Southeast Asia forum

Honestly? This is a lot of ground to cover. It would be akin to me saying I have four months and I plan to visit Canada, the US, Mexico and Cuba. That's a huge area and without some help about what your interests are and what you want to do on your vacation, it's a needle in a haystack.

+ 3 on the amount of ground you're trying to cover. I'd say just pick one. Thailand for example is a great place to start. Its easy to get about and quite diverse - massaive 24/7 sensory overload city, huge amount of beautiful beaches to suit every taste (party or chill out and everything inbetween), bags of culture, incredible food, jungles, mountains,villages, wildlife, men, women, men that look like women and much, much more.

I've been to SE Asia a few times now and the last time I went I went for just 2 weeks. This for me was a mistake because by the time I had to leave it felt like I was just settling in. I'd never again go for less than a month. If you try to squeeze all these countries into a month you will regret it. You'll be in such a rush that the whole experience will pass you by!

Take your time and relax and you will have an amazing experience.

Good luck.

I still think you are trying to cover too much, even taking out Bali.

I will assume you tend to fly across borders. Each time you you do this, you lose nearly day by the time you get to the airport, checkin, wait around for 2-3 hours, fly, go through immigration and make your way to your hotel. So if you play on making, say 5 flights, that's 5 days of relaxing travel time gone.

Don't underestimate the distance between cities in Vietnam. There is a good table in the travel guide section on this website (look under Suggested Itineraries, near the bottom). Hue to Hanoi is about 12 hours by memory; and another 1.5-2 hours or so to Halong Bay. It's not so bad if you take an over night bus or train I guess, but that can take its toll on you.

I would strongly suggest having a look at the Suggested Itinerary sections that I mentioned above. You will find these really useful to plotting some sort of route, and most importantly, get an idea of travel times. (To find them, go to the 'Before you Leave' box at the top of this page, and scroll down to the 'Trips....' section.)

And ask yourself this: do you want to be on the move every day, seeing as much as you can and ticking off your list, or do you want to be able to spend a few days just relaxing, taking in the atmosphere, mingling with a few locals, and getting some sort of appreciation of the country that you are in?

Seriously, I think you need to reconsider.

thanks for your comments. At this moment the help that I really need is setting up an itinerary. My quesiton wasn't really if we had time to travel to all these places. Ideally, we would like to take a month but if it's necessary we will need to extend our trip. Please help me if you have a good suggestion of routes for this trip. We would like to start the trip in Thailand. I did find many itineraries but by each country individually. I didn't find any with the places that we want to cover. Most of them include Laos and we want to skip Laos as it's not in our priority for places we want to visit. I will repeat the places we would like to see:


Thailand- Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket and about 2 or 3 surrounded islands.In cambodia we only want to visit 2 cities- Siem Reap and Pnohm Pen. Vietnam we are planning to only go to Central Vietnam and up North-Hoi An, Da Nang, Hue, Halong Bay, and Sapa.


The order I was thinking of doing is Thailand-Cambodia-Vietnam.

Thank you!!