About 10 minutes into our first sightseeing day in Ho Chi Min City Joanna slipped while running through a park. Laura ran back to the hotel to get a plaster, knee cleaned and plaster applied before continuing on the days sightseeing. It was then that we decided that we needed a survival day bag.

Initially the bag was going to be used to keep our bamboo skewers which we take everywhere and try and do our little bit to reduce the amount of plastic straws used (obviously quite a few juices have been drunk on this trip by MoJo!) This has then evolved into “the pink bag” carrying all sorts of useful bits that we think we might need and coming in very handy various times ever since.

Below is a full list of the items included:

4 bamboo straws and straw cleaning brush

3 wet wipes (often given with meals in China, Korea and Japan)

Paper napkins

No biting nail varnish (to stop Joanna sucking fingers!)

Insect cream (before)

After bite cream (for when we forget to put before insect cream on!)

Sweets (saved from hotel stays)

Travel drops for motion sickness (ginger juice)

Hand sanitiser

Yellow girl (easy chopstick holder)

Empty plastic bag

Plasters (various sizes, mostly “frozen” or “princess” design)

Rehydration salts

Paracetamol

Imodium

Neurofen

Plaster tape

Alcohol swabs

Colouring pencils

Plastic cutlery

Since this photo was taken we have also added chopsticks which after 3 months in Asia we are getting very good at using!

We got very good at packing quickly and hardly leaving anything behind, although as we went we did have an increasing list of items that had been lost along the way – Tom’s hat, Joanna’s neck pillow, always just one flipflop of Molly’s…Laura’s phone into the water was probably the biggest loss, along with the chef knife that had to be given up at a train station in China.

We probably travelled slightly heavier than we needed but wore and used everything we had. We had three check-in bags between us, two of them rucksacks and one a suitcase, a day rucksack and the girls two scooter bags which usually went as hand luggage.

Accommodation wise we had a wonderful variety, and by luck more than good planning the next place we were staying was always what we felt like, be it with friends, in a hotel or a camper van. Tom did a wonderful photo story on Instagram of all the room numbers we stayed. His second a day film was also a fun way of remembering the trip.

Travel wise, we were in the air for 98 hours (not including check in, waiting and boarding!) on 29 flights on 14 different airlines covering 64907km. Other than that we traveled within countries by train, many different sizes of boats, camper vans, cars, a side car, trams, horses and bikes.

Tom and I decided to set ourselves the challenge of running everywhere we slept which we almost did, perhaps not when we were sleeping on a boat. We clocked up around 100 hours of running each.