I really enjoy following this trip for quite a while now! Back when I first looked I had just 2 countries to my name, but a lifelong dream came true and I was able to backpack around Asia for almost 8 months and had the absolute time of my life. Of course none of these travels (except possibly the very worthwhile daytrip to Macao) was influenced by wanting to collect another country. All places I would traveled to anyway. On that trip I was able to find a virtual at a tuna fish auction in Osaka/Japan at 5 in the morning, running into into a massive typhoon on the way back. In Korea the hides were usually poorly maintained, but hiking around Seoul was amazing, even if no boxes were found. Thailand had me place my first own cache (and check every single touristic billboard in Bangkok ). In Malaysia it was my first 5/5 ever, an EC on top of Mount Kinabalu at 4500 meters, in the heart of Borneo. In Singapore and Brunei the caches were byproducts of visiting the city. In Indonesia they made me go around the whole island of Lombok on a scooter to find two caches in the very south. And get a FTF off the coast of Flores, just by the amazing Komodo-Dragons...
In East-Timor they made me rent a bike and got me to a former ammunitions storage carved into the side of a mountain, from the recent war of liberation. The cache was found by flashlight, hidden inside an actual gunshell pointing out the violent history of the country. Goosebumps right there, one of my most impressing caches ever. Big China had surprisingly few caches, but a virtual at the panda-base in Chengdu and 3 tradis were found in a whole month...
I'd just like to appreciate in this post how beautiful geocaching is. What amazing things it makes you go out and do, just as a small reason to go out and embark on adventures. You start going out to find this one cache, and in the end the experiences you make along the way count for so much more that it almost becomes a side remark to say "oh yeah, and that box I was looking for, I also found it".
Here's to the next adventures!