Currently traveling in 3 countries this October

October is a busy month for travels! This afternoon, I just arrived in Bangkok, my fourth visit to this beautiful capital city since 2000 and will be staying here till the 25th of which, I will be flying back to Davao via Manila. I initially planned to just travel to Indonesia for two weeks when I scored a promo fare in early September. You see, I still haven’t visited the largest archipelagic nation in the world (now, I did! Check here) but due to some changes, that one country plan morphed into a three nation sojourn.

I was supposed to be in Indonesia 5-19 October but two things changed it:

• A call from Cebu Pacific for a familiarization tour for travel bloggers in Nagoya, Japan, and
• TBEX Asia 2015

After just having visited Japan last June, the lure of an all expense paid trip to Aichi, a prefecture that I only passed by, proved to be too much of a temptation that I gave in. But that means changing my travel dates to Jakarta much later. But of course, because of some promo fare that I found in AirAsia, I booked a flight from Manila to Kuala Lumpur to stay for two nights then head to Jakarta. Done.

But Anton of Our Awesome Planet blog messaged me if I will be pushing through with joining the Philippine delegation for TBEX Asia, a big conference of travel bloggers which is coming to Asia for the first time and happening from 15-17 October led me at a fork. Should I or should I not? Being a travel blogger, it is perhaps a very important event. After a day’s thinking and research, I decided to join TBEX. And had a batch of business cards made specifically for this event.

That last move meant that I have to give up my plans of finally traveling to Jakarta as well as giving up three flight routes that cost me a total of P7,000+. Darn. But I booked a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok via AirAsia which was on promo at the time of booking.

Well, there. Japan, Malaysia and Thailand. All in twenty days (minus 12 hours stopover in Manila from Japan). Good thing that a friend told me that I can still use my Manila-Dubai tickets early next year or I might have given that up too. Despite sacrificing that amount of money lost to unused tickets (promo fare thus unreroutable and other limitations) I do expect that the trade off with joining TBEX Asia will eventually payoff later.