Starting to plan trip, advice needed!

Hi all,

I am starting to think of making a trip, departing from the UK in the next 12 to 24 months, and the silly thing is I can't think where I want to go, or how I intend to do it!

By that I mean, should I by a round the world ticket, and stick to pre arranged route, or get a ticket to Thailand or another similar destination and see what happens?

I'd like to travel light, is there any bits of kit that you'd find indispensable in your pack? Is there anything to be avoided, in case of trouble at customs etc, apart from obvious of course?

What about things like vaccinations, if I'm not sure where I'm going or for how long, should I load up on all the shots and be safe or just not bother and hope for the best?

Anyway, sorry for being so vague, I should get it together as time goes on.

Cheers, Karl

Karl

That's a tricky one, I would think about how much money you have - a round the ticket costs around £2000 and allows you to 15 flights (you can only visit eah place once, although you can visit again for a connecting flight), also you cannot travel more than 380,000 miles. Plus you'll need to plan out your trip first andk now when and where your going, great for a first timers.

As for where, I would try Asia, its cheap and although not the easiest place its a great place to learn, a popular starting point would be Thailand, as it so simple.

A lot of people go to Austrlia and new Zealand, whicj is great but unless your working, you'll need a lot of money.

As for jabs, unless you know where your going you will not know what you need.

One my first trip I did a around the world ticket, but now I just get a return ticket and use local transport, buses, trains to travel to other countries its so simple.

Remember these days there are thousands of people on the road and your never going to go anwhere nobody has not already been. - stories of I found this place and lived in the villiage for 3 years are total rubbish.

Most of do not worry it so simple, use your head and you'll be okay, and a pro within a month.

Anything I can help you wish just say, I have loads of stuff on my web

Roland

Two months ago, we were pretty much in the same situation you were, more or less. We went to a bookstore and looked in the general travel section and found what appeared to be exactly the book we needed. It was. Read the Practical Nomad by Edward Hasbrouck(sp?). Its a relatively large (500+ pages) book on how to travel, in general. Ed works for a travel agent out of San Francisco that specializes in RTW and overseas flights. The website is airtreks.com, I think. There's a pretty good tool on their website that lets you pick cities all over the world and it'll give you a rough estimate (in US$) of the cost. That helped a lot.

We started emailing Airtreks with some possible itineraries and after some back and forth which seemed to be getting us forward a lot slower that we had anticipated, we mentioned that we had read the Practical Nomad and that Ed seemed to paint a much different picture of how helpful the consultants at Airtreks were. The next night, we got a call from Ed, who both my wife and I thought was exactly what we thought he'd be like. He was extremely knowledgeable and spent over half and hour on the phone with us. In the process, we picked his brain and he made several suggestions that are going to allow us to travel more intelligently. We were pretty impressed with him. He said he'd put something together for us based on our conversation and the itinerary we got the next day was pretty close to what we think we're going to commit to.

Unfortunately, Ed left Airtreks this week for leave to do research on his next version of the Practical Nomad, but we still anticipate booking our flight with Airtreks in the next couple weeks.

I'm sure there's other resources out there (like this newsgroup) to help you start putting things together for your trip but these worked for us. Good luck. If you have any other questions, send us an email.

- Greg