29 December 2013

Why travel? Your living room is so cozy. You like your neighborhood. You can get sick while traveling. Who is going to take care of your dog? What about your friends? There are plenty of reasons to stay home. Traveling involves staying in bad hostels, using outhouses when all you need is a bathroom, eating strange food, like snake soup or fried spiders.

Some other worst case scenarios are?

—Losing a passport

—breaking a leg

—missing a flight

—getting robbed

—losing a credit cards

—running out of money

—Riots, mugging, snakes

Yes, you need a lot of guts to go on vacation if you prefer to see things this way. The way I see it is: all of the above, plus:

—Experiencing new cultures,

—getting in touch with locals,

—meeting people,

—different food, spices and drinks,

—interesting hotels,

—cool stories,

—home—stays in Asia

—landscapes you've dreamed of seeing,

—planning is fun,

—time with friends,

—researching is fun,

—proving yourself you can!

My world trip starts tomorrow. There will be:

—around 150 days,

—at least 11 airports,

—around 7 countries,

—several layovers

—around 40 cities,

—and God knows how many hostels.

What will be the route:

January: Thailand and the Philippines

February: Vietnam

March: Australia

April: Brazil and Argentina

May: USA

The plan is to follow a pattern everywhere:

—draw a sketch of what there is to see in every country,

—see how that is feasible from a logistic point of view,

—pick two or three highlights everyday

—document the trip with articles, journals and pictures.

How to plan the budget?

A previous research was made in order to figure out how much a day in each country costs for a tourist with middle standards (good hostel or inns, plus transportation, food and extras).

The website http://budgetyourtrip.com/ (as well as every travel guide) offers a good overview of how much each country costs (not including flights and insurances).

Southeast Asia: around 50 EUR a day

Australia, USA, Brazil: around 80 EUR a day

Of course big cities are more expensive than the average price, and it all depends on how disciplined you handle your money.

What is important?

Health Insurance is indispensable. An accident overseas can cost you anywhere between five to fifty thousand dollars.

Planing ahead: route, budget, means of transportation, best time to travel, places you want to visit, hotels and restaurants you'd like to see, etc. Most items on my list are "nice to have" but no "must—have", with the intention to keep myself flexible. You have to keep everything as flexible as possible. For this reason, I only booked the long distance flights and no hotels.

Good websites to give you an initial ready are:

http://www.airtreks.com

http://weltreise—info.de

These sites will help you with everything from the planning of the route down to the packing techniques.

Route: Probably my initial route contained more than twenty countries, and I'd need 2 years to see everything (at my pace) and four times more money. The final route was achieved by defining priorities, putting your trajectory in a straight line (on google maps) and trying to accommodate your route and your pace in the amount of time you have available. This is more difficult than most people would think.

Some highlights of the trip:

—Ha Long Bay,

—Beaches in the Philippines,

—Angkor Wat,

—Bangkok

—Food in Vietnam,

—flight over the Whitsunday Islands

—Whisunday Islands,

—nights in Sydney

—Brazil

—NYC

—coming back home after all that.

In order to keep the discipline, I'll try to keep a tentative schedule: get up at a certain time everyday, explore the area, document my days in a journal regularly. I plan to include a regular publishing cycle.

Let's see how much of the trip turns out as planned.