I love statistics. Travel statistics. And now I can do them for my kids! Hooray!
Our third child who is now 14 months old has been to 14 countries in 4 continents.
In comparison, our first son visited his 14th country at the age of 15 months while our second son had visited 17 countries at the age of 14 months.
The list of countries Kion has visited to date are as follows:
1- Switzerland
The picture above was our stay at the amazing Whitepod.
2- Germany
We had a lovely time in the Black Forest before Easter 2019.
3- France
Kion has been to many places in Alsace as well as Paris in April 2019.
4- Austria
Kion’s first road trip was to Innsbruck, Austria when he was shy of a month old.
5- Canada
Kion’s first big flight was to Toronto, Canada at the age of 2.5 months.
6- Mexico
We will need to take Kion back to Mexico one day for the cliff jumping into the cenotes.
7- Colombia
I waited 23 long years to step foot onto South America, Kion did it at the age of 3 months.
8- Panama
Kion was too little to properly admire the Panama Canal.
9- Cyprus
It was a challenge finding pureed baby food for Kion in Cyprus…
10- Malaysia
Kion’s tenth country is my homeland, and he’s been there twice!
11- UK
We LOVE London and go there all the time. No special pictures unfortunately…
Kion and his brothers loved visiting the Natural History Museum and the Science museum.
12- Belgium
We visited Brussels, Oostended, Brugge and Ghent over Easter 2019.
13- Italy
We had the best roadtrip in Sicily at the end of April 2019.
14- Thailand
We took a trip to Krabi from Malaysia in June 2019.
What is it like to travel with 3 kids ages 4 and below?
It can be very demanding and at times very tough. Heading back to Malaysia from our recent trip to Krabi, Thailand was particularly challenging.
It felt like none of the kids would walk most of the time and we had to keep begging the older two to walk so we wouldn’t have to carry all 3 of them on top of our luggage (we only had hand luggage – 3 Cabin Zero bags).
To make matters worse, we were hoping to get onto a long tail boat at 7.30am but they wouldn’t leave unless it was full. As I didn’t want to charter a boat just for ourselves as it was almost 3 times the price, I walked to the nearby hotel to ask reception if there was any other way to get to the airport. Unfortunately, there wasn’t. We chartered a boat and later had to walk along the long jetty to find a taxi to get to the airport.
Arriving at the KLIA 2 airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, we once again had to carry all the kids with the luggage (thank goodness for the parts when there was a trolley) and wait 1.5 hours to get through immigration. The kids were lying on the bags on the floor while we were queuing as they had been awake since before 7am!
However, the actual tough parts are never as bad as you’d imagine them to be and they pass relatively quickly.
If you can excite your children on the things that you are going to see, it is a very rewarding experience for everyone involved. Particularly as you can see how much more they learn and grow in a new environment.
On our recent trip to Malaysia, we were in awe at seeing our son’s confidence level with swimming in the clear blue sea. Click here to find out more about the paradise we found.
Certainly traveling with kids is different, it is slower and there are things that can’t be done (I would have wanted to go rock climbing in Krabi but didn’t for instance). However if you focus on what you can do, it is still very wonderful to travel. For example we asked the staff in Wisana Redang (the paradise we found) to watch the kids so we could go hiking at 6am to watch the sunrise.
How do you manage to travel so much?
What helps is that I am naturally someone with a lot of energy who loves planning my next holidays and trips up to a year in advance. I am constantly on the look out for cheap flights and researching about my many dream destinations (like Churchill Canada where I would love to see polar bears and swim with beluga whales!).
Any particularly memorable anecdotes?
On the 17 hour flight from Dubai to Auckland (after six hours from Zurich to Dubai and another 3 hours layover), toilet trips were THE thing to do. Then 22 months old Ilyas made me let him have a “bath” in the tiny sink which I managed, SOMEHOW.
We were in Queenstown, New Zealand, booked to do a day trip to Milford Sound. At 6.30am we were already out with both babies (Ilyas was 22 months, Noah was 3.5 months) waiting for the bus to pick us up from a Copthorne Hotel which we soon realised was the WRONG Copthorne Hotel. Frantically looking for wifi to get directions to the right Copthorne Hotel, we ran in the rain getting to the correct pick-up point. We got on the bus, and ten minutes later it broke down.
We had to get off said bus in the rain and got on another one that passed by which took us to Te Anau. We had to deal with Noah’s major poop explosion and had to change him entirely. Getting on the third bus for the day, Ilyas was happily eating a banana and asked for another one. In the 3 seconds when I reached down to grab another banana from the backpack, he had managed to throw up the entire banana he just ate all over his sweater.
Thank goodness I brought enough extra clothes. This was right after said throw up.
All that happened before 10am.
On top of that, this happened the morning after it took us almost an entire day to get from Wellington to Queenstown (day of major earthquake 2016) where our plane finally landed in Invercargill after 3 failed attempts at landing in Queenstown.
Why travel when they won’t remember anything? Wouldn’t it be better to wait till they are older?
Sure it would be great for the kids to remember everything they’ve experienced but there are so many intangible things they are getting and learning during every second we are on our travels or on holidays which I know makes them the person they are. Ilyas’ speech improved exponentially during our trip to Malaysia – could it have been because of the different experiences and surroundings? Who knows?
I did not have much memory of Prague. I went there when I was 21.
I was 8 when I first went to Paris and still remember how much in awe I was standing at the steps of Sacre Coeur seeing how fast the clouds were moving due to the strong winds. I have been to Paris countless times since but this one memory I had as a child sticks till today.
For us at least the parents, we will forever remember that:
Noah took his first steps in Nice, France. Kion started properly walking in Malaysia.
Ilyas and Noah had their first helicopter ride in Queenstown, New Zealand.
All kids first tasted durian (and a million other food items) in Malaysia.
etc.
What’s next?
We have much planned across Switzerland and nearby France this summer.
We will be in Sardinia early August and then a Mediterranean cruise that begins in Barcelona in October, taking us to Mallorca, Corsica, Cinque Terre, Portofino, Rome and more.
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What are your travel statistics like? What would you like to achieve when it comes to traveling?
Read more here on other posts on traveling with kids.
