Broken Foot, New Plan. Changing Our Trip Before It Began.

After months and months of planning, here's a sentence I wasn't planning to type in the first post after departure. I broke my foot two days before we were meant to fly out. By falling off an e-bike.

Not a heroic story. No mountain trail, no near-miss with a bus, not even going particularly fast. A slow-speed, entirely avoidable tip-over on a rented e-bike. The kind of fall you watch happen in a holiday video and think "how did you manage that?" It turns out: easily.

Four hours in an emergency department, followed by the single worst conversation I've ever had with an orthopaedic surgeon. "You've fractured your second, third and fourth metatarsals and are going to need to wear a boot for the next six to eight weeks and are extremely lucky you don't need surgery."

Well there goes the start of the itinerary Annalise and I had just spent the past six months building.

We were meant to depart from Sydney on April 15. First stop: three nights in Hong Kong. Then three weeks through Vietnam (Hanoi, the Ha Giang Loop, Ho Chi Minh City). Then Thailand, with most of the middle of it booked across Phuket, Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao. A pretty classic Southeast Asia opener.

Now, I was barely able to walk, stumbling around with my crutches and Annalise was carrying my bags everywhere we went. Back to the drawing board.

Triage: what had to go

The Vietnam leg was the first to get cut. I am not doing the Ha Giang Loop on a motorbike with one functional foot, for reasons that should now be extremely obvious. Plus, three weeks in Vietnam with no real mobility is just three weeks of sitting in a hotel watching our daily spend climb for no good reason.

Then the Thai islands. The whole appeal of that stretch is hopping ferries between Phuket, Samui, Phangan, and Tao. The whole appeal is the water. None of that works in a hard-sole boot.

Hong Kong (which I now had 48 hours to try and salvage cancellation policies) was also being cut.

Luckily, using Booking.com for the bulk of our hotels meant we got free cancellations until a few days before each stay. Trip.com was a little more difficult but after sending through some paperwork from the hospital, we managed to get that back too. Our flights had been booked using points, so we got all our points and cash back, less a 5,000 point cancellation fee.

In all, we actually got everything back aside from an $8 eSIM. Not a great way to start a "track every dollar" blog. But at least it's a real number, and a real, slightly embarrassing story to go with it.

The replacement: a very Australian opening leg

Instead of flying out to Southeast Asia on crutches, we're doing something genuinely fun with the time: an east-coast road trip.

This was all unplanned just days ago. None of this accommodation was in the original $80k budget. But the silver lining is real:

• We get to see a bunch of family we weren't going to see for 9+ months.
• Annalise is going to dive on the Great Barrier Reef and make a two week trip to Cairns.
• I get another three or four weeks to let my foot heal.

What this changes for the blog

A few practical things:

• The daily cost tracker will now start from May 20th. Up until then we'll be staying with family in Sydney, and then the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, so there's no accommodation line item to log.
• We'll chalk up our Australian road trip and travels as its own blog post and budget separate to our international travels. This will serve as a nice datapoint for anyone interested, but beyond this won't factor into the live tracker for the rest of our travels.
• The route on the spending page has been updated. Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Thai islands are gone. Australia, Bangkok, and Singapore are in.

On doing this publicly

I'll admit: the first draft of this post was going to be "Day 1 in Hanoi: here's what 24 hours of street food actually costs." Instead it's "here's the spreadsheet of things I cancelled because I fell off an e-bike like an idiot." Not glamorous. But it's a more honest first data point than most travel blogs will ever publish.

The full new route, with budget expectations and how we're thinking about the re-phasing, is in Our Updated Travel Route.

Every dollar. Every destination. Even the ones we didn't plan on.

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For those following along at home: Day 9 post-fracture. Still in my post-op (or "Darco" boot), non-weight-bearing, crutching everywhere. Pain is fairly manageable on paracetamol alone now (down from the first few days where it genuinely wasn't). The swelling around the midfoot is the main thing I'm watching; mornings are stiffer than evenings. My next check-in will be an x-ray after 4 weeks. For now: lots of elevation, lots of feeling slightly ridiculous sitting on my parents' couch rather than on a motorbike in Vietnam.