Many years ago, a friend of mine was working for a company who’s CEO at the time is now a very Senior US Government Official (no names mentioned).

One day, my friend got a call from the boss, informing him that he was planning a 14 day trip, and he wanted my friend to create an itinerary so that he could visit every one of the 22 offices that the company had, scattered throughout Asia.

After recovering from the inevitable paroxysm's of mirth, my friend eventually managed to compose himself suuficiently well to fax the CEO a map of the USA, superimposed on to a map of Asia, to demonstrate the relative sizes of the two continents. Pretty soon afterwards, he received a very apologetic faxed reply from one extremely humbled CEO!

Many people don't really grasp it, but Asia is a big, big place.

Think about the size of Russia (only a small part of which is in Europe), then add China and India, and you are talking about absolutely vast tracts of land, and millions upon millions of people.

This size inevitably means that Asia is a veritable melting pot of different races, cultures and languages, all of which will have varying degrees of fascination for visitors from the West.

Thus, it is a fairly common occurrence that a visitor to Asia (especially a first time visitor) will try to do too much, by perhaps trying to visit too many countries or places in one trip.

Don't be too ambitious would be my advice. If you have only two or three week’s vacation, don't try to visit two or three countries moving from town to town or from one attraction to another on a daily basis. By doing this, you guarantee that you see little of anything, and learn nothing about what it is that you are seeing.

Far better to take your time, relax, and soak up the culture of one country at a time. Enjoy the food, discover the people and give yourself adequate time to see what the country has to offer.

Give yourself the chance to become truly immersed in the culture of that one country, because it is in this way that, in my experience, you ensure that your vacation becomes a genuinely enriching experience, rather than a pell-mell race to “fit everything in”.

Wherever your vacation takes you, it is, by definition, meant to relax you. Traveling from place to place every day for two or three weeks is the exact opposite of this ideal!

Remember, if dear old DC (oops!) couldn’t do it with the resources of a multi-million dollar corporation at his disposal, you cannot “do” Asia in one trip either!

 A Short Snippet   Continues Here....

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