Why Southeast Asia? The Honest Answer.
Series: Slow Travel Southeast Asia
I still carry my dive certificate with me on holiday. Just in case.
It’s an Open Water diver qualification from Cairns, Australia, dated September 1997. I’d just turned 22. I arrived in Australia and booked the dive course the same day I landed, no deliberation, no research. Just the kind of decision you make when you’re 22 and learning to dive on the Great Barrier Reef was the only firm plan you’ve made for the year of living Down Under.
I look at the photograph of that young man, and it takes me back to a version of myself that didn’t overthink things. That just booked the dive course.
The certificate has been sat in a drawer, or a holiday bag, ever since. Never used again, for nearly thirty years.
About six years ago, just before Covid, Natalie bought me a dive computer for my birthday. A good one. I’d told her I had plans to get back into diving and she listened, the way she does. The computer is still in its box. Never been used.
There’s never enough time on holiday to take three days out and resit an Open Water course, and I go on holiday to be with my family, not to take a three-day break away from them.
That sentence, I realise, is the whole point of what we’re doing.
Not the diving specifically. The thing underneath the diving.
Taking time out to be with my family.
The Reason Why
TN is 13. He’ll be 15 when we leave. He’ll be 18 or 19 when we come home, or wherever home turns out to be. That window, those years between a kid who still wants to do things with his parents and an adult who has his own life entirely, doesn’t wait for the best financial moment. It just closes.
Going early means taking a financial hit. The pension is smaller than it would be if I did my full thirty years’ service, but we’ve modelled it, we’re planning around it, and we’ve decided it’s worth it. The money will recover. The years won’t come back.
We are doing this to make memories as a family while we still can. We’re doing it to experience the world with TN; so he can see that life has more to offer than just the well-worn path of school, university, safe job, mortgage, etc. That’s one version of a life, and there’s nothing wrong with it if it’s genuinely chosen, but it’s very hard to choose something freely if it’s the only thing you’ve ever seen.
We are doing this to stand with him in front of Angkor Wat as the sun rises, to feel, hear and smell a Borneo rainforest together, to marvel at a thriving coral reef, and show him that the world is vast and strange and full of possibilities. No careers advisor could possibly show him that.
I won’t watch the last of TN’s childhood just slowly slip away in a blur of busy days, because all I did was talk about ‘Someday’. Someday is never, unless you do something to turn it into today.
And yes, we’re doing it because I want to dive the Gili Islands with my son. Because the dive computer is still in its box. Because thirty years of doing the right thing has earned us the right to do the thing we actually want.
That’s one answer.
So, why Southeast Asia?
The other answer is that Southeast Asia is the place that makes the most practical sense for a family like ours, and once you understand that, everything else follows. The cost of living is genuinely, structurally lower.
Families report living comfortably on half of what ordinary life costs us on the Isle of Man. The expat and world schooling communities are proven, particularly in places like Chiang Mai, Penang and Bali, and we won’t be the first family to arrive with a teenager, a laptop and a vague plan.
The visa situation, while complicated in places and worth understanding properly before you go, is broadly manageable for a family intending to stay months rather than weeks. Then there’s the infrastructure, transport, accommodation, reliable internet, international schools for exam centres; all important factors that are there in a way that simply aren’t in some of the other places we considered.
Southeast Asia isn’t just a romantic choice. It’s a practical one that happens to also be extraordinary. The diving is the bonus. The Komodo dragons are the bonus. The sense that we’re somewhere genuinely different from anywhere we’ve been before, well that’s an added bonus.
The Research – Why This Series Exists
When I started researching Southeast Asia seriously, not holiday research, but the kind of research you do when you’re actually going to live somewhere, I found a lot of content aimed at digital nomads in their twenties and not much aimed at families like ours.
Families with a teenager who needs to sit GCSEs on the road. Families where the income is a pension rather than a remote salary. Families where one person is quietly excited, and one person is cautiously supportive, and one person doesn’t fully know yet because telling him would make the next seventeen months unbearable. Families who are normal, genuinely, ordinarily normal, and who are doing this anyway.
So I started building the research I wished existed. This series is the result. This post covers a lot of ground, jump to whatever’s most useful for you:
The Countries We’re Researching
Over eight posts, we cover the destinations that kept coming up in our research: Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Bali, and Indonesia beyond Bali, because Bali and the rest of Indonesia are different enough to deserve separate treatment.
Each post covers the same ground, visa reality for families like ours, where to base yourself, what it actually costs, and the things most content glosses over or gets wrong. Every post is honest about what we don’t know, because we haven’t left yet. These are research findings, not lived experience. When the lived experience comes, we’ll tell you that too.
Each post below covers one destination in depth — visas, costs, where to base yourself, and what we found that most content doesn’t mention. They’re research posts, not travel guides. Read them in order or jump to wherever you’re planning to go. I’ll link them here as the drop in.
Malaysia — visa, costs, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Langkawi
Thailand — DTV, retirement visa, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, the islands, tax
Vietnam — the e-visa truth, Hoi An, Da Nang, what nobody warns you about
Cambodia — the simplest visa in the region, Kampot, Angkor Wat]
The Philippines — the SRRV retirement visa, Dumaguete, the diving
Bali — the upfront rental reality, Sanur, Ubud, the visa layers
Indonesia Beyond Bali — Lombok, Flores, Komodo, Sulawesi, Raja Ampat
When the series is complete, every link within the posts will be collected on a dedicated resources page — we’ll link to it here when it’s live.
If you want each new post as it lands — we’re publishing one at a time, one country at a time — the email list is the place to be. No noise. Just the posts, when they’re ready.
We’re just a family from the Isle of Man who decided to look properly. If you’re doing the same research and hitting the same walls, everything we find is here.
