Which legs connect, and which cost you a day
A route is not a list of countries. It is a sequence of legs, and three or four of the legs travellers assume exist do not — or exist only as a flight, or only in one direction. This is the page that saves an itinerary.
The closed border, and what it breaks
Every official land checkpoint between Thailand and Cambodia has been shut since clashes began in stages from June 2025. That is the Poipet–Aranyaprathet crossing, the Trat and Chanthaburi crossings, and the rest. As at late August 2026 the Thai position was that there is no reopening until conditions are met, no timetable, and any restoration would be step by step. A ceasefire agreed in late December 2025 broke down within weeks. Officials expect the closure to hold through the end of this year.
Three standard itinerary shapes stop working because of it.
- Overland Bangkok to Siem Reap. The classic budget-to-mid-market day — road to Poipet, cross on foot, road to Angkor — does not exist. It is a flight now, and only a flight.
- Phnom Penh to Trat and on to the Thai islands. The run down through Koh Kong to the eastern Thai coast, which is how Cambodia used to connect to Koh Chang and the Gulf, is closed at the same set of checkpoints.
- Any Thailand–Cambodia twin centre priced on road transfers. The two countries still combine perfectly well; they combine by air, at air prices, with an airport transfer at each end.
An itinerary that shows an overland Bangkok–Siem Reap day in 2026 is not a cheaper itinerary. It is a day nobody can run, and it will be rebuilt at your expense once you have paid a deposit. It is the single fastest way to judge whether a quote was written this year.
What replaces it is straightforward: Bangkok to Siem Reap or Bangkok to Phnom Penh by scheduled air, both ordinary daily services with a good spread of carriers. Sixteen airlines serve the new Siem Reap airport, among them Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Bangkok Airways, AirAsia and Vietnam Airlines, with daily Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City connections. Our 28-day Asia Crossing flies that sector deliberately and always did; the 22-day Indochina route avoids the question altogether by staying inside Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The legs that work, and the ones that don't exist
Asia is not one network. It is four or five networks that meet at a small number of hubs, and the difference between a good route and an expensive one is usually whether you noticed where the seam runs.
Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia
Reliable in both directions and cheap in time. Tokyo to Seoul is about two hours forty; Seoul to Taipei about two and a half. Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Singapore all connect north without a backtrack. This is the seam that a four-week Japan and Southeast Asia trip crosses exactly once, and it should be exactly once.
Central Asia and the Caucasus against Southeast Asia
Here the network stops. Jordan, Oman and the UAE connect comfortably to Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan through the Gulf, but linking any of those to Southeast Asia in the same trip normally means routing back through a hub — Dubai, Doha or Istanbul — rather than a forward hop. We deliberately publish no block times for those sectors, because the schedules move and our own sources could not confirm them; they are checked live when a route is drawn.
The practical consequence is that our 16-day Silk Road and Jordan and Oman voyages are built as self-contained trips rather than as extensions of a Southeast Asian one. Bolting Uzbekistan onto Vietnam costs two travel days at each join, and two days is a city.
Bhutan, and the Paro problem
Only two carriers fly into Paro: Drukair, with five aircraft, and Bhutan Airlines, with two. Fewer than two dozen pilots in the world are certified to land there. The approach is visual, daylight only, good visibility only — no instrument landing system, a single beacon and landmarks — with a manual descent between peaks reaching 18,000 feet onto a runway of 7,431 feet at an elevation of 7,364 feet.
None of that is a reason to avoid Bhutan. It is a reason to build a buffer day around every Paro flight. Cloud delays and cancellations are ordinary, and a tight same-day onward connection out of Paro is a promise the weather has not agreed to. Our Himalaya voyage runs Delhi to Paro to Kathmandu with that slack built in, which is part of why it is twenty-one days rather than eighteen.
The Indonesian island hops
Indonesia looks like one country and routes like six. Bali to Labuan Bajo is a short hop of roughly an hour and a quarter, and that is the easy one. The hard part is inside the islands: Ubud to Amed is 87 km on the map and two and a half to two and three-quarter hours in the car, longer after lunch. Departing between eight and ten in the morning is not a preference, it is the difference between an afternoon and a write-off.
The other Indonesian variable is volcanic. Anak Krakatau closed Jakarta’s airports until just before nine on the morning of 7 September 2026 and disrupted 108 Bali-linked flights across 6 and 7 September. This is a recurring pattern rather than a freak week, and it is why our 17-day archipelago voyage carries a flexible day near the Bali and Jakarta connections rather than a perfectly tessellated schedule.
Where the train beats the plane
Four rail journeys in Asia are faster, cheaper or simply better than the flight that competes with them, and one is a scenic ride that has to be justified on other grounds. Knowing which is which is most of the value of this section.
| Leg | By rail | What it replaces | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vientiane to Luang Prabang | About 2 hours on the fast C-series trains, up to 160 km/h | 5 to 6.5 hours by minivan on the road | Both stations sit outside the towns, so add a road transfer and security time at each end. Booking is harder than the ride — seats are best secured through an agent rather than at the counter |
| Tashkent to Samarkand | About 2.5 hours on the Afrosiyob at 250 km/h | A long, dull drive across the steppe | Booking opens 60 days out and tickets sell out fast, partly to operator block bookings. If a Silk Road itinerary is not being ticketed at the 60-day mark, somebody is not paying attention |
| Tokyo to Kyoto | Nozomi about 2h 13m, Hikari about 2h 40m | A domestic flight plus two airport transfers, which is slower door to door | The Nozomi is not valid on a Japan Rail Pass. Pass holders take the Hikari and lose about half an hour |
| Seoul to Busan | About 2h 15m at the fastest, typically 2h 30m to 2h 50m | A domestic flight into Gimhae | Since 1 September 2026 the old SRT services run as KTX-Sancheon and both Seoul Station and Suseo departures appear in one search. Any guidance still treating them as two booking systems is out of date |
| Kandy to Ella | About 6 to 7 hours over 120 km | A shorter road transfer, and it is genuinely shorter | This one is slower than the car. You take it for the tea country and the Nine Arch Bridge, in Second Class Reserved with windows that open rather than sealed air-conditioned First Class, on the right-hand side going towards Ella |
The Japan Rail Pass arithmetic, done properly
The pass is not automatically the answer, and the industry habit of recommending it by reflex costs clients money. A seven-day ordinary pass is ¥50,000. A simple Tokyo–Kyoto–Hiroshima loop bought as point-to-point tickets runs about ¥39,520 return — roughly ¥10,000 less than the pass.
Extend the same trip to Fukuoka and point-to-point rises to about ¥56,000, at which the pass saves about ¥6,000 and starts to make sense. So the rule is geographic: the pass pays for itself when an itinerary runs past Hiroshima or north into Tohoku, and loses money on the Golden Route alone. Note also that from 1 October 2026 passes bought through overseas JR-designated agencies rise by ¥3,000 to ¥5,000, taking the seven-day ordinary to about ¥53,000, which pushes the break-even further out again.
Connection buffers, and the airlines we will not use
Airlines sell minimum connection times that assume nothing goes wrong. We book two and a half hours where the airline is happy to sell ninety minutes, and on a day where a missed leg costs a hotel night and a guide, we would rather buy the earlier flight than the tighter one.
Bangkok is the clearest argument for the habit. In August 2026 its two airports were part of a disruption event that produced more than 2,300 delays across sixteen Asian hubs, described in the reporting as systemic scheduling and capacity strain rather than a single bad day — the sort of fragility that recurs rather than resolves. A ninety-minute connection at Suvarnabhumi is a coin toss dressed as a schedule.
Bamboo Airways is gone
Bamboo Airways stopped scheduled commercial flying from 1 August 2026 and was effectively grounded after the 22nd, its fleet down from 44 aircraft to 3. Every scheduled route it held, domestic and long-haul, is discontinued. If a 2026 or 2027 quote in front of you still shows a Bamboo sector, that quote has not been reconfirmed since last year.
VietJet against Vietnam Airlines
On-time performance is the whole argument. VietJet ran 55.0% on-time across the first nine months of 2025, with a record low of 43.3% in April of that year: one flight in two arrives at least fifteen minutes late. Vietnam Airlines runs about 76.7% arrival on-time performance, sixth in Asia-Pacific by Cirium’s ranking. Vietravel Airlines sits between them at roughly 67.7%.
So we book Vietnam Airlines on any sector that feeds an international connection, a boat departure or a guide with a fixed start, and we accept VietJet only on a sector where a two-hour delay costs an afternoon rather than a day. That is not snobbery about low-cost carriers. It is arithmetic about what a missed Lan Ha Bay sailing costs to rebuild.
Siem Reap moved, and arrival days did not notice
The old Siem Reap International Airport closed permanently on 15 October 2023, eight kilometres from town. Siem Reap–Angkor International opened the next day, about 50 km out, and the transfer is 45 to 50 minutes on the Angkor Highway instead of the fifteen minutes everyone remembers.
An hour and a half of round-trip road, added to an arrival day nobody re-planned, is how a first afternoon at the temples quietly becomes a first evening at the hotel. It changes three things in a well-built itinerary: the arrival flight should land before mid-afternoon rather than at dusk, the first Angkor session moves to the following dawn, and the departure day needs the transfer counted backwards from check-in rather than from the gate.
A moved airport is a small fact with a long tail, and it is the kind of thing that separates an itinerary written from a map from one written by somebody who has done the drive. The same principle applies to Laos, where both railway stations sit outside their towns, and to Bali, where the map distance between Ubud and the east coast bears no relation to the driving time.
A worked example: Japan and Southeast Asia in four weeks
Two sequences, the same countries, the same twenty-eight days. One of them loses a day and a half to backtracking, and it is the one most people draw first.
Route A — Japan first, out through Bangkok
- Tokyo, then Kyoto by Shinkansen, ending in Osaka. Twelve nights.
- Osaka to Hanoi by air. Vietnam overland from north to south, ending in Ho Chi Minh City. Eight nights.
- Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap by air, landing before mid-afternoon so the 50 km transfer does not eat the day. Four nights.
- Siem Reap to Bangkok by air. Three nights, then home from Bangkok.
Every leg goes forward. Japan is entered once and left once, from a different city than you arrived in, which is what the Shinkansen network is for. The Thai exemption question never arises, because you are in Thailand for three nights against a 30-day allowance.
Route B — Bangkok first, Japan at the end
Same countries, reversed. It reads well and it costs you a day, for a reason that is not obvious until the flights are priced: long-haul home from Japan is cheapest and most frequent out of Tokyo, and after Kyoto you are 500 km from Tokyo. You either take a Shinkansen back on the morning of an international departure, which nobody sensible does, or you add a night in Tokyo you did not want, and the night comes out of Kyoto.
There is a second cost. Putting Japan at the end means your most expensive and least flexible hotel nights sit in the part of the trip most exposed to whatever went wrong earlier — a typhoon in the Philippines or central Vietnam, a volcanic closure in Indonesia, an August Bangkok delay cascade. Japanese city hotels in peak season are the hardest nights on the itinerary to move at short notice.
There are good reasons to choose Route B anyway: cherry blossom, or koyo, or a family joining in Tokyo. When a client wants it, we build it and we say what it costs. What we will not do is draw Route B by accident and let the reader find the lost day in their own calendar. For how the same trade-offs work at country length, see how many days a country actually holds, and for the entry rules each of these legs triggers, visas and entry.
Send us the countries and the dates
We will tell you which legs connect, which need a flight, and where the sequence should be reversed. A first draft comes back within two working days.
Questions travellers ask most
Can we still travel overland between Thailand and Cambodia?
No. Every official land checkpoint has been closed since clashes began in stages from June 2025, and as at late August 2026 the Thai government position was that there is no reopening date and any restoration would be step by step.
The two countries combine perfectly well by air. Bangkok to Siem Reap and Bangkok to Phnom Penh are ordinary daily scheduled services. What has gone is the road day, and any itinerary still showing one needs rewriting before it is bought.
Is the Japan Rail Pass worth buying?
Only past a certain distance. A seven-day ordinary pass is ¥50,000, and a Tokyo–Kyoto–Hiroshima loop on point-to-point tickets costs about ¥39,520 return, so the pass loses money on the Golden Route.
Add Fukuoka and point-to-point rises to about ¥56,000, at which the pass saves roughly ¥6,000. From 1 October 2026 passes bought through overseas agencies rise a further ¥3,000 to ¥5,000, which moves the break-even further out. We price both ways for every Japan itinerary rather than assuming.
Why do you insist on longer connections than the airline requires?
Because the cost of a missed connection is not the flight. It is a hotel night held, a guide standing at an airport, and a boat that sails without you.
Two and a half hours is our default where an airline will sell ninety minutes, and more at Bangkok, whose August 2026 disruption produced over 2,300 delays across sixteen Asian hubs and was described as systemic rather than a one-off.
Can we add Uzbekistan or Georgia to a Southeast Asia trip?
You can, but it is rarely worth what it costs. There is no dependable forward hop between Central Asia or the Caucasus and Southeast Asia; the routing goes back through Dubai, Doha or Istanbul, and that is two travel days at the join.
Our advice is usually to run the Silk Road or the Caucasus as its own voyage. If you want both regions in one year, two trips of sixteen days each will show you more than one trip of thirty-two.
Read next
Tell us about the journey you have in mind
Dates, party size and the places you care about are enough to start. You get a draft route and an indicative price, not a brochure.