A bit of history

So Since the planning of this trip started way before this blog ever appeared I've decided to post a bit of a history. These aren't updates per se and are by no means detailed but it should give some info about the planning of the trip.

So I've decided to make my first post here as a history of how the trip came to be. Its one of the more frequent things I'm asked by everyone. It started with just me, visiting a friend in Japan. But I've been to Japan before so I wanted to see something different. Since I've graduated I've picked up my scuba diving a lot more, making more frequent trips to Seattle to dive. (I'm pretty lucky to have a friend out there that I can stay with.) So I figured I would go to the Philippines to do a bit of diving.

I've always wanted to go to the Philippines, not just because its a tropical region but because it seems like there are more places that would be less touristy than Hawaii, Jamaica etc.. It seemed like there would be more out of the way places to go where you wouldn't be getting stuck in over priced tourist traps. Also, it was close (relatively) to Japan.

One of the rules of diving (which I frequently break due to circumstance) is that you should have a dive partner. Since diving was my plan I asked Nathan if he wanted to go with me on my trip. He talks about adventure traveling etc.. Honestly it was more of a joking invitation at first but when he seemed receptive to the idea it became more of a reality. Cash on hand was of course and issue but after thoroughly lying to him about how much it would cost (the original quote was $3,500 i think) he agreed to go.(hey what are friends for if not to make you commit to something under false pretenses.)

So now it was a matter of how to best go about getting to the Philippines. When I research something I tend to be quite thorough about doing it. While I was looking at plane costs etc to get to the Phil's i figured out that we could actually save about $300 each if we took the ferry from Japan to S.Korea and then took the bullet train to Seoul and flew to Manilla from Seoul. (I won't even tell you the number of hours it took me to stumble upon that particular route). Any way that route worked out great because the ferry to Busan left from a town called Shimono, which put Kyoto directly in our route!

About this time I decided to ask Jeff if he wanted to come on this little tri--country excursion. Again almost jokingly but again surprised when he agreed. I guess with his school schedule etc it all worked out well. We did have to postpone the trip a bit though. Originally we had planed on Nov 2009 - Feb 2010. So to meet Jeff's school schedule we pushed the dates back to Jan 2010 - March 2010.

Even those dates were changed as I was able to convince Nathan and Jeff that if we extended our trip to start in December we could see new years in japan and if we extended out return until mid April we could see the cherry blossoms as well. Then after a few more hours of scouring for the best price out dates became Dec 28th 2009 - Apr 15th 2010

The choice to backpack through these countries came out of necessity and a lack of funds. Remember I originally quoted Nathan and Jeff about $3,500. Well, throughout the planning I kept raising the estimate, only a little at a time. "Ya man only 4 grand and the trip will be great... Ya this is going to be an amazing trip for only 4500 bucks, no no man I've always said it was going to be 4500." lol

Well eventually they caught on that I kept telling them more and more and we had to settle at around $5,000. $1500 for all the plane tickets about 500 for gear and then 2500-3000 for..... everything else, which puts us on a budget of about $25 a day. .

So that's the history of how a simple visit to a friend in Japan became a 4 month long tour through 5 countries (we fly out of Canada, and have a really long layover in China)