Honeymoon travel ideas – help!

One of the hardest things I’ve found about planning a wedding is the number of decisions you have to make. I’m not the most decisive person at the best of times and there have been many moments over the last few months when I’ve found myself completely at my wits end as I sit at home on a Friday night trying to decide what weight of paper I want my invites to be printed on. I mean who even knows what that means?

But one of the things I’ve been really looking forward to is planning our honeymoon. I mean, let’s face it, travel is never far from my mind and the chance to organise a really super-duper holiday somewhere sounds amazing.

However I must admit, after Mr A’s incredibly romantic proposal at Yosemite National Park on our US road trip, I’m struggling a bit. I think there’s already a lot of pressure to make sure your honeymoon is the best holiday ever. But when you love travelling I feel like there’s an added expectation to make it even more brilliant.

So, after a lot of uuming and aahing, here’s what we’ve narrowed down the list to:

Japan

Japan is somewhere I’ve been longing to go back to, ever since my visit there in 2005. On that trip I naively turned up without a guidebook and not a word of Japanese and spent a month travelling around. I gate-crashed a geisha tea party, slept in a capsule hotel, went to a jazz club in Hiroshima and ate my own body weight in sushi. I got lost repeatedly, confused lots of Japanese people and loved every minute of it.

Since then I’ve always wanted to go back for the cherry blossom season in the spring. I’ve heard so much about it and would love to experience one of the cherry blossom parties, where local people fill the parks to celebrate.

One of the things Mr A and I share an interest in is all of the quirky things you see on your travels. It was one of the reasons we had such a great time in America, as we loved stopping off at the world’s best preserved meteorite site and staying in a wigwam. I know there is so much of that in Japan and I would love to go back and experience it with Mr A.

However I started to reconsider Japan for a honeymoon after someone pointed out that it might not be the most romantic trip. There will be no lying around on a beach and most of the places we are likely to visit will be very busy. The trip is also likely to involve a lot of travelling around which, with no Japanese, could get stressful.

Japan

Cuba

Cuba is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for a long time and, although I was  momentarily put off it when we read Peter Millar’s Slow Train to Guantanamo in #travelbookclub, the more I hear about it from other travellers, the more I want to go.

The old elegance of the architecture, the soulful music and the paradores (restaurants) in people’s homes sounds right up our street. Not to mention I’m sure Mr A would want to spend a lot of time checking out all of those old cars.

South America

South America owns my heart. It’s the place I love to travel to more than anywhere else in the world and something always pulls me back there. I adore the people, the scenery, the food, the music – the list is endless.

Mr A and I had our first ever holiday together in Argentina and Chile, when he came to meet me for Christmas and New Year when I was on my solo round the world trip, just a few months after we’d met. So it holds lots of special memories for us both and we’d love to go back one day.

I’d really like to return to Colombia and Brazil and am also keen to explore some new countries like Uruguay, where we could enjoy a mixture of cities and beaches.

The Maldives

Speaking of beaches, part of me is wondering whether we shouldn’t ditch the more adventurous holiday for once and just go and lie on a beach somewhere. I’m always insanely jealous of the photos I see of people’s trips to the Maldives. And isn’t a honeymoon a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stay in a five star hotel and spend every day lying on a perfect beach? It would be the chance for Mr A and I to chill out together after a busy few months and also the opportunity for us to do some diving, which I absolutely love.

Aaah, decisions! What do you think? Have you been to any of these places or is there another country you would recommend as the perfect honeymoon destination?