We believe in setting goals. We don’t always achieve them exactly in the way we would like…. like what happened with 2013, but we still like to set goals anyway. It keeps us motivated.
So what are our goals for 2014?
Well for the first month of 2014 we will actually still be on the trip that started in 2013. We were in Kosovo for New Years eve, and soon after will be in Macedonia. We will spend half of January in Macedonia, and the other half in Bulgaria. We will spend a few days in the UK at the end of January before catching our flight back to Australia.
That will end almost 5 months of travel for us. So as you can imagine…. we will most likely be broke.
So I can imagine that the majority of the first half of 2014 will be spent working and saving money for adventuring.
There are still several Pacific Islands we would like to visit. And since you can see pretty much all of these small islands in a week or so, they are easy trips to do while working. Ideally I will get a 6 month temp contract or something similar, and at the end of that we will go on another longer trip.
There are LOADS of places on our bucket list. Africa… South America… Russia and Mongolia… all of these places are calling our names. But since we plan to move to Canada in a couple of years, we have decided that we better make the most of our position in Australia and visit some more of Asia.
Travel Goal #1 : Pacific Islands
So far we have visited Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia. There are many great Pacific Islands I would just LOVE to visit, but in reality, many of them are pretty difficult and expensive to get to unless you have your own yacht. We really want to visit Vanuatu, but we think we would want to devote at least a month to this island, so we might save it for a little later.
While I am working, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get a week off here and there, so we will use that time to visit islands that are a little more straight forward to get to. Good candidates for this are: The Cook Islands, Lord Howe Island (part of Australia), and Norfolk Island (an Australian external territory).
Hopefully we will be able to visit two more Pacific Islands this year.
Travel Goal #2 : Asia
I’m going to be honest here, 5 months of travel in 2013 have taken a lot out of our bank account. Even though we ended the trip with cheaper destinations, we started out in some of the more expensive countries for travel. (New Caledonia, Canada, Iceland, etc)
So when I go back to work, my savings will be starting from zero again. The good thing about an Asian destination is that it shouldn’t take too long to save up enough money for a 1 – 2 month trip where we can explore one country in depth.
Candidates for this are Indonesia, Philippines, or Myanmar.
We have wanted to go to the Philippines or Myanmar for quite some time, but flights there from Australia can sometimes be a little bit pricey. If our saving goals don’t add up as quickly as we would hope, there is always Indonesia – another incredibly diverse destination, but with much cheaper connections to Australia.
But who knows, plans can change!
These are our travel goals for now, but who knows… everything can change! We certainly learned that in 2013. So now it’s your turn, leave us a comment and let us know what are your travel goals for 2014? Or if you have been to one of the countries we want to visit, maybe you can leave a quick tip for us.
