I’ll never forget the moment we landed in Chiang Mai. It was December 2023 and I felt different, lighter than I had done in months. My baby – the baby who never slept – awoke after his longest nap yet to a Thai woman clamouring to cuddle him. Others joined in, cooing at his gurgles and clapping every time he smiled. Besides my family, I hadn’t met anyone who shared even half the enthusiasm for my baby that I did. This was new territory for us on all counts.
When I was six months pregnant, my partner and I decided to book a big trip. We put our flat on the market and booked flights to Thailand with a grand plan to travel to three countries for three months with our would-be six-month-old baby.
The only people who thought this was a good idea were those without children. We were smug and naive, so we ploughed ahead and plotted out our trip.
But after our beautiful baby boy was born, I struggled. I spent the first few weeks in a state of shock, so full of love and fear. Then my partner went back to work, and we were divided. I knew that ‘staying on the same team’ was crucial, but experience taught me that was impossible. My equally exhausted partner would spend his days navigating the distant galaxies of the corporate world, while I spent hours in pursuit of an elusive nap, too anxious to walk anywhere further than the bottom of the road. Our experiences of early parenthood bore almost no resemblance to one another.
If we hadn’t already committed so much money and planning time to the trip, it would never have happened. We managed to sell our flat before we left, which was extremely stressful. Still, we knew it wouldn’t be feasible for us to cover our mortgage and travel at the same time.
Somehow, against all my instincts, we put our belongings in storage and filled two comically large backpacks with mostly baby grows and half of Superdrug and set off on our big adventure with our six month-old baby.
That first experience on the plane set the tone for the rest of our trip. Everywhere we went, we travelled with special VIP baby status. People seemed genuinely happy to see us (subtext: our baby). And the thing about joy and big smiles and lots of laughter is that it’s contagious. It rubs off on you.
In the haze of sensory classes and sleep training back at home, I had failed to realise that parenting isn’t an endless to-do list. It isn’t just a set of motions – monotonous if lucky, miserable if not – to pass through in a zombie-like state of exhaustion. It reminded me that it was joyful too.
I’d like to say we made a conscious decision to “slow travel”, but it was inevitable with our tiny companion. We quickly learnt that a three-hour drive with a lively baby was not a day trip but a glimpse into a very specific circle of hell. It just forced us to be more creative. Instead of ticking off sites and cities, we visited whimsical waterfalls, rented lakeside cabanas alongside local families and ventured to quiet villages tucked into forested hills.
Any semblance of a schedule went out of the window, but it was surprisingly easy to settle into new rhythms: mornings exploring mountains and medieval architecture, evenings browsing street stalls, with weaning, sterilising and tummy time in between. At night, we would park the pram in some fairy-light festooned square, play cards and chat, properly.
We had been warned about the pitfalls of travelling with a baby. “It changes everything,” friends forewarned. And it does, but for us it only made the experience more special. Our son won’t remember any of this trip, even if it was a sensory experience on speed. But we won’t ever forget his ear-to-ear grin when he came face-to-trunk with an elephant outside Chiang Mai. Tiny feet paddling in the South China Sea. Crawling practice outside gilded temples in Kyoto. The raw excitement of a first strawberry, plucked straight from a farm overlooking the purple Mon Cham mountains near Chiang Mai.
We stuck to our plan and travelled around Thailand, Vietnam and Japan. We had intended to cover a lot of ground, but we decided it’d be more enjoyable to pick a base in each country – Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, Da Nang on the coast of Vietnam, and lively Osaka in Japan – and get creative exploring the surrounding areas on day trips.
I know that not all parents want or have the privilege of travelling with their baby. We were incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to travel together, particularly when you consider that in the UK paternity leave tends to be no longer than a fortnight.
This trip was more than a holiday, it helped us right the balance of our relationship and gave us the space to adjust to our new life as parents. So much of early parenthood is spent either in isolation or in the company of too many friends and family at one time. Getting away for three months, just the three of us, was a gift I didn’t know we needed.
Investing in that time together made us so much stronger – and it made me realise that my baby and my relationship are much more robust than I gave them credit for.