Asia | When | Where | How | Excited

My wife and I are excited and overwhelmed with the many options available to us for Asia trip. I am really looking for help and guidance as I am starting to plan for our 30th wedding anniversary in May 2019. We want to go somewhere more exoctic than what we have done in the past. Those have been US based trips, cruises and all inclusive to caribbean, Canada, Hawaii (yes US), Europe from London, to Paris, to Rome, to Venice, to Amsterdam, Antwerp, etc, and have been on African safari.

Our initial thinking is somewhere in Asia, more specifically but not limited to China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, etc. We are open to River Cruise, Bus Tour, Flight from city to city, or any combination thereof. We are planning 14 -21 days and would like to end the trip in one of the nice Romantic Thailand, Bali or Maldives, etct islands for a few days. We also would like to experience what the locals do and any tour companies that help with planning activities with locals would be interested in hearing.

We would like what you have experienced, what you liked, did not and would change if you were to do it again. Where you went, what you did and what tour company you did it through and when did you go and when should you go.

Can't wait to learn from your experience and sharing ideas.

Moved to the main River Cruising forum. You might also want to post this in the Asia forum:

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=70

We took the Uniworld China and Tibet tour last fall and loved it. The river cruise portion on the Three Gorges is only for 3 days and the rest is a land tour. I would not want to be on this river for more than 3 days so that was perfect. We started in Bejing and ended in Singapore which is the preferred direction in my opinion. It was 14 days and we added a day on each end. Some in our group added on a trip to Hong Kong at the end, but we preferred to save that for another trip. This was a fully escorted tour and we found the guides to be excellent.

If you are looking at other types of cruises, there are several lines that take you to a variety of countries and Asian ports. We love the Windstar cruises and they have just started to enter the Asian market with the yachts that they purchased from Seaborne a few years ago - about 210 guest maximum on the yachts.

We're pretty experienced Asia travelers, traveling mostly independently. For instance, we did a six-week trip on our own through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and found it fairly simple to book everything from the US. All three countries are now on the main tourist route, and infrastructure was generally good. (Since you mentioned Cambodia, if you're really interested in Angkor Wat I'd advise you to allot longer in the area than package tours do and visit more of the Ankgor sites at a slower pace, avoiding the crush of massive groups when possible.)

China, though, we visited on a fairly inexpensive group tour from San Francisco offered by World Spree. It was the way to go - they did a good job of looking after us and got us into Tibet with no problem. Checked off the must-sees - Great Wall, Forbidden City, terra cotta warriors, pandas, etc. There were a number of long bus rides involved, but I would not try negotiating China on my own.

Going to Japan, we travelled on a Princess Cruise and that was outstanding. Since it's an island nation, we got to a lot of the most interesting places, and in several made use of the Goodwill Guides, locals who volunteer to show visitors around for no more than the price of their transportation and airfare. Truly an outstanding way to see Japanese towns from the viewpoint of a local. Princess runs a lot of Japanese itineraries and you might have a look. Passengers were a mix of Japanese, Chinese, and Westerners, and language barriers were a bit imposing, though. Go a few days early and spend time on your own in Tokyo and/or Kyoto. (And Tokyo DisneySea is generally thought of as the best theme park in the world, if you're into that. Really great.)

Last on the Asian bucket list was Bhutan, which was an amazing experience, like I'd imagine Tibet was before the Han Chinese moved in. Has to be visited in a group tour or tour run by a local, not cheap, but a once-in-a-lifetime treat.

Hope some of that helps.