Two countries or four, and how to decide

What each extra country actually costs

Not in the abstract. Here is the real bill for adding one more country to an itinerary.

None of that is a reason not to do it. Crossing a border on the ground is one of the pleasures of travel in this region and it is the thing this company is built around. It is simply not free, and quotes that treat it as free are hiding the cost somewhere.

The five questions that actually decide it

1. How many days on the ground? Under ten: one country. Ten to fourteen: two. Fifteen to eighteen: three. Nineteen and up: four is comfortable. The arithmetic is on how many days you need.
2. Will you come back? If this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, breadth is a legitimate choice and we will build it well. If you expect to return to Asia, depth wins and you can add a country next time.
3. What actually interests you? If it is Khmer archaeology, Cambodia plus one neighbour is a better trip than four countries with a day and a half at Angkor. If it is rivers and trains, the four-country line is exactly right.
4. How do you feel on the fourth transfer day? Some people find travel days restful and some find them exhausting. Only you know, and it is the single most predictive answer on this list.
5. What month are you travelling? In March, northern Laos and northern Thailand are full of smoke, which removes two of the four countries from a good itinerary anyway.

The case for two countries

You unpack in more places for longer. You get two or three nights everywhere instead of two, which is the difference between seeing a town and being in it. You have slack for a flight delay, a road closure, or a day when someone is ill.

You also spend meaningfully less: a two-country trip runs about 10 per cent below a four-country trip of the same length, and considerably below a four-country trip that has been compressed into the same number of days by adding flights.

The two-country combinations that work best: Vietnam and Cambodia by the Mekong, which is joined by a river crossing rather than an airport; Thailand and Laos, joined by a bridge and two days on a boat; and Vietnam and Laos overland, which uses the one border with visa on arrival.

The case for four

Mainland Southeast Asia reads differently when you cross it in a line. The Mekong that is a braided flood plain in southern Laos is a working canal network in the Vietnamese delta; the Theravada Buddhism is the same religion and a visibly different practice in each country; the French colonial building in Vientiane, Phnom Penh and Hanoi is the same architects and three different outcomes.

You do not get that from four separate holidays taken years apart, and it is a real argument rather than a sales one.

It also works, at the right length. Our twenty-four-day route has eleven stops in twenty-four days, which is a shade under two and a half nights per place, and three unscheduled days. That is a proper trip. The same four countries in fourteen days is not.

When we tell people to do less

Roughly one enquiry in four asks for more countries than the days support, and we say so in the first reply. The most common version is four countries in fourteen days, usually because a friend did it or a website sold it.

What we say is this: we will build it, here is what it will look like, and here is the three-country version of the same fortnight for you to compare. About two thirds of the people who see both choose three countries.

We are not doing this to be difficult. A trip that is remembered as a series of hotel lobbies is bad for us as well as for you.

A worked comparison

The same fourteen days on the ground, two ways.

There is no trick in that table. It is the same fourteen days and the same standard of hotel. The four-country version costs more and delivers three fewer days of being somewhere, and the reason people still choose it is the one at the top of this page: sometimes breadth is genuinely what you want, and that is a legitimate answer.

Questions travellers ask most

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