Change is baked into Megatrip’s DNA. It’s coded and entwined within the same crowded double helix as exploration, endurance, and gluttony. Remember, without an initial act of dramatic life upheaval, this bizarre journey/adventure/career suicide wouldn’t even exist. So it makes sense that the spirit of constant flux be honored and maintained for its duration. The perpetual rotation of scenery certainly contributes to this dedicated dynamism, but location shuffling alone isn’t enough to achieve the perennial toe-tip quality Megatrip deserves.
Which means Megatrip has to be more than one kind of travel, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it justice. This isn’t a spring break getaway or a family vacation or a study abroad. This is wanderlightning in a bottle made out of explora borealis. The moment we can pin down exactly what we’re dong here, we’ve failed. So with that in mind, and without any real premeditation other than a commitment to remain changing, we’ve now found ourselves deep in the latest phase of Megatrip’s constant evolution: The Honeymoon.
First, to provide some context and to highlight a fact many, including ourselves, easily lose track of, Megatrip was always devised to be our honeymoon. Before planning our wedding, before writing our vows, and definitely before traveling to Amsterdam, Greece, and Oktoberfest after our ceremony (if you think the timing of our nuptials coinciding with the German intoxathon was coincidence, you don’t know us very well), before all of that, there was the idea to do something bigger, weirder, and riskier. In fact, we’ve consistently referred to those weeks in Europe as our “Post-Wedding Trip” so as not to confuse them with the untamed beast we were carefully nursing into maturity behind the closed doors of marital preparation and private browser windows. Though in complete honesty, the word “honeymoon” may have been casually deployed here and there in certain workplace situations, like, say, the request for three weeks off. David would often toe the line by mentioning that our real honeymoon would come when we quit our jobs just to travel, knowing that, due to both the insanity of the idea and his own well-cultivated unreliability, no one would take it seriously. Whoops.
The origins of this honeymoon idea are murky, and as we have written, it didn’t materialize overnight. There was a time when we were considering a number of different honeymoon ideas: overwater bungalows in the Indian Ocean, Balinese canopy infinity pools, pyramid-view hotel suites in Giza, private Namibian desert lodges, secluded Stellenbosch wine estates, a hotel in Singapore named The Vagabond that references sensuality so much in its literature we honestly question whether the “g” is pronounced hard or soft. And somewhere along the way the question morphed from “Which do we do?” to “What if somehow we do all of them?”
And that’s where we currently find ourselves; Reveling in the cheesiest of accommodation, depleting our Chase Ultimate Rewards points at an alarming rate, milking this newlywed thing for all it’s worth, getting genuinely fed up with the amount of elaborate rose petal displays we have to dispose of. Megatrip is the ultimate celebration (and test) of our now legally recognized union. An opportunity for us to take a huge step, leave our former lives, and start something completely new and different together. On a balcony overlooking a world heritage site.
But wait, weren’t we doing that from the start? Well, yes. But the Honeymoon Phase is distinct from what preceded it, a Megatrip epoch we can comfortably refer to as the Age Of Imitation Backpacking. An era for which its Southeast Asian setting was wonderfully appropriate. We stayed in some “hotels” that smelled like overly Febreezed dorm rooms. We rode Uber motorcycles for 50 cents. We went to all night beach parties. We ate undersanitary street food on plastic stools. We swung in hammocks at reggae bars where joints were cheaper than beer. We fell victim to several laundry scams. We made our travel insurance provider sweat in more ways than one. And it was glorious. But it also made the subtle transition to the more relaxing and (debatably) more mature Honeymoon Phase even more satisfying. The patio of the Maldivian bungalow we are currently writing this from feels that much sweeter pulling double duty as a romantic getaway and a place to profusely sweat out a month’s worth of glucose-tinis served in glorified paint cans.
No iteration of Megatrip exists in a bubble (except maybe the part where we slept in an actual bubble in Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert), and the Honeymoon Phase definitely overlapped with and borrowed from what came before it. But all that matters to us now is that the celebration feels worthy, and that we should enjoy it before this trip stays true to itself and becomes something else entirely.
