Southeast Asia Travel Guide: Routes and Where to Start
How to turn 45 of our Thailand, Vietnam and Bali pieces into one trip: when to go, how to chain the routes, and what to read first.
Most people plan Southeast Asia backwards. They book Bangkok first because the flights are cheapest, then try to reverse-engineer a route around a fixed return date. We wrote forty-five pieces about this region — Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia — and the same mistake shows up in half of them. So this page exists to fix the order of operations: season first, route second, beds last.
Pick your season before anything else
The region has two monsoons, and they point in opposite directions. Thailand's Gulf coast and Vietnam have roughly opposite wet months, and Indonesia is wet when mainland Southeast Asia is dry. We have a whole set of pieces on what the Indonesian rainy season actually feels like — island hopping when the rain comes, waterfalls at full power, and what the wet does to wildlife watching.
The Indonesian mechanics, since they decide the whole archipelago: the monsoon runs roughly October to April. October to December is the transition — sunny mornings, short violent afternoon storms. January and February are the peak, when seas turn choppy and boat days start getting cancelled. March and April are the value window: off-season prices with steadier weather. Bali rarely loses a whole day to rain, and the exception proves the pattern — Raja Ampat, in the far east, is at its calmest from December to March, exactly backwards from the mainland. Short version from those pieces: the rain is real but it arrives in predictable afternoon blocks, and boat schedules, not rain itself, are what actually break plans.
My own take, and you can disagree with it: the shoulder months are worth more than the postcard months. Fewer boats, lower prices, and the islands are still green. If your trip only works in July, that changes — then you're planning around crowds, and the guides below still hold.
What a month actually costs
We tracked 90 days across Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia for the 2026 budget breakdown: $4,217 all-in, about $47 a day including inter-country flights, visas, and the occasional overpaid bus ticket. Vietnam was the cheapest country at roughly $42 a day; Cambodia ran above its reputation. The category numbers, with their conditions: private air-conditioned rooms for $10–12 in places like Da Lat and Hoi An, dorm beds $5–10 across the region, food around $12.50 a day — a plate of pad kra pao from a Bangkok street cart was 60 baht, about $1.70, and khao soi in Chiang Mai ran 50–65. The food budget piece and the accommodation piece take the categories apart.
The booking strategy that produced those numbers: reserve only the first two nights in a new city, then walk. Agoda dominates the region and wins in Bangkok and Hanoi; in smaller towns, weekday walk-ins beat the app. Stay past a week and ask for the weekly rate — 10 to 15 percent off is normal.
Three routes that chain well
Vietnam top to bottom. This is the most reliable first trip. Start with the Hanoi, Sapa and Ha Long plan, ride south — the train vs flight vs bus comparison settles the longest leg — then finish with Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong. The train leg deserves its reputation: the Hanoi–Hue overnight is the Reunification Express, running north to south since 1976, about 620 km and 13 to 15 hours. A soft sleeper — four berths, air-conditioned — costs more than the open six-berth hard sleeper but saves a night's accommodation, and the route saves its best for last, along Lang Co Bay and over the Hai Van Pass. The train guide covers cabins and booking. If you'd rather ride than rail, the Ha Giang loop has its own monsoon calculus — the rainy-vs-dry comparison is the piece to read first. For the honest version of the whole route, my ten-day diary lists what I skipped, not just what I did.
Bali plus one island. Two weeks works: south, north, then Nusa Penida. In the south, Uluwatu Temple sits on a cliff about 70 meters above the ocean, and the Kecak fire dance starts at sunset — arriving by 4 p.m. is the difference between a seat and standing with the monkeys. Build surf days around the Uluwatu season guide rather than around your arrival date, and read the Nusa Penida guide before booking the fast boat, because the crossing is the part people underestimate.
Northern Thailand slow loop. Chiang Mai and Pai, done properly: the northern Thailand guide, temples and food — the old city is a moated square you can walk across in forty minutes, holding more than 300 temples — and Pai is three hours north over a road with 762 curves. If a monastery stay appeals, the retreat guide explains how booking one actually works.
Connectivity is a planning decision, not a kiosk decision
We keep seeing readers leave SIM cards to chance. Don't. The per-country SIM and eSIM guide covers Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, and the airport-vs-city comparison explains why the arrivals-hall price is rarely the city price.
Where to stay, without the guesswork
Bangkok deserves its own paragraph because we went deep on it: ten separate stay guides, from Khao San hostels through mid-range Sukhumvit to the high-end riverside picks. Start with neighborhoods ranked by budget, then narrow down. For island stays, the Samui shortlist is the calmest place to begin.
What we haven't covered yet
Cambodia and Laos are thin here — Cambodia shows up mostly as Angkor notes inside the budget pieces, where the $62 temple pass gets called what it is, and Laos barely appears outside the Pai piece's border notes. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend the map is full. If your route runs through either, treat this guide as the Thailand-Vietnam-Indonesia half and plan the rest from schedule reality on the ground.
Official sources
Details worth verifying before you go — checked against:
Travel Writer & Editor
Emily Johnson writes and edits Do Travel Blog. Every guide on the site starts the same way: with a question she actually had while planning — when to book, which pass to buy, how to get from A to B without overpaying. Where a number matters, she cites the source: park tickets link to the park's own fee page, visa rules to the official consulate, ferry times to the operator. Prices get re-checked against those pages before each update, and a guide is re-dated when its numbers move. Nothing here is sponsored — she doesn't accept payment for coverage. Spotted something stale or wrong? Email hello@dotravel.blog and she'll fix it.