We are counting down again until our next overseas trip!  In just under three months, the four of us will be heading to Malaysia and Thailand!  Working out these destinations took a ridiculous amount of time though.  I have been shocked just how much more planning traveling with two very young children involves.

What triggered this trip?

We first booked this trip when very cheap fares came up on Air Asia back in May!  The trip is in March so we have already been waiting a long time!!  It was crazy cheap – the four of us return with the kids both having their own seats for about $1200.  It was too hard to resist, especially as we had just received $2000 from my mum of my grandmother’s money.  She was always about experiencing life, rather than gathering things and this seemed like the perfect thing to do with the money.

I booked it without letting myself think too hard about how tough it may be with an eleven month old and .a two year old.  We don’t want having kids to mean we stop traveling. Quite the opposite in fact, as we want to show them the world.  If I thought too much about how we would survive the plane journey, then we would never go anywhere!!  We are certainly not blind to the fact that it will be hard work, but there is no point dwelling on it either.

Where should we go after KL?

We booked flights to KL planning to book onward flights elsewhere in Asia later, after we had a chance to research and make the best decision.  This is where things turned into lots of work!!  I want the kids to travel and I am not going to over think things like surviving the plane trip.  However, I am a responsible mum and traveler and I see no point taking the kids somewhere they won’t enjoy (which means not places which will require too much traveling for the two week time frame we have) or is a risk to their health.  Unfortunately, this cut out many of the places we wanted!!

We wanted somewhere with sites that interested us as well as lots of attractions that would interest a toddler.  We also wanted beach time, a destination we could travel around easily (meaning we could afford private cars if necessary) and not have long travel days. I also don’t want anywhere cold, and we wanted to feel a little bit more adventurous than we did on our trip to Phuket and Penang last year.

Our first thoughts were Cambodia.  I have been here before, but only Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, and I wanted to see the coastal region.  Josh hasn’t been there and wanted to, so it sounded good.  We were quite excited by this until I remembered about malaria, looked at a malaria map and saw that the coastal region would us at risk 🙁  I didnt want to put the kids on anti malarials, so this removed this option.  Phnom Penh and Siem Reap were fine, but having already gone there, I didn’t want to go back to Cambodia just to do the same trip.

We really wanted to go somewhere different so we weighed up many options, mainly Singapore, Brunei, Philippines and Java in Indonesia.  They didn’t meet our requirements of trying to minimise travel though, had malaria or were too pricey for our budget, so we ended up back where we started effectively – a holiday in Malaysia!  I have also seen a fair bit of Malaysia previously, so we thought we would travel the east coast as I haven’t been there before and it’s meant to have beautiful beaches and I found plenty of things that sounded interesting for all of us in the Lonely Planet.  We even went so far as to book domestic flights in a crazy Air Asia sale ($26 for all 4 of us!).  It all came crashing down when I did some research on the “ferry” to the Perhentian Islands which was to be our main destination and is really the main draw card of the east coast of Malaysia.  We’d be there in March at a time where the seas are still likely to be rough and the boat ride over just did not seem safe for us with two children that will be so young 🙁

We investigated other options in Malaysia.   

Assumptions I had made initially about how we might travel came undone when I thought about them more.

Like we may be able to afford private transfers between Malaysian destinations, but is riding in a car really practical with a baby and a toddler given we won’t have car seats?  I’m not talking about safety aspect so much as how we keep them still. Even half hour journeys in Phuket could get to me with S as she would want to stand up and play and holding her down really wasn’t much fun!!  She will be a bit older this time and should be able to follow direction to some degree, but she also wants to do whatever Z does and an eleven month old isn’t going to understand that they must sit still!!

Overland travel started seeming like a lot of work and something we needed to minimise even more than we had originally thought.

We came up with a plan we were happy with in Malaysia (KL – Ipoh – Taiping – Langkawi – Sunway Lagoon), but then I started to think about Thailand!  We hadn’t really consider Thailand as we have been there a lot of times and wanted to do something different.  The fact is though, that I have also been to Malaysia a lot of times, and I actually like Thailand a lot more, so this reasoning is a bit silly!!  It took another month, but I came up with an itinerary that we both liked, and next time an Air Asia sale came up, we booked return flights between KL and Bangkok.  Finally, we could stop thinking about which country we were going to go to!!

Our final itinerary

KL (4 nights)
Ayutthaya (2 nights)
Pattaya (5 nights)
Bangkok (3 nights)

Now the accommodation…

I did a ridiculous amount of research into hotels, so hopefully they are the right choices as well!! So much to take into consideration with young kids – do they have a cot? an extra bed? Is there somewhere for the kids to play? room big and clean enough for Z to burn off energy crawling? are there places to eat very close by? the location matters more than ever before as Z, at least, will be napping, so we’ll probably want to go out multiple times a day, rather than be out all day.  We found the cost of an extra bed often quite ridiculous, so we have bought a self-inflatable mattress for S and a sleeping bag liner to use at two of the stops.  Everywhere has promised us cots though!!  In doing this research, I realised how much harder it is going to get in a couple of years in regards to booking accommodation though.  It was rare to come across four person rooms.  We can only get away with having the four of us in most of these rooms because Z is a baby.

Anyway, it is sorted! yay!!  Being the planner that I am, I have a whole document already written, complete with maps and details about how to get around, kid friendly attractions, sample itineraries, budgets, the lot!  Now if March would just hurry up!!!