We first had the alphabet travel idea when we read Sebastian Faulks’ A Fool’s Alphabet ages ago, which I gave to Louie as a gift soon after we started going out in 2001. We only joined the dots (neither can remember who suggested it first) in 2004, when planning our first big trip together. We decided to stay overnight in a town in Asia beginning with every letter of the alphabet. From March to September 2004 we worked our way from Delhi to Beijing, and although it got tricky at times (we had to go a long way to get our J, having neglected to pick one up in India) we managed our alphabet. For some unknown reason I didn’t take a picture of every alphabet town we visited, but we did buy a silly little trinket for each place, which you can see here (pictures by Lu):

[insert gallery of trinket pictures here]

The Asian Alphabet was awesome, the constraint of having a mission to complete gave us a sense of direction and purpose, and brought us to places we would otherwise never have visited (anyone else heard of Qiqiha’er?). But there’s always been that nagging feeling that, well, we sort of cheated. We didn’t do the letters in order. To be fair, we did better than Faulks’ character, who takes a whole life to collect his alphabet, and includes Terminal 2 as his ‘T’, which is clearly cheating. But we didn’t do them in order. This time we’re going to change that, although, given the countries we’re visiting, we’re relaxing the requirement to stay overnight in each alphabet town. We’ll visit, and I’ll get pictures this time, and we’ll get a trinket. But some of our targets are barely visible on google maps, so a hotel might be out of the question.

To read more about the rules for alphabet travel, click here.