for that matter, I) are reading this years from now and you’ve forgotten about the headlines of early February 2020. See, there’s this virus spreading from an epicenter in China. Headlines with “pandemic” are causing notifications on my phone on a regular basis. Stores have run out of inventory on facemasks and hand sanitizer. China’s economy is facing a downturn. Flights have been cancelled. Cruise ships with thousands of passengers have been quarantined. So where are we going to extend our stay? Asia!

It’s a little hard to explain our logic on this. Mostly, we buy the argument that the virus itself is less dangerous (lower risk of fatality) than the flu we’d be exposed to on a regular basis at home. Yes, it’s more transmissable and we’re spending hours on airplanes and so forth. Will I look back at this entry and scoff at my naivete Maybe. I’m mostly worried that we’ll catch it one by one and either have to drag sick members from city to city as we tour Vietnam or we’ll end up getting quarantined in one place where we suddenly need to find long term accommodation (with our virus). Only time will tell on that one!

So, as of this writing (February 13th), we’re flying from Hanoi to Singapore on March 9th, but not continuing on to Mauritius. Instead, we’ll take a shuttle to Johor and to a furnished apartment in a highrise apartment complex across the street from Legoland. We’ll meet up with other families and see how that goes. At some point we’ll buy plane tickets to go somewhere else, probably in early April, probably in Africa. We think we’ll get to Europe around May 1, giving us about two months to travel around. 

I think one of the really interesting questions will be about the pace of our travel through Europe. We plan to be finished schooling by then, which means one big bag lighter and a lot more flexibility on a daily basis. Will we still want to settle down and spend those two months in just a few places? Will we - as I used to assume - be ready to buy one-month Eurorail passes and dash from city to city? Will we want to seek out the world schooling community in Spain and settle in for another few weeks as we’re doing in Malaysia?

I’m glad we have the opportunity to learn and evolve as we go. It’s hard for me to face the uncertainty. I liked having things planned out when we headed abroad a few months ago. But I’m eager to have this experience that informs the next decision we make! We’ll all have to stay tuned, even me.