The struggles & consequences of long-term travel

Anders
00:10
Hello there and welcome to Southern Summers and Northern Winters. Good morning or good afternoon Mark, how are you doing?
Mark
00:18
It’s definitely good evening here. 7.12pm here in Eastern Daylight Saving Time in Australia, as they call it.
Anders
00:27
So 10 hours ahead of me, 10 hours ahead.
Mark
00:30
Yeah, 7.12pm for sure. And still pretty warm here. It was 30 today so I’d say it’s still probably 28 or 27 here.
Mark
00:38
It still feels warm especially in my studio here where I am. Yeah. My office shed turn studio that’s covered in tin so it does feel a little bit warm down here.
Anders
00:50
So it’s not really insulated towards cold or heat?
Mark
00:55
No, it’s got some insulation in the roof, but it’s not house standard or anything
Anders
01:00
like that. No, no.
Mark
01:02
It tends to feel a bit warm later on in the afternoon if it’s been a warm day because the sun shines onto it in the afternoon when the, and the hottest parts of the day. So it does warm up. So I’ve got the door opened and I’ve got a fan going at the back end of my shed but as I said to Anders earlier I would probably have the 1 going above my head but I don’t know if you guys would like to hear the sound of sound of my fan all the way through the through the podcast so I’ve left it off today.
Anders
01:31
We have a crispy minus 3 degrees Celsius here. Yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice.
Anders
01:39
It’s this time of year I preferred like this. Yeah, it’s just an exactly 1 year ago. We actually had quite a bit of snow. We had like 50 centimeters of snow on this day 1 year ago.
Anders
01:55
Today, the day of recording today is 2nd of December. So
Mark
02:00
I was watching in South Korea, they’ve had record snowfalls at the moment. They’ve got roofs collapsing on buildings and things like that. There’s that much snow going on in South Korea, which is…
Mark
02:13
I know that they’re a cold country, but generally they don’t have that much snow. And they’re only sort of adjacent to China where my daughter lives and there’s been no snow there yet. So yeah, they’re only, she flies to South Korea regularly, so it’s only a couple hours away, so it’s probably 400 or 500 kilometres away, but on the same latitude sort of thing. But yeah.
Mark
02:32
So interesting.
Anders
02:34
It’s funny. It’s… Because I don’t really think of Asia as a cold area at all. I’ve… I don’t think of it as, you know… You say South Korea having snow.
Anders
02:46
Oh… Well, yeah. But it’s just not what I could combine with…
Mark
02:54
I think when most people think about Asia they think of Southeast Asia. So, you know, they’re talking, you know, Vietnam and Malaysia and Thailand and stuff like that. I guess not North Asia, like, you know, because China borders onto Russia and places like that.
Mark
03:09
It does, yeah. So it’s fairly high latitude on the map when you get north of, say, Beijing and places like that. There’s definitely a lot of snow. There’s a place in North China called Harbin and they have a really famous ice sculpture festival there all year.
Mark
03:26
Oh, I mean every year at winter time, but it’s about minus 32 apparently every year when they have this this ice festival I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos on it looks fascinating but the people
Anders
03:36
it’s amazing yeah
Mark
03:37
I can only go out for a couple hours at a time like they’re like it’s this yeah it’s so cold
Anders
03:42
yeah yeah no it’s it’s it’s definitely like you say because you think of Asia as being really warm and humid. But it just proved to show that the globe is so big. Well, I
Mark
04:00
mean, Asia stretches a long way. I mean, if you consider Bali, Bali’s like 2 hours from the top of northern Australia, but if you flew to Beijing or, you know, even beyond Beijing, it’s 11 hours or 12 hours. So in retrospect, you know, it’s 9 hours from Bali.
Mark
04:18
So it’s, you know, so it’s a fair distance of flying. That’s halfway around the world. It is. It is.
Anders
04:24
Pretty much in 9 hours. Yeah. Exactly.
Anders
04:27
Yeah, it’s… Even in… Well, Australia is considered a big… It’s a continent.
Anders
04:33
But even in Germany here, internally, we often forget how big Germany actually is. I mean, it’ll take you 8, 9 hours to drive from here to Hamburg. No, not to Hamburg. That’s only 7 hours, but to the Danish border, that’s about 9 hours and it’s just a long way.
Anders
04:55
It’s just a long way.
Mark
04:56
The biggest country in Europe?
Anders
04:59
Yeah. Area-wise, no.
Mark
05:01
Be close, wouldn’t it?
Anders
05:02
Yeah, no, I don’t think. That’s a good question, actually. We should, I should probably research that.
Anders
05:08
I would say that France or Spain are bigger. But I
Mark
05:14
don’t know. I’m on my phone
Anders
05:16
right now.
Mark
05:17
You’re already on your phone. What is the largest country in Europe? Yeah, we should know that.
Mark
05:24
We’ll see. I would have to be able to type as well a little bit. That would help. And push the space bar so I have a gap and not 25 letters in front of me.
Anders
05:33
Yeah, the typing on the smartphones nowadays it’s not really intuitive. I think it’s gone back. It’s gone back.
Anders
05:43
It doesn’t
Mark
05:43
help if you’ve got big fingers either like that.
Anders
05:46
Yeah, got 10 thumbs.
Mark
05:49
Oh well it says Russia but that’s not really fair because we all know that Russia literally would be the biggest country because it stretches halfway around the world so yeah okay here we go so besides Russia, Russia’s the biggest country then it says Ukraine France yeah, fine.
Anders
06:07
Yeah, Sweden. Yes, we miss big.
Mark
06:10
Why yeah, Norway Germany and Finland So
Anders
06:13
yeah, there you
Mark
06:14
go Germany.
Anders
06:14
Yeah But
Mark
06:15
I guess all the others there besides France and Germany’s probably biggest country like in that central central Really is this
Anders
06:24
yeah. Yeah, it’s certainly central Europe biggest. I mean, it’s With with the biggest country amongst our neighbors. Well, France is actually bordering.
Anders
06:35
Yeah. Okay.
Mark
06:37
What are we actually saying? Let’s stop before we
Anders
06:39
bury ourselves. Yeah. Exactly.
Anders
06:46
Today we are talking about long-term traveling and the consequences and the struggles of long-term traveling. Me and my family, we traveled for 12 months way back when. Mark, you’ve been away for, what’s the longest stretch you had?
Mark
07:07
We traveled for a just shy of 14 months. That was in 2019 and into the start of 2020. We were sort of humming and harrowing about whether to come home, but then COVID was happening.
Mark
07:22
So we sort of headed home. I wouldn’t say COVID was the main reason, but it was just at the outbreak stage when we were humming and harrowing. So we were like, Yeah, okay, everyone was starting to wear masks where we were and it was all, yeah, we were like, okay. So we headed home in February of 2020, just when the outbreak was first happening.
Mark
07:43
But we’ve travelled, I wouldn’t say anywhere near that term, but most of the holidays we were taking previous to that in European places were 8 weeks, 10 weeks. So we had a fair few, I would say longer than holiday stints, but shorter than what you would cost long-term travel. But yeah, we’ve had that 14-month journey done.
Anders
08:04
Yeah. What would you consider being the worst thing about long-term travelling?
Mark
08:14
I guess It depends what sort of traveller you are. If you can try and plan, it becomes a little bit hard. Like, I’m a big planner because I like to make the money stretch out.
Mark
08:29
So trying to plan in advance for flights and things like that. So this caused a bit of a contentious issue with me and my wife when we were travelling. She wanted to wing it by the seat of her pants and just go, okay, let’s just go here and stay here and do that. And I was like, yeah, okay, we can do that.
Mark
08:47
But then when it came to it, I was like, well, we can’t do that because we need to try and book flights when the flights are cheap, you know, and things like that, which sort of, which works and then it doesn’t work because there’s some places we would have stayed longer in and there’s certainly some places we would have stayed shorter in when we were traveling. So planning can be hard, but 1 of the things, if you’ve got, depending how old your kids are, like food can be a real issue depending on where you’re going to like what food you can get to feed especially if you got fussy kids like our daughter lived on chicken nuggets for a long time, and chicken nuggets only were 1 of the main things that she would eat. But we did find though that through travelling for 12 months, it definitely broadened her taste palate when it came to food, and by the end she was eating most things where she started out not, but that was a consequence of being in Asia for a long time and it was like, well, you know, you’ve got to, this is what there is to eat. There’s no chicken nuggets everywhere.
Mark
09:43
There’s no chicken schnitzel everywhere, you know, like you’ve got to eat some of this stuff, some stir fry and things like that, which is really good. So food’s a big issue for a lot of families who’ve got fussy eaters, I would say, when you’re travelling long term. Logistically, luggage. We’ve spoken about luggage before.
Mark
10:01
Luggage is definitely an issue if you’re traveling long term and you want to Keep your costs down especially if you’re flying and not going on trains and planes because as you know if you can just hop on with a carry-on and jump on that’s a lot cheaper than having to pay for checked luggage all the time, so That was another serious
Anders
10:22
and that’s the thing about about luggage. I mean you can actually You can travel light even though it’s long term, I mean obviously if you are going across seasons, you’d want to wear some, an overcoat or pullover. That makes it a little more, the luggage a little more bulky, I guess.
Anders
10:46
But as I think it was last episode we talked about, you know, if you travel, if you pack t-shirts for a week, underwear for a week, socks for a week, stuff like that, then more or less you can get by.
Mark
11:01
Yeah. Also visas are also an issue, I guess, if you’re lying by the seat of your pants, as we were saying before, and not planning too much. A lot of countries in Asia, not so much Europe, because most of them fall under the Schengen, but in Asia a lot of countries require a visa to go into every country and not all of them, well, I shouldn’t say that, most of them can be had at the border, but there’s also the, There’s also a lot of sometimes scrupulous border guards in Asia that are known to want to overcharge you and things like that. So I was always 1 that liked to go to the embassy or the consulate in the country I was in before going to the next country and actually getting the visas done before we actually went into them countries just so we didn’t have to face any of that or even have the option of, you know, of border guards trying to bribe you and such.
Anders
12:04
That’s good advice actually. I wasn’t aware of that. Because when we travelled, we bought this around the world ticket And we had all the major destinations, major stops, all the countries as well.
Anders
12:21
It was all cleared before we even left Munich. So all the visas were… But I don’t think we even needed a special visa for anything because most European passports, as we’ve also discussed here, we can go anywhere. Yeah.
Anders
12:41
It’s just that you get the stamp when you get
Mark
12:43
to
Anders
12:43
the border. Definitely. I’m not sure
Mark
12:45
if this is still happening, but 1 of the border crossings we had to do, we had to do a visa run in Thailand. So we were staying in Chiang Rai, which is in northern Thailand. So the nearest town on the border is called Miezi, and it’s in the Golden Triangle, so our borders, Burma and Laos and Thailand.
Mark
13:09
So we went to this town on the Thai border called Miezi, stayed there for the night, and we had to cross into into Laos. Yeah. So we could extend our, not into Laos, sorry, into Myanmar, sorry. So we had to cross into Myanmar to get an extension on our visa.
Mark
13:29
So this was, I’d read about this, this was a long running, I don’t know if it’s a scam or an issue, but you had to, there’s a bridge there. So you cross the bridge and there’s a market on the other side in Myanmar. So you’d go and then you’d come back like 2 hours later and the Thai border officials would stamp you back in. But what you had to do is you had to go, you had to check out of Thailand, you had to walk halfway across the bridge, then you had to go into the Myanmar office, or the border office, and you had to hand them your passport with a crisp, fresh, brand new $10 US note in each passport.
Mark
14:04
And they would keep your passport while you went into Myanmar and had a look around. We basically went in as a really big junk market on the border, like massive market. So we went into this market, had a look around, had a couple of beers and came back. And then so as you come back, you then go into the Thai office on the opposite side of the bridge and they hand you your passport back and your $10 is gone.
Mark
14:30
So obviously the Myanmar border guards have taken it and and they hand it back to you and then you check back into Thailand and your visa gets refreshed.
Anders
14:38
So okay.
Mark
14:39
So yeah, so that was like yeah had to be a fresh crisp $10 US notes No bending on it. No, nothing can’t exchange them. So yeah, so we went to this exchange place, this shy of the bridge, and got $40 because it was 4 of us, $40 US dollars and put them in our passports and handing our passports over was actually a little bit nervous because you can’t take them with you, they keep them.
Mark
15:00
So you’re like, now am I stuck in Myanmar? Like what’s going on here? So yeah, so it was quite funny because it was only a double lane bridge but there was 2 offices on each side. Obviously when you left Thailand, you went out of their office and 50 meters long the bridge was here, was the Myanmar border office.
Mark
15:18
And then when you came back, you went on the other side of the bridge and exactly the same thing, 2 offices.
Anders
15:22
Get back into
Mark
15:22
the Myanmar 1, they give you your passport back and then back into the Taiwan, they’d re-stamp your passport and back into Thailand, you went for another 30 days or 60 days or whatever it was. But yeah, that was definitely the, the most unique border crossing of, of ever done.
Anders
15:37
We actually, we actually had hopes we could do more or less the same thing between us and the Canadian, the us and Canada, Canada border. Because we, we had a 3 months, stay in, in the U S and we wanted to go to Canada for for at least a week or 2 and we did. But it was then someone told us, you know, it doesn’t matter if you go to Canada, you won’t get a refreshed, renewed 3 months extension on your visa into the US because they somehow have stopped that.
Anders
16:13
Yeah,
Mark
16:14
because everyone would be doing it, I guess.
Anders
16:16
Yeah, I guess so. So yeah, that was a bit of a bummer.
Mark
16:22
But your visa stopped obviously, so if you went to Canada for 2 months and you came back to the US, you still had a month left? You didn’t have to spend that 3 months entirely in a row?
Anders
16:34
It was 3 months from the beginning of the…
Mark
16:37
Ah, okay, so if you went to Canada for 2 weeks,
Anders
16:39
that meant you had to
Mark
16:40
get 2 months and 2 weeks in America.
Anders
16:42
Yes, yes.
Mark
16:43
Ah, okay.
Anders
16:45
Yes, so… Excellent. Yeah, and…
Anders
16:50
Yeah, so that was a bummer. We wanted to go to Canada anyway. So, so it didn’t really affect us. So we sort of had already booked the, the, the planes out of the U S.
Anders
17:04
So we knew that, but, but still, you know, it’s just a bit of advice to any listener. You can’t do it in Canada, US. It’s not working like Thailand, Myanmar.
Mark
17:19
And you know, like You really need to know about visas because a lot of countries have them, require them, don’t have them, and to assume that you can just walk in. The amount of places I’ve been where I’ve been held up at an airport by people who have just rolled up and assumed that that they can be let in the country and I’ve noticed this more often and not with Americans because but
Anders
17:45
And they think they can go anywhere. Yeah.
Mark
17:46
Yeah, they think they can go anywhere basically. Yeah, and and they get stopped and yeah This lady in ho Chi Minh city last time we were there She’s like how can I not be let in you know all this sort of stuff like this and And this guy’s like well everyone else he’s got a visa like, you know, yeah So why haven’t you got 10I didn’t know I needed 1? Well, that doesn’t fly these days.
Mark
18:10
You need a visa, you need a visa. Most countries in Asia actually require a visa. There’s not many that don’t. Some are free.
Mark
18:18
I mean, I will say some are visa on arrival, but a lot of countries still require you to pay for a visa of Vietnam, Indonesia for sure, Thailand when you get there, I think. So yeah, definitely Cambodia, they require a visa as well. Laos, I think Laos does actually but but you still have to fill out the paperwork on the border you know so so most of these countries in Asia still require a visa and as an Australian we require we need to get a visa for a lot of countries because nearly everyone that comes to Australia requires a visa so most of these countries are in payback mode because we make their citizens have a visa to come to Australia where
Anders
19:01
that’s diplomacy at work yeah
Mark
19:04
yes we’re then required to get a visa going back so of course I don’t know I assume Germany’s probably on the list but China extended their visa free period from 15 days to 30 days starting today for a lot of countries which is really good for China. So obviously they’re trying to cash in on some tourist dollars for 30 days visa free which is really good. They started with this 72 hour visa which they had in certain cities so if you could fly into Beijing and if you had a connecting flight you can stay 72 hours.
Mark
19:34
Yeah 6 cities in China that were doing this at 1 stage and but now yeah You can pretty much fly in for 30 days from most countries But once again, I take my word you need to check that that your own country is this list of countries
Anders
19:49
that you
Mark
19:49
can go for 30 days. So yeah, but visas sometimes can be a little bit tricky no matter where you’re going. Like I had this discussion, once again, this is about China, I had this discussion the other week.
Mark
19:59
I’d been emailing their embassy because prior to this there was a 15 day visa and I was I’d been reading on travel forums about whether the first day counts because say if you land at 10 o’clock at night surely that can’t count as your first day like that doesn’t seem it doesn’t seem right like that you can use 1 day when you’re arriving so late at night. And people on Facebook were saying, no, no, it doesn’t count, but other people were saying it does. So I was firing off emails to every Chinese consulate I did in Australia and every major city because I knew I’d be struggling to get an answer and I was. It took me a few emails but they finally come back.
Mark
20:37
The embassy in Canberra, which is the official Chinese embassy, came back and said the first day doesn’t count. So a lot of people probably don’t realize that. So it’s the first day doesn’t count. So it was 15 full days after the day you arrive So which is okay.
Anders
20:52
Yeah, and and well again, that’s that’s different because we’ve actually far We were short of a couple of days as we arrived from New Zealand to to the US and also they didn’t we said 3 months and the travel agency where we booked the tickets, the flight tickets, they had counted like 3 months as you know, they counted the days, but they in the US they said like 3 times 30 days regardless of having 31 days in at least 1 of the months that we were staying there. So we were short of 2 or 3 days and we had to rebook the flights out. So yeah, you have to really take care.
Mark
21:42
Yeah, you do. And yeah, you can’t assume. The first time I went to Bali, I did the same thing.
Mark
21:49
I just assumed that most places had 60 days or 90 days because that’s what you got in Europe at most places back in the day before the Schengen. So we flew to Bali and I was there for 33 days and you can only get 30 days so I had to run around getting a visa extension and things like that for 3 days. I had assumed that 60 days was standard but it wasn’t so. But that’s life.
Mark
22:18
So yeah, so there are some of the difficulties you’ll face as a Family or even just as an individual in of individual traveling For long-term travel Schooling is also an issue depending on how old your kids are. We planned to do a lot of schooling and we didn’t in the end. I think we touched on this the other week. But yeah, it didn’t happen for us.
Mark
22:48
I wasn’t motivated and I gave up in the end. I went with good intentions to, to try and homeschool our kids as much as I could. Rebecca was like, it’ll never happen. And she said, I’m leaving that up to you.
Mark
23:01
So, yeah, so I tried and cause she knew it wasn’t going to succeed and we sort of stuck to it for a while, but, but it sort of faded off. But like I said earlier, we go and see a lot of historical and cultural sites. So that’s sort of, yeah, but yeah, but Don’t go with this big expectation that you can, that your kids really need to be schooled for half a day every single day. If they’re only young, they will certainly get by.
Mark
23:27
We used to make them do things like go and buy things for us so they could work out the change and the money and the conversion rates and things like that. So that was a sort of a learning curve in that retrospect with the money. So that was just 1 of the few little tricks we used to do, make them do, take this money, go buy that. We knew how much it was in places, you know, how much change should you bring back, you know, so it was a, you know, a roundabout way of doing some, doing some math and things like that.
Anders
23:54
Yeah. I guess if the school system is very rigid, which it is here in Germany, you would, you would run into issues with, you know, when getting back because there would be things that, that your kids hadn’t learned. On the other hand, there would be a lot of things that they had learned and would be way ahead of people in the school when they get back. I mean, so yeah, I agree with you.
Anders
24:20
You know, seeing the real world, travelling in the real world is as good an education as any school can give you, at least.
Mark
24:33
So accommodation can also be an issue when you’re travelling long term, depending on how many you’re travelling with. If you’ve only got 1 kid, you know, the world’s your oyster because you can always get a hotel room for 2 people that has an extra bed in it. Yeah.
Mark
24:48
If there’s 4 years or even 5 of years, then you’re in a bit of trouble. Then you’re going to have to stay in apartments all the time, which apartments are really good, but you don’t have that safety net of having, you know, someone down at the front desk or all things like that or knowing that someone will be there when you when you arrive you know you might have to find some key box it’s down some alley behind some side gate you know and it’s got the apartment in it and things like that And if you’re arriving late at night and it’s dark and you don’t know the place and and things like that, you know That can be That can be an issue for you. So them sort of things You know
Anders
25:28
you recently went to because you had your sister with you in China so you were like you were 5 of you you visited Willow but but
Mark
25:37
yeah so there was 4 of us
Anders
25:38
yeah yeah
Mark
25:39
but we stayed in a hotel my sister stayed in a room with my daughter so
Anders
25:43
okay okay
Mark
25:44
yeah that worked that worked all right so you can do that like it’s that’s fine And we do that we did that a lot after the kids got Older and even on the long-term Travel trip towards the end we was doing that when willow was maybe I think she was 13 or 14 and Marley was probably 12 but only if the room was right next to our room. Like it didn’t need to be, didn’t need to be interconnecting all the time. But as long as the room was, was next door, you know, you’re pretty, well, you can, you know what your kids are like, if you think your kids are responsible, you know, and things like that, well then pretty much they’re going to be all right.
Mark
26:16
They’re not going to go wandering around at age 10 and 12 or 10 and 13 in a strange city you know they can always just bang on the wall if they need things so so that can be so yeah so you can get away with it like that but yeah but there’s not too many hotel rooms these days that fit a family of 4 and if you’re and let’s be honest If you’re staying somewhere for a month or even 3 weeks, these all really want to be Washed in a 1 room hotel room.
Anders
26:42
No you don’t
Mark
26:42
get up for You don’t like it it’s not nice. We did it a few times when we were when we’re on this trip for maybe 10 days at the maximum and after 10 days that was That was plenty of time for us to all be in the same room and getting frustrated with each other for yeah your clothes are all over here and you know and tidy up and you know and all this sort of stuff like this ends up weighing heavily on you if you’re all stuck in the same room so you better get in a 2 bedroom apartment.
Anders
27:12
That’s true that’s true it’s as we say in Germany you that in that case you or in that situation you’re definitely in the in need of a change of wallpaper as we say we need to go we need to go somewhere else yeah this leads me into travel fatigue have you ever had that I mean where you simply just
Mark
27:34
well you’ve had enough yeah I think that’s real Like it’s real for a lot of people. I was ready to come home like when we came home. But I was ready to leave again after 2 weeks.
Mark
27:47
Like, I couldn’t have went again. I just wanted to come home for a couple of weeks and just not have to worry about anything, if that makes sense. So I was humming and harrowing. Like, we were sitting…
Mark
28:00
So we left in January, at the start of January of 2019, and I was sitting in Poland in December of 2019 and we sat there and had a really long and hard conversation about where we were going, because we probably had 6 months worth of money left and we were going to have to go or needed to get out of Poland and the EU because they have our Schengen visas are up So we’re gonna have to head to Romania or somewhere down there which was not a problem like I was keen to go to Romania and and and be on there and have a look Or we were gonna go home. So we sat there thought about it at that stage. The kids were a little bit disengaged I would say with the traveling They were sick of going to churches and cultural sites and castles and museums after 12 months and that’s fair enough. So they were disengaged, that’s the best way I would say it.
Mark
29:01
So they were spending a lot of time online chatting to their friends back home and wanting to go back to school and things like that. So just be weary if you do travel long term that it’s not for all kids and it’s not for that amount of time is really is a long time to be isolated I guess socially and socially from your friends and your family away from everyone like we had friends in Europe like you know we we’d met you and we
Anders
29:28
have we were here yeah
Mark
29:30
we had friends in Poland and Germany and my sister came to Wales when we were staying there But you know, but yeah, so so that pretty much swayed the decision in the end was the fact that they were so disengaged with what we were what we were probably doing and they were just wanting to stay in the hotel room and watch TV and things like that, you know, except at meal times or if we want to go to a theme park or something really, you know, really fun for them, which you can’t go to a theme park every day. Like It’s not, it’s not, not wise. But we, we, we, we
Anders
30:05
had the sort of the same thing. Anton was very small at the time, but, but, but, but even for Alex and I, we, we, we had days where we just, we, we, we just needed to crash somewhere on a campsite in the camper van and there were days with endless rain southern island of New Zealand where we just parked and we watched movies and just relaxed and didn’t do anything for a couple of days and that was needed.
Mark
30:35
That comes with long-term travel, doesn’t it? Long-term travel is not a holiday. It isn’t.
Mark
30:42
Let’s be honest. It’s not a holiday. It’s a way of life or a lifestyle choice. And if you think you can travel for 12 months, like you go on holiday, you can’t, I mean, you can’t be out every day like you would for 2 weeks.
Mark
30:59
No, eating, drinking, you know, doing, you know, not so much drinking now, but when I was younger, like, yeah, but yeah, yeah, but you can, it’s not, it’s not feasible. And budget wise, it’s not, it’s probably not allowable for most people. Unless you’re, unless you’re extremely well off, like, you know, you can’t, You can’t eat out for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for 12 months. It’s not gonna happen for you budget-wise.
Mark
31:28
So in the end it becomes about having them slow days like you spoke about where you sit on the couch and watch watch TV or you read a book or you know you even just go for a walk and and See nothing, but just go down the street and maybe do some window shopping or exactly But don’t really do anything
Anders
31:47
Just be local with the locals really. That doesn’t necessarily cost you anything. If you have smaller kids, you go to a playground in a park or something like that and you can actually then engage with the locals and maybe get a few tips and tricks to what’s good in the city and Yeah, so so and it’s quite easy when you
Mark
32:10
got kids to do that like it is go to a park It’s very easy to meet meet other parents in in that situation who are from local areas and if you’re an affable type of person who’s happy to talk to strangers or even introduce yourself to strangers, you know, yeah, you’ll definitely learn some really good things from locals in parks.
Anders
32:32
Absolutely. It’s like dog walking. Dog walkers, they typically have an easy way of interacting with 1 another.
Mark
32:39
Yes. So long-term travel is that. It’s just travel. It’s not a holiday.
Mark
32:42
It’s not a vacation after a while. You can be in a rush, but you’ll soon burn yourself out if you’re in in too much of a rush And my wife would say that I was probably in too much of a rush when we did it I was probably I think the longest place we were staying on the hop was maybe 10 days at a time We didn’t stay in We did stay a couple of places in England for longer. We had a house sit for 3 weeks in a house in the middle of England. So we stayed there for 3 weeks.
Mark
33:11
And our mate had a caravan in Wales and we stayed there for 3 weeks. But other than that, we were moving every 7 to 10 days constantly.
Anders
33:19
Yes.
Mark
33:20
Because more to do with me than her because I’m always 1 of them people who goes, hey I may never come back here so I need to see what I can see now.
Anders
33:35
But you are right about this being concerned about the next step you want to. Because even when we were traveling around in a camper van, there was like almost a daily routine, you know, because a certain point of time, a certain time during the day, you would start thinking about where we’re sleeping tonight. Yeah, we need to find a campground, we need to find a supermarket, we need to just get settled for the night.
Anders
34:06
And we had a small kid back then. There are daily routines in a family with kids and you can’t neglect it. We had the advantage of having the same environment in terms of living quarters every day in the camper van. So, you know, for Anton, it wasn’t as ever-changing as it was for us adults.
Anders
34:36
I mean, he would have the same sink to brush his teeth and same bed and stuff like that. So there were routines, there were like, you know, fixed surroundings, but still as a parent, you would have to think about, you know, where are we going next? And that’s it.
Mark
34:53
I mean, it’s probably not so bad when it’s just 2 adults or 1 adult You can maybe wing it a bit and just go okay.
Anders
34:58
Yeah
Mark
34:59
roll into this town and and
Anders
35:03
Yeah, yeah,
Mark
35:03
but yeah, but you can’t do that with kids you gotta
Anders
35:06
you can’t
Mark
35:06
you know have some sort of plan and because you can’t be stuck somewhere middle of the night with nowhere to stay in and you know kids with you in a car or in a bus or in a bus station you know at the worst or yeah something like that and you know I take my hat off to to people who can travel like that and have have no absolute concern about it I can’t in any in any way shape or form
Anders
35:32
no me
Mark
35:33
neither me causes me massive amounts of travel anxiety. Yeah. For someone who’s traveled a lot, you know, I really struggle with anxiety when it comes to travel, not about the places I’m going or anything like that, just about the logistics of getting there and then getting from, you know, the hotel to getting from the airport or something to the hotel, you know, these things I find to be really, really stressful.
Anders
36:04
Yeah, I can relate
Mark
36:05
to that. Hence I’m 1 of them people that’s always at the airport 3 hours early, no matter what, just in case there’s a hurricane on the way and my car gets blown off the road or there’s a sinkhole pops up and it swallows me. You know?
Anders
36:17
Yeah. Things like that. You never know.
Mark
36:22
And yeah, so I am always early and I’m always, I need to have that plan of some sort in front of me to feel, I don’t know, feel safe in what we’re doing. Because yeah, this is the thought of going to another country is no problem, but yeah, it’s more all for me, it’s all tied in with the anxiety of the logistics of getting there and then making getting on time and getting to where’s the hotel, you know what if we roll up and the hotels not actually there or All these different crazy scenarios that you can
Anders
36:57
all the bookings speed goes through it up or some yeah I mean yeah
Mark
37:00
things like that. Yeah.
Anders
37:01
Yeah, you
Mark
37:02
know or in countries like China, especially You know or catching a taxi somewhere and then not being able to Get 1 back because you can’t actually speak the language and a lot of people do so you go Okay, what happens if I if I go here and and for some reason I can’t get a cab back. You know, what do I do? You know, things like that.
Mark
37:20
Like really, really stress me out, but hey, you know. If I wanna travel.
Anders
37:25
When we were in Australia, we were thinking about, because in some areas, I don’t know if you’re allowed to do it in all areas, but you can actually free camp. We didn’t do that because I was anxious that we would be camping somewhere far away and all of a sudden in the middle of the night, either robbery or wild animal or whatever. I mean, I didn’t want to be there with my family without being able to protect
Mark
37:56
them. That’s a real concern. And I think that’s a valid concern too. I’m a bit like that.
Mark
38:02
Like I’ve got friends that go camping up what I would say up in the bush away from people but that’s not for me. Mine and my wife’s type of camping would be going to like a caravan park or something like that and popping a tent up there where there’s a toilet block and a caretaker and you know anything exactly that’s That’s what I call safe camping and yeah and better camping because you never know you never know what can happen up in the Forest or you know the forest in Germany or something like that. No, there’s People could you know, there’s no 1 around any, you know,
Anders
38:35
it’s, you’re extremely vulnerable. If you’re sleeping somewhere completely off grid and there’s nowhere, there’s no people anywhere around and all of a sudden comes someone with sinister intent. What can you do?
Anders
38:50
I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s yeah. So it was out of the question then. And Alex was okay. You know, she’s, I don’t think she was that anxious, but, but she agreed that, you know, we couldn’t do this with a small kid
Mark
39:03
It’s it was a few free camping sites popping up now actually in Australia It’s quite a few that are and there’s a few that are in in towns We have 1 here in our town in Mafra where it used to be We used to have a local caravan park, but they try shut the caravan park down. So now they use that area for free camping. People pull in their camper vans and there’s no toilet facility.
Mark
39:25
So you’d really want to have a self-contained camper van or a caravan caravan. It’s got a toilet, but you can stay there for free and just up the road about 50 kilometers from us There’s a little town called Rosedale. It’s on the Princess Highway. So the main highway around Australia It also has a little free camping area as well.
Mark
39:42
Just on the side of the highway. It’s really popular as I see 1012 caravans in there, you know things like that people just traveling along So it’s good. It’s good to see that some of these places are popping up in populated areas so you can feel that sense of, I guess, safeness compared
Anders
39:58
to being
Mark
40:00
out in the forest.
Anders
40:02
But even, I would say even because we had a couple of times we stayed on some off-grid campgrounds, but there were campgrounds, but there were No staff. It was in New Zealand. But there were other campers and that helps.
Anders
40:21
Yeah. Definitely. It’s just when you’re completely alone it’s just, you know, I really didn’t like
Mark
40:27
that. This is gonna lead me to another story about Thailand again. So in northern Thailand again, Okay, so we’re in this town called I Think it’s called non-kai It’s on the border of lao because we were going down the Mekong on a boat in Laos the very next day So we booked into this hotel that was a little bit out of, out of the main town. The border was maybe 5K, 10K from the middle of town.
Mark
40:56
So you go out of town and this is on the outskirts of this town and there was like a long straight road that was about 4 kilometers long and it went straight to the border with Laos. So we booked into this hotel about halfway down this road. So we roll in there, this joint’s 3 stories, I would say 50, 60 room hotel possibly. And we were the only people in this hotel.
Mark
41:21
And I was absolutely, I was spitting right out. I didn’t actually know what was going on.
Anders
41:28
You didn’t feel relaxed.
Mark
41:30
I did not feel relaxed 1 little bit Even to the extent that when we went into town they gave us a ride I set my GoPro up and left it on record in the room because I was like why is this hotel? Empty like it’s It’s nice. It was clean.
Mark
41:48
You know lots of marble white tile like you see in Asia, fountain in the middle of it, like…and I was…but out in the back was just bushland. There was nothing behind it. Dirt tracks leading out into the bush.
Anders
42:02
Oh, yeah,
Mark
42:03
and I was really really Peaking as you would say oh
Anders
42:07
yes and
Mark
42:10
Even to the stage where like I thought I was hearing voices outside like oh, I don’t know whether it was my mind or what and but yeah there was no 1 there and I asked my brother my brother’s married to a Thai lady and I said why would there be a hotel and he said maybe someone died there because if someone died there then Thais won’t go but in the end I think it had more to do with It was owned by the Chinese and it was for Chinese tourist groups a lot of the time. There was none there, but there was Yeah, there was literally not another soul except for the person behind the desk And it was and we were on like the third floor and so it was really it was really alarming
Anders
42:48
Wow, to
Mark
42:49
be honest with you
Anders
42:50
That would have put me on edge too, I must say.
Mark
42:53
Only there for 1 night and I couldn’t get out of there quick enough the next morning at 7 a.m. Obviously nothing happened, but yeah, it’s just so unusual to go to a hotel where where you’re the only person that’s
Anders
43:03
a little creepy because you again you feel like you know if someone with sinister intent comes what can you actually do
Mark
43:13
yeah nothing that’s it like you know so yeah so that was probably the most bizarre hotel stay I’ve ever had to yeah we still talk about that to this day I you know I just I can’t get out and I still got no reason no idea why you know except that like I said there was a couple of odd suggestions that people made but really, I don’t know. So we got in a tuk-tuk, we headed to the Laos border and we’re out of there.
Anders
43:41
I had a similar experience in Italy, in Tuscany actually. It was way back, way before I had kids and stuff. I was there in a hotel late at night.
Anders
43:51
It was a nice hotel actually. It was an old, probably medieval hotel. I mean, it was stone house And in rural Tuscany, they have these old buildings that go way back, hundreds, centuries back. And we came in and it was late and very dark everywhere.
Anders
44:16
And nearby there was a restaurant and a bar and we didn’t feel safe. And it was just like, you know, we quickly went into our room and got settled for the night. And luckily I fell asleep. But my girlfriend at the time, she asked me the next morning if I’d heard that there were actually shootings during the night.
Anders
44:41
So I said, no, I didn’t hear that. Thank God. And she was really, And we left early as well because it was not my… Maybe it was pretty much…
Anders
44:58
I’m sure she heard the shooting, but that can be just… I don’t know, could have been a wedding or sometimes, you know, southern Europeans, they shoot in the air and stuff like that. So I’m sure it was nothing, but still, probably our minds tricked us and we didn’t feel it’s all about how you Arrive in the first place your first impression is really important when you come
Mark
45:26
definitely It’s definitely and your mind is a really powerful thing at nighttime like because as you know not just a travel or anything you know everything seems twice as bad when you’ve got even ordinary problems when you’re laying in bed in the dark thinking about everything and you know and then you get up the next morning and you go what was I doing you know it’ll be it’ll be fine but you know but yeah while you’re while you’re alone in the dark with your own thoughts sometimes? Yeah Imagination and things can certainly easily run wild.
Anders
45:53
Okay, exactly. That’s true. That’s true.
Anders
45:55
Yeah, so no there this is these are these are some of the of the Issues of long-term I think you put it right there, Mark, when you said, long-term traveling has nothing to do with a holiday. It’s not a vacation you go on. It’s a lifestyle and It’s not for everybody. I completely agree.
Anders
46:18
I completely agree. It’s something you need to consider.
Mark
46:21
Yeah. Definitely.
Anders
46:22
But again, long-term traveling can be done in many, many ways. I mean, it can be, there are some ways more expensive than others, But if you go like most people do, you know, with a backpack or budget traveling, then it will become like an everyday routine. And You need to plan a little bit ahead and you need to make sure that you don’t just book the most expensive flights and all these things.
Mark
46:54
Yeah, most definitely. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it. But speaking of kids, and this is a little bit off topic, Australia became the first country this week to introduce legislation banning kids under the age of 16 from accessing social media.
Anders
47:11
So I
Mark
47:12
don’t know
Anders
47:13
what your thoughts
Mark
47:14
are on that. I think it’s a good thing.
Anders
47:17
I think it’s a good thing. I would say well you need to put an age, you need to put a limit somewhere so 16 is probably, I don’t know if it’s a little late.
Mark
47:30
Yeah, maybe 14, 15, 15 maybe. I’d be probably, maybe more on board with 15 But I guess you know if it’s to stop bullying it doesn’t matter whether you’re 16 14 or 12 literally like you know Yeah,
Anders
47:42
no, it’s
Mark
47:43
a young minds gonna be affected by By any any of that that stuff So yes, I’ll be interested to
Anders
47:50
bad behavior bad behavior in general has has nothing to do with social media. It’s just become easier on social media. And I think bullying has always been around.
Anders
48:02
So I don’t think, yeah, well, the thing about this, what you’ve done in Australia is kids need to adapt modern technology. I mean, it’s in the workplace when they get out in work life. So you need to have like technical agility, I guess. And you need to learn that.
Anders
48:26
It needs to come somehow naturally. So I think 16 is a bit late, but yeah, as politicians, they tend to set up very rigid, fixed framework of rules. So that’s probably what it is. But I’m interested
Mark
48:49
to see how they how they try and Police it or how yeah, they try and
Anders
48:54
force it. Yeah Yeah,
Mark
48:55
he’s bringing bringing age verification and how they have actually verify it, You know and whether the government are gonna come through with these massive fines They reckon they’re gonna find Facebook with and you know and Twitter and all these places if they allow Underage users from Australia, but apparently there’s a lot of governments around the world Watching to see how it goes in Australia like because it there must be there’s obviously a growing sentiment that that social media is you know destroying destroying kids possibly, you know with different through different ways and it definitely definitely have a way shorter attention span because of social media and find it hard to put the phones down at some times and things like that. But then so do I at times.
Anders
49:39
The short videos on TikTok and YouTube shorts, they are addictive. That’s what, I rarely watch any short thing. I know you’ve done a couple of 4 hour channel, Mark, but these are good.
Anders
49:55
But in general, you can see kids in buses and trains and they just scroll down without ever really thinking about it and then they laugh a little bit and then scroll on to the next 1 and all of a sudden an hour has gone by and they’ve not done any homework. I mean so I can actually understand that. I think
Mark
50:20
also… Yeah. Sorry. I think also we’ve lost the art of conversation because of social media, I would say, because… And I fall into this too.
Mark
50:32
It’s way easier just to send a message on Messenger or chat than it is to actually ring someone up and talk to them or have a conversation with them or things like that. And for kids also, like a lot of kids, so winding back the clock when I was a kid, like I was out every weekend and you know, we always had somewhere to go or there was a party on or things like that. Like that sort of thing doesn’t really happen anymore. Not where I am and not with my kids.
Mark
51:00
Like they would be, they spend their Saturday evenings, you know, on the chat with someone or, you know, watching TikTok or,
Anders
51:08
you know, doing things like that. The pandemic certainly didn’t help that because I think it’s really pushed it way further than it would maybe have been. Yeah.
Anders
51:19
Also, I don’t know if kids in Australia, they do this, but here they use these messenger services and they will create these little voice messages. So they will voice message 1 another back and forth instead of having like a proper telephone
Mark
51:40
conversation.
Anders
51:41
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t get that. It’s just why.
Mark
51:46
The art of conversation is dying.
Anders
51:48
Yeah, it is.
Mark
51:50
You know, and this is why I think there’s so many teenagers that have mental health and anxiety problems. Yeah. Because they aren’t out there interacting or Talking to other teens as much as I had to and then when the time comes they they can’t they feel self-conscious they feel anxious because it’s not it’s not a skill I would say it’s not a skill or Or just a social aspect of their life that they’ve ever done To a great extent like we did like back in my day you know I had the phone that was connected to the wall you know yeah it was like that but but you know my parents will be like don’t be making phone calls all the time you know and yeah you know so I’d get on my push bike and you know I’d go to school with kids and after school we’d get on our push bikes and we’d go down to BMX track or
Anders
52:32
yeah
Mark
52:33
something like that and ride around or play football or play cricket you know and we’d come home at dark you know
Anders
52:38
and exactly your parents don’t even know where you were because there was no way to know where you were that’s
Mark
52:44
it you know you’d leave a note on the table and go, hey, I’m going here. This is, I’ll be home at 06:00 or I’ll be home before dark. Like, you
Anders
52:50
know, that’s,
Mark
52:51
and that’s what it was like back then.
Anders
52:53
Yeah, exactly. You know, what
Mark
52:55
we live in a different…
Anders
52:56
In terms of social media, I find actually it’s not always the kids having a bad behavior when it comes to bullying or or being just being mean or vicious comments or what it’s actually often adults and I would even say probably adults my parents, my parents age, like, like, you know, really people who, who, who, who would and should know better.
Mark
53:26
Better.
Anders
53:27
Yeah. They are now, you know, they have their wifi zone at home. They have a tablet and they, they just, you know, comment on anything, anywhere. A lot
Mark
53:39
of keyboard warriors out there, isn’t there?
Anders
53:42
We call them seller people. They sit in their basement and they just, you know, in the blues, you just see the blue light and that’s their, their environment and yeah, keyboard warriors. And, and They are not nice.
Anders
54:01
They are not nice. I always say, you know, just interact with people the way you would, or, you know, converse with people in the same way as you would, you know, in real life. Don’t ever write something. Yeah.
Mark
54:17
My mum and dad always said, if you ever got anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. And that still rings true. It rings true with me today.
Mark
54:24
Like, if I’m…just Have a think about it before you type something. Yeah, you know because You know, it’s no need no need to be nasty, especially to people you don’t know. So why, you know, you can disagree with people. Yeah, of course.
Mark
54:39
Disagreeing’s fine, but don’t be, you know, there’s no need to be mean. Like, you know, that’s why the world is the way it is, because no one’s nice to each other and everyone’s got an opinion on everything. If everyone is minding their own business and looked after what they were doing, the world would be a better place.
Anders
54:54
I’m 1 of those who just recently moved from Twitter to Blue Sky. Blue Sky is a new Twitter-like social media platform. And there was 1 saying, yeah, well, all you people think the blue sky is going to be much better.
Anders
55:07
No, it’s not. Because if the bad habits just move along with it, it won’t change the thing. It’s the people using the platform. I know they’re saying that Elon Musk has changed the algorithms and there’s a great difference now to what becomes viral and what doesn’t because they have modified the algorithms.
Anders
55:31
It’s probably some truth to that, But in general, bad behavior. I mean, if you go to another platform and your bad behavior goes with you and you start behaving badly towards other people there, you won’t have a better experience on that platform at all. I mean, start with yourself. Just be nice, as you say, Mark, be nice to other people.
Anders
55:51
It’s really all there is to it. Speaking of something nice, I saw the pictures of your new car. Yes. Yes.
Mark
56:02
Finally got the new car.
Anders
56:04
What a beast. It’s a big 1.
Mark
56:09
Because it’s a lot bigger than my last 1. I was
Anders
56:11
just going to say there was a there’s a picture on on on your on your social media where you have the new car in front and in the back the little red 1 is just shamefully put away. It is actually I feel
Mark
56:26
a bit sad about that because I’m gonna have to get rid of it and like I’ve had that for I’ve had that longer than I’ve had my children, you know Oh that little red car Me and my wife bought it the first year we were together in like 2001 and We’ve had it ever since But I can’t keep 3 cars and I really it needs some repair work done to it that I’m probably just not willing to do like kilometer wise it’s only hasn’t even done 300, 000 kilometers in 25 years so the engine is pretty good but the body works a bit rough it needs some shockers and new windscreen and you know bits and pieces like this that that in the end I was like well I’m gonna spend all this money and I still would only be able to sell it for next to nothing because it’s 25 years old so yeah well okay I’ve got to you know it’s
Anders
57:14
probably 1 of those if if if if it was in good shape yeah good condition if some backpacker could probably benefit from it. You know, buy it and drive around for 3 months and sell it again to someone. Yeah, yeah.
Mark
57:30
But in Australia, you’ve got to get a roadworthy with it to transfer it and there’s no way they would get a roadworthy without spending a couple thousand dollars to probably fix it up. So yeah, so I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I don’t know whether I’ll just ring the scrap heap And someone will come and give me some money for it because there’s metal in it or there’s a local car club here that Do something called a hill climb?
Mark
57:53
They’ve got like a little dirt track out the road and so they’re proper car club I’m gonna might ring someone with that name might be able to take it and Fix it up and use it out there on their arm on there. They don’t race They have a time trial sort of track around this oh,
Anders
58:05
yeah
Mark
58:05
gravel gravel track that goes up a hill Yeah, I thought that like pretty smooth track and things like that So they they might want to come and take it away and and donate it to them or something like that I think it’s a
Anders
58:15
good idea.
Mark
58:16
They can use it that way or something like that. So be out. I Don’t know how I’m being attached to it then The whole thought of you know sending it to be crushed or something, you know
Anders
58:29
That would that would hurt you Yeah, it
Mark
58:31
does like you know I was like to Rebecca maybe I can take the door off it and like hang it on the outside of our shed or something like that, you know, to say that we’ve got a part of it. Yeah, because yeah, we’ve had it for a long, long time.
Anders
58:45
I can absolutely understand that. There are things, I still have a shirt and jacket or something that I had since I was a teenager, a young man, maybe 30 years old. I never wear it, but it’s just, no, I wanna keep it.
Anders
59:01
It’s kind of a keepsake.
Mark
59:04
We have a passport folder like that, that we’ve always kept our passports in for probably the last 20 years. And we still take it on every trip with us because that’s always been part of the journey. So yeah, it continues on.
Mark
59:19
I’ve often wanted to get a new 1. And I even bought a fake Louis Vuitton Ziploc, little purse thing to put it in. And my wife then made me put the other folder inside that if I wanted to.
Anders
59:31
Yeah, but that folder comes with you.
Mark
59:33
Yeah, so that folder comes with us everywhere. So it’s 1 of them little travel things. That’s life, though, Isn’t it?
Mark
59:42
We all have our have our little quirky things and Yeah, I probably keep way too much stuff that I probably should throw out. My wife probably does as well.
Anders
59:52
Yeah, we all do. We all do.
Mark
59:55
Yeah. The things we get attached to and we go, hey, it’s always come with us. I need to… I need to…
Anders
01:00:00
To take it with us. My daughter always took her teddy bear with us when traveling and I think it was only the last, oh it was a doll, it was a pink doll called Dolly. She had 2 of them, exactly the same and I think only last year did she stop bringing them with us. Like she doesn’t sleep with them anymore, but she used to take him because we’d always Yeah, they’d always come on every trip with us So they used to go in in the suitcase and sit on her sit on the bed in in the hotel room I were out and yeah, there was dolly and old dolly Because 1 was older than the other, we thought we’d lost the first 1, so we bought another 1 exactly the same.
Anders
01:00:34
So we ended up having old Dolly and new Dolly. And old Dolly and new Dolly, yeah, used to come everywhere with us. We were traveling. So yeah, it was only I reckon last year was the first time that she left them at home just because, yeah, just not that she needed them, but it’s because they came with us all
Mark
01:00:47
the time. But you know, it’s fine to feel a bit nostalgic. I guess the older you get, the more nostalgia you sort of have.
Mark
01:00:58
And for instance, this past week, we just decorated for Christmas and we have all these ornaments around the house and on Christmas tree and all and when we open up the the decoration the box with decor we have several boxes with decorations and and we take them from from the basement and we start unpacking. And there are certain things, certain ornaments, they have to hang like in the same…
Anders
01:01:28
Certain place.
Mark
01:01:28
Certain place. I particularly have a wooden carved Mickey Mouse, an old Walt Disney thing that’s really probably 25 years old. And it’s just, you know, I’m a little bit weary about it.
Mark
01:01:42
And I want to do it myself to make sure that if something happens, at least I can’t blame anyone else
Anders
01:01:48
at least I’m doing it yeah someone’s gonna break it I’m gonna break it
Mark
01:01:56
exactly yeah so so yeah there we are nostalgia yeah have you decorated you’re not gonna decorate your house for Christmas no
Anders
01:02:04
we left haven’t haven’t this year because we’re going but normally my wife would have a tree up probably sometime about now. You got a real tree obviously.
Mark
01:02:15
No, no, we stopped that because for 2 reasons really, we wanted to be more sustainable. So we have like a real, I spent a bit of money on this actually, I bought a real, authentic looking fake Christmas tree. It is pricey, but they say, and it’s not sustainable if you only use it for 1 year, but you have to, I think it’s 6 or 7 years and now we’re on the eighth year.
Mark
01:02:45
So now it’s sustainable. You’ve had it for a while then. Yeah. We wanted to have more sustainability there because there was in the media here, there was some, there was some stories about Christmas trees being sprayed with pesticides and stuff like that.
Mark
01:03:05
So that was kind of 1 of the reasons why I said, no, I don’t want that in my house. And then the other reason was that after Christmas here in Germany, you typically have your Christmas tree in the house up until the Holy 3 Kings Day. That’s the 6th of January. I don’t know actually if The Holy 3 Kings is directly translated from German.
Mark
01:03:33
I don’t know what it’s called. Probably it has some different name in the English speaking world. It’s a long period and the needles would fall off. It’s kind of not really nice looking at the end of that long period, you know, because from early December to early January, it’s about a month.
Mark
01:04:03
So it would really look tired that the tree around that time. And actually the third reason also is that it’s really hard to get rid of your tree here. You have to take it quite a bit further down the road to a certain collection area of old Christmas trees and then they will, you know, the city will come and collect them. So all these things, you know, it was just too messy, it was dirty in the end and it was, no, let’s just have a fake Christmas tree and we’ve had it for like 8 years now and it really works.
Anders
01:04:39
I’ve got to say then I’m probably the opposite, I’m the unsustainable tree guy, I don’t have a real tree but the last few years I’ve just gone to the local shop and bought 1 of the cheap trees and I throw it away. Yeah Yeah end of Christmas and I go buy another 1 the next year cuz I can never get it back in the box properly And that really really annoys me that oh,
Mark
01:05:00
0, so you buy a fake Christmas tree
Anders
01:05:09
I’ve only been doing this for the last I got probably 5 years or so But yeah, I could never get them back in the box and it used
Mark
01:05:16
to really be… That is a real issue, but I’ve sort of got the hang of it now. Also because…
Mark
01:05:22
It’s like a tent. Yeah, but also because it really was pricey, so I don’t want to waste the money. I’m just too concerned about that. But now it really does look good because the first year or 2, it would be too difficult to really make it look like a real tree.
Mark
01:05:43
But now that we’ve had it for so many years, it’s sort of intertwined and it’s just all the branches are just… Yep. Still I can still manage to get it into the box every year. Excellent.
Mark
01:05:59
So it’s… But it’s increasingly harder. I must admit.
Anders
01:06:04
When you were traveling long term, where did you spend Christmas?
Mark
01:06:09
We spent Christmas in San Francisco. And actually we bought a little fake Christmas tree that we had with us in each hotel room that whole month, the whole December. It was with lights, with colored lights, and it was really just like a 50 centimeter or something.
Mark
01:06:32
It was nice. We had it in the trunk of the car. So the first thing I would do when we entered a new hotel would set up that tree because then Anthony, they have a nice tree here as well. Yeah, they do.
Mark
01:06:44
So yeah, But we stayed in San Francisco. It was Southern California, no, Southern California. So it was a different Christmas. Yeah, even the whole thing of the 25th is also a thing that we, because we celebrate on the 24th.
Anders
01:07:02
Yeah. Yeah. And Americans are the 25th.
Mark
01:07:06
They are. Yeah.
Anders
01:07:06
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Mark
01:07:07
But we, my mom came out and, and, spent Christmas with us. And, We then went from San Francisco, I think on the 27th or 28th, we drove down to Nevada, to Las Vegas, where we had New Year’s. So that was nice.
Mark
01:07:29
And then we, on the first of January, we flew to Washington, D.C. And then we spent the last month of our U.S. Trip, we spent that on the East Coast, in Washington, and New York City, and North Carolina. So we went from literally, we went from Nevada, the Nevada desert.
Mark
01:07:57
Yeah. Las Vegas was pretty warm, balmy, nice. And then we went to Washington DC, which was a minus 15 degrees and snowstorm.
Anders
01:08:10
I’ve never been to America, I’m not sure whether I’ll ever go there, not through any great reason. It’s a it’s a fair way from Australia, but so is Europe, I guess. Yeah but this is I’ve got nothing against it, but and I probably will I shouldn’t say I won’t I probably I probably go there 1 day
Mark
01:08:29
I can certainly recommend
Anders
01:08:30
I’ve just never had no I’ve never really had That desire I know a lot of people, you know, really like to go there and want to go there. And because it’s got a lot to do with, you know, growing up and the American culture that everyone knows and things. Yeah.
Anders
01:08:45
And probably that was more 1 of the reasons why I actually don’t want to go there is because I like to go places that you know speak a different language and have a different culture and eat different foods and yeah hence the same and hence the same as England why I’ve I’ve been in England a few times, but only really to see people that I That
Mark
01:09:02
I already knew yeah
Anders
01:09:05
To go there
Mark
01:09:06
You mean the culture is too similar to Australia? Yeah, basically. Yeah, so there’s no real difference.
Mark
01:09:12
I mean, I can sort of relate to that actually. Yeah. Yeah, I am I obviously if you were to go to the US, I would say, you know, definitely go to New York. I think 1 of the most fascinating thing, New York is probably my favorite place in the US.
Mark
01:09:30
And it’s not really, you can’t really compare it to the rest of the US because it’s so different. And, and there’s so, it’s so international and, and so full of history. What I found remarkable the first time I was in, in, in New York City, I was looking at skyscrapers that were well over 100 years old. And like 100 years ago, we still had like small villages in Denmark.
Mark
01:09:59
We obviously had Copenhagen and they were starting to build tall buildings, but nothing like that. I mean, so New York City in terms of big cities, it’s a very historic city. And I find that fascinating really. Yeah.
Mark
01:10:15
But it is, I can recommend New York City. Absolutely. I can recommend America in general. I think you feel like you have it with the United States as I have it with big parts of Asia.
Mark
01:10:33
I’m not really, I have nothing against it and I wouldn’t mind going, but it’s not the first thing of my list. It’s not where I immediately would wanna go because it’s very warm and I’m struggling with that. And very humid. So, so the first is literally, yeah, sorry.
Mark
01:10:55
No, 1 of the, the, the, the next things that w that we probably will go to is we’re talking about Canada and you know the wide open spaces of Canada, the grand nature, the mountain areas and stuff like that. That would be fascinating for us and then…
Anders
01:11:13
I’d like to go to Canada. I’d go to Canada before America But I think probably too 1 of the main reasons is I have to make a specific trip to go to America. Like if I go to Asia, it’s close to Australia.
Anders
01:11:26
If I go to Europe, I can go to multiple countries. But America is a large, large country.
Mark
01:11:31
It is.
Anders
01:11:32
It’s like, well, I’ve got to make a specific trip there I can’t stop there on the way back from going somewhere because it’s on the opposite side of the world for us to compare to You know where Asia and Europe sort of follow around each other from Australia You know and but America is yeah, it’s pretty much on the opposite side. I have a real hankering to go to South America though I’d like to go. Oh, yeah, I’d like to get Argentina and Yeah, and Chile probably so that is definitely on my list.
Mark
01:12:01
Yeah, I’d
Anders
01:12:02
like to go to Brunus Aries. It looks like a lovely city and Montevideo, which is the capital of Uruguay, is only across the river from it. So places like that I like because you can hit up 2 places or 2 countries, you know, basically just by going to the 1 destination, so which is really handy if you want to see a couple of different places while you’re going in the same area that doesn’t cost you a lot to actually see 2 different places and things
Mark
01:12:33
like that. Yeah, that would be smart. That would be good to Yeah.
Mark
01:12:40
Yeah. What you say about, you know, going somewhere sort of central and you can actually have more destinations without traveling through distances. South America is on my list too. I would definitely like to go to Machu Picchu in the Andes.
Anders
01:13:08
Yeah, that’d be nice. The bottom of Chile, Ushuaia or whatever it is where the glaciers are, where they get the boats to Antarctica a lot from there.
Mark
01:13:19
Yeah, true.
Anders
01:13:19
But yeah, there’s a lot to be said about multipurpose destinations. Hence why, luckily, we’ve spent a fair bit of time in Germany, but we’ve got these really good friends in Freiburg, and Freiburg, like the French border, is only 20 minutes and the Swiss border is only about 30 minutes, you know, so it’s all in a nice little pocket. Luxembourg was only about an hour and a half, so you know we were able to get up a heap of different places, you know, from this 1 destination within, you know, 2 hours, you know.
Anders
01:13:48
Too bad you
Mark
01:13:49
don’t get a stamp in your passport anymore now Well this is it Nice collection
Anders
01:13:55
You know when people say where have you been I could say I’ve probably been to France about 50 times But you know I might have went 20 times from the same city just to cross the border.
Mark
01:14:03
Yeah, exactly.
Anders
01:14:05
And back. You know, what you do today, we’re staying in France, we’ve popped over to Germany,
Mark
01:14:09
you know.
Anders
01:14:10
And for Europeans, that’s, you know, that happens all the time. But for Australians, that’s really novel when you can say to someone, yeah, cars popped into a different country, you know, because we don’t have no borders, obviously. So and you’ve got to fly or take a ship to go to another country.
Mark
01:14:23
So say, when you can say to someone, yeah, car has popped into a different country, because we don’t have no borders, obviously, so and you’ve got to
Anders
01:14:24
fly or take a ship to go to another country. So say when you can say to someone, I went to 2 countries today, things like this. And yeah, so it’s quite a novel thing.
Mark
01:14:30
But you had, speaking of novel things, I thought you had, it was pretty strange. You have time zones in Australia and South Australia has like a half hour difference. It’s not an hour.
Mark
01:14:47
It’s just a half hour. I That was confusing
Anders
01:14:53
Perth is 3 hours sometimes 4 hours, but we also have daylight saving which Victoria and New South Wales do, but Queensland doesn’t. So if you live on the border and you, a lot of people live in maybe New South Wales, but work in Queensland and vice versa, then it’s really,
Mark
01:15:11
Oh, man.
Anders
01:15:12
That’d be a real struggle. And sometimes daylight saving finishes different times in Victoria and New South Wales as well. So there’s a big border town called Albury-Wodonga, which is a big rural center, probably fairly big population, 20, 000 or 30, 000 or something like that.
Anders
01:15:26
And yeah, so at the time, if we’re not all in sync, well, they might have to cross the bridge an hour later or an hour earlier to go to work. Yeah. So it’s all, all a bit strange.
Mark
01:15:36
But why, why the half hour? Why not a total hour? It’s just, it was just weird.
Mark
01:15:42
I
Anders
01:15:43
don’t know why they do it. Like China, even though China is really big, they have 1 time across the whole country even though even if they’re in you know Even if the timelines are changing in the countries around them. Everything is Beijing time all across.
Mark
01:15:56
We don’t care I think this is how
Anders
01:15:57
it is. Yeah, yeah, which probably makes sense like, you know, I don’t see but surely it’s daylight and dark you know at the wrong times in some places in a country that big I’m not I’m not really sure but
Mark
01:16:09
it must go across at least 4 or 5 time zones I guess yeah yeah
Anders
01:16:13
definitely it would have to like because I think we flew from Beijing to like al Maddie which is just across the border from From China in Kazakhstan and it was about a four-hour flight from Beijing So so, you know surely it’s got to be a couple of thousand kilometers in 2 and a half 3000 kilometers like like across So there’s surely time zones that are being changed over that amount of distance.
Mark
01:16:38
Absolutely yeah.
Anders
01:16:40
That would do you no good for the jet lag.
Mark
01:16:43
No, That’s a topic for another episode.
Anders
01:16:47
Yes, that is a topic for another episode.
Mark
01:16:51
This has been wonderful. Once again, Mark, almost 1 and a half hours already. Wow, we need to wrap it up for the week.
Mark
01:17:02
As always, you have been listening to Southern Summers and Northern Winters with me, Anders and Mark in Australia. Mark, you’re still there for the next couple of weeks, right, in Australia?
Anders
01:17:16
I am. I have 2 more Mondays at least and then we might try and jump online 1 night and do a test
Mark
01:17:23
and we should do that
Anders
01:17:23
connections like yeah in China and then maybe we can do something the next night or something like that yeah yeah or even in in Bangkok I’m sure they I’m sure the Internet will be better in Thailand than
Mark
01:17:36
oh, yeah
Anders
01:17:37
Yeah in China, but if we can’t get any good Internet in China We’ll just I’ll invite my daughter on 1 night when we’re doing it from Australia and we can Peg her with a heap of questions about what living in China is like anyway, so
Mark
01:17:49
China special. Yeah, we yeah definitely. Yeah
Anders
01:17:53
Yeah, thank you everyone for tuning in Don’t forget to go to the Facebook page the YouTube chat page the Instagram page and the website page all that, Southern summers and Northern winters.
Mark
01:18:06
Yes. And, take care. If you travel, travel safely and, we’ll be back in, in a week or so.
Anders
01:18:16
We’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
The Team
