Traveling while living abroad
Taking advantage of your location- Post 1 of 3
I used to live in Delaware. <Turns away in shame>. Just saying that actually gives Delaware too much attention. It’s a state.
“It’s the FIRST state!” locals would emphatically exclaim. My Air Force family moved there right after my high school graduation in Hawai’i, and it was a real boner killer. With deep golden skin and sun-bleached hair, we stood out amongst the welcoming crowd of vitamin D deficient faces.
As our pasty new comrades tried to grasp at any straws to convince us that this wasn’t the absolute worst place in the United States to be sent after just spending 3 years in paradise, they offered a silver lining.
“It’s really fast to travel outside of Delaware!”
They should put that on the license plates. “Delaware! It’s easy to escape!” Now, you know a place sucks pretty bad when the best comment you can hitch to it is that it’s really simple to leave, but there we were. Delaware movie theaters were slow to show The Blair Witch Project, so a hop, skip, and a jump later got us to Maryland where we watched the impetus to my proceeding decade of nightmares. Thanks, Delaware.
Now, I am in no way comparing Delaware to India, but I am suggesting that your proximate living location can open travel doors you would have never considered. Would I have wanted to go to Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania? No, not really. Not in a vacuum, at least. But since we were close, it made it possible and convenient to try those states out, and I’m glad I did.
Living in Southern India gives us a great launchpad for traveling around Southeast Asia; Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka are all within a few inches from us on the map and as Liz Lemon would say, “I want to go to there.”
The kids recently had a 9-day break from school, and the original plan was to explore our neighboring coastal state to the south, Kerala. Our Kerala backwaters plan took a sharp nosedive off a cliff though when a Nipah virus outbreak there happened. Not wanting to die and such had us turn our attention to places outside of India for our little vacation, and we ended up choosing the closest one; Sri Lanka.
I had not thought much about Sri Lanka prior to this trip, but a quick check on the U.S. State Department Travel Advisory website showed it at a Level 2- Exercise Increased Caution. Uh oh. We replaced the word “Sri Lanka” with the word “India” and it turns out India is ALSO a Level 2. Hmmmm. Since it seemed we had unknowingly already been living life on the edge, we decided to continue to throw caution to the wind and jetted off on a 55-minute flight, via Sri Lankan Air, to a new and exciting country!
There is a lot of rich history and culture in Sri Lanka, along with breathtaking places and UNESCO heritage sites. A trip with kids requires a bit of compromise by everyone, so this would be an educational trip but also a relaxing one. We decided that we would focus on our 2 main desires: a safari, and beach time. Anything else we got to do would be considered icing on the cake.
Sri Lanka is going through a hard transition right now. There is a petrol shortage along with outrageous inflation (almost 50%) of basic goods and services. They are recently recovering from a civil war and the pandemic and government corruption has handicapped any real progress. We were aware and sensitive to these problems but also knew that every dollar we spent, every hotel we booked, and every kilometer we drove would help Sri Lanka recover, and boy did Sri Lanka gain recovery that week!
Please read my next two posts to hear about our whirlwind week of discovery!