Solo travelling as a type B person ☆Part One

My three weeks backpacking experience in SouthEast Asia

Dear reader, get out your map

Pick somewhere and just run…

Dear reader/Taylor Swift

Hi! Thanks for finding my space where I share my unhinged thoughts and experiences👼🏻

I’m so excited for today’s article, I’m going to write (mentally talking to you) about my 3-week backpacking trip to Vietnam and Thailand.

This was actually in March 2024, so it’s been like a year and a half, but I clearly remember everyone I met and everything I experienced.

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My uni is famous for having a never-ending (110 days) spring break, and I decided to finally do what I wanted to do for a long, long time. Solo trip to Southeast Asia 🔥

For those who don’t know, I live in Tokyo, Japan, so it’s fairly close and cheap to fly to Vietnam.

I was working at a German restaurant then, and that’s where I earned my budget, sipping German lager in the backyard and secretly getting sausages from the kitchen worker I was close with.

At that time, I mean still, I was broke af as a uni student living on my own without that much aid from my parents, so I was cutting a large part of my food budget.

Anyway, I spent about 1200 dollars in these 3 weeks of travel. This includes flight fees I paid to shorten my trip because I was fucking obsessed with this guy who was leaving for Australia for working holiday in April.

I couldn’t resist the urge to go back… one thing about me is I always go insane and do unbelievable stuff when I like a guy. Personally, this is one of them I can’t forgive myself for (This is the least cringy one, she did a lot more batshit crazy stuff guys, trust me…)

Here’s the route I took.

Tokyo→Hanoi→NinhBinh→Hanoi→Hoi An→Ho Chi Minh→Bangkok

→Back to Tokyo

One thing I regret about my travel is that I brought physical books instead of a Kindle. I took many flights and train rides, but physical books are so annoying when you have a massive backpack with you, and you will eventually finish reading…

Trust me on this one, you need Kindle, a phone is not enough, you will run out of battery, and the internet is really unstable.

As soon as I arrived in Hanoi, I went outside and saw taxi drivers yelling for us to get into their taxis. I knew sometimes they charge us travellers more than the locals, so I tried to call a taxi by the infamous Grab app.

(You guys have to know that I’m a type B person. Which means I’m so messy and another-level-unbothered. One time, when I went to South Korea with my sister, the tickets for the express train we were supposed to get were sold out, so we had to take the slower local train to the airport. My sister was having a panic attack when she found out the ticket was sold out, but on the contrary, I, a little sister with a mindset of thinking nothing is serious and everything will turn out fine, did not react at all. I was laid af. I was like okay, then we just have to take the local train lol it’s not the end of the world… and we ended up catching the flight last minute.)

My sister tells me that story to this day whenever something happens.

However, my dumbass mind did not think of uploading my creditcard before arrival.

What happened here was that since I needed to get authorisation for attaching my credit card, I needed my Japanese phone number. Since I already have changed to SIM card number and there was no fucking internet signal at the airport, it turned out I can’t use taxi.

Guys, here’s the little tip: get an eSIM card before arriving. Here’s one I used(https://amzn.to/3FCGgR6), and do not forget that your phone number will be different once you use the SIM card. If you still activate your country’s phone number, it might cost a fortune from all the data roaming.

Almost midnight, too scared to get on the local taxi and pay with cash, guess what I did?

Yes, I was chilling like an idiot. I was thinking, you know, thing happens, someone will help me.

Mind you, this was in a country where I know nothing about their language and transport system.

And as it always has, it did turn out fine indeed.

Let me introduce you to my life-saving Spanish beauty, Vicky.

She just turned up from nowhere and asked me if I wanted to share a cab to the city centre with her. Luckily, our hostels are close to each other, and I trusted her 100% with my instinct and decided to share a taxi with her.

It is quite common for solo backpackers to do this if they are heading in the same direction.

I gave her my cash for the ride, and she called an Uber through the Grab app, and we had a nice chat on the journey.

That is how I safely got to my first-ever hostel and began my adventure…

Here’s the view I took from the hostel room window from my bed.