THE VALUE OF TRAVELLING WITH A BEST FRIEND

This trip came about because last summer, after a year spent in the depths of grief and despair after losing my beloved husband after a shock cancer diagnosis, I realised remaining stuck and never leaving the house wasn’t an option. You can read more about this in my post ‘Heartbroken‘.

I’ve always been at my happiest when exploring somewhere new and adventurous with my husband. Then, after losing him, something shifted. The confidence and sense of possibility that had always carried me forward seemed to vanish alongside him. I decided that if I was to ever to pick myself up again, I needed to travel again.

In his honour, I planned to travel on the first anniversary of his death and to return three months later, on our wedding anniversary. Flying from the UK on the 6th March 2026 also meant arriving back in Asia on my birthday.

I say ‘back in Asia’ because, for me, this trip was a kind of pilgrimage. My husband and I had travelled through Asia just three years before but I was struggling to recall our happy times there. They seemed to be buried so deeply beneath my unhappy burden of grief and trauma. It’s hard for me to explain. But I felt I needed to travel again to tangibly reclaim some of the happiest memories of that time with my husband.

So, when I invited my lifelong best friend Dina to share my travel plans of three months travelling across Asia, I wasn’t sure how she would react. To my delight, she was intrigued, and she immediately warmed to the possibility of travelling with me.

I explained how travelling and revisiting some of my favourite places in Asia might help to reinstate my happy memories. I also wanted to show Dina all these amazing places I knew, so we might make new memories, to hold dear and to talk about into our old age. As it turned out, Dina was standing at a crossroads of her own. The possibility of retirement was suddenly on the table and she wasn’t sure that she was ready to redefine herself beyond a lifetime of work. She too loved to travel and relished the idea of more time to do so but wasn’t sure taking retirement now was the right option.

So, although our circumstances were different, we were both confronting significant life transitions and searching for a sense of direction. It was decided that if Dina could secure a sabbatical from work we would embarked on this grand adventure together. We both thought this extraordinary journey across four different countries in Asia would be a wonderful way to celebrate our long friendship and we also hoped it would help us to navigate the changes unfolding in our own lives.

Now that we are back and I can reflect on those three months of immersing ourselves in unfamiliar cultures, strange food and embraced experiences neither of us will ever forget – it’s not the destinations that stand out most vividly – it’s the laughter that left us both in tears and the conversations that stretched late into the night. I remember the comfort of knowing there was someone beside me who understood. More than anything, I remember rediscovering a sense of being alive.

The journey did not remove my grief, nor did I expect it to. Loss remains part of my story. What travel gave me was a reminder that joy and sorrow can coexist. Therefore, many of the stories I have to share with you in My Asia Diaries will not just reflect our physical journey, but the emotional aspects, and the value of travelling with a best friend.

There’ll also be the downsides, of course, as not every moment of our journey and our friendship was effortless!

But as you travel with us on this trip – this adventure – through My Asia Diaries – you’ll come to see how it showed Dina that putting off travel dreams until ‘one day’ or ‘someday’ isn’t something she wants to do in future. And, it showed me how fading memories can be reclaimed by experiencing travel in a tangible way, and that new memories are still waiting to be made no matter what came before.

It’s also reinforced – and proved to me – that my husband is always with me spiritually and that he lives on in my heart. Then, there’s the simple but powerful truth – that even during life’s most challenging seasons – the presence of a trusted friend can help make the future feel full of possibility once again.

MY ASIA TRAVEL DIARIES

I’m planning for My Asia Diaries to be more detailed, in depth, and personal, than my usual travel posts, which tend to focus on travel writing and destination experiences as way of inspiring you to visit, where to stay, what to see, and what you might expect to eat. You’ll still find these informative destination posts here on my website but I’ll also feature My Asia Diaries as a collection prominently on my sidebar so you can access them easily in bite-size chunks for your coffee time reading.

The entries in My Asia Diaries will record our three month long adventures numerically (this is #1!) and chronologically as we fly from Manchester to Singapore and onto our first destination of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia before travelling to the islands of Penang and Langkawi. Then travelling on to Vietnam, and Japan, before arriving in South Korea to explore the cities of Busan and Daegu and Seoul – and also visiting my Korean family – as my son and his family live in South Korea.