About a year before my parents’ silver wedding anniversary in October of 2014, we were thinking of ways to celebrate. Should we have a banquet with dear family and friends? Or should we just travel instead? Until we finally agreed on the latter. We figured, the budget we would set aside for a banquet would do much more if we traveled. But credits to me as I was the one who insisted on traveling. And since I was the mastermind, I also had the upper hand in choosing the destination. But much of the pressure was on me as I should do much of the research, and plan out the whole itinerary.

I am a person, very interested in history, arts, and culture. I also have this thing for exotic countries, as highly developed ones don’t appeal to me so much. Well, I didn’t look far. Our neighbors in the Indochina region were the best options! Our itinerary consisted of Ho Chi Minh (Saigon/SGN), Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Bangkok, Georgetown Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, consecutively.

For months, all of us in the family dug Google through and through for the best airfares. JUST WHY DON’T CEB-SGN DIRECT FLIGHTS GO ON SALE?! It was pretty frustrating. We were already less than 3 months from our travel date yet we still didn’t have our tickets. Average fares of direct flights from Cebu to Ho Chi Minh (via Cebu Pacific) cost around 5-5,000php (one-way). Expensive. Till CebuPac went on sale with their Cebu-Singapore flights on the travel period we intended. So we directly booked it as a layover, and we just then booked SIN-SGN via JetStar. Came out cheaper than Ceb-SGN.

We arrived in Singapore around 11pm. Our flight to Saigon was still at 7am the next morning, so we just wandered around the massive Changi Airport. Thank God there were still some shops open. We also directly felt “in the zone” with the backpacking trip we were about to embark on, when we slept on the airport benches with other backpackers. ‘Twas something I finally checked off my bucket list!

On my next posts, check out how we scoured through 7 major cities, and 5 countries, in only 2 weeks!

Our itinerary