Other states, other lives, other souls

Have you ever planned your own travel abroad?  Or have you always used some kind of organized service that plans your itinerary, hotels, experiences, and has a guide and a group of people? Does planning your own travel and traveling alone (or with another friend) scare you?  If the answer to the first question is no and to the second and third questions, yes, I want to offer up some of the benefits and tips for planning your own travel.  So as not to reinvent the wheel, here’s a link to a great site to use in planning your own travel experience:  Thrifty Nomads .

What this post offers is more personal experiences I have had planning my own travel, pros and cons (mostly pros), and in-between steps to lessen anxiety.  I have planned my own trips, more or less, since 1992. The first one was a road trip through part of Brittany and the Dordogne, lasting 14 days, with my husband and ten year old son, making a loop after dropping off my daughter in Aix en Provence for a six week stay with a French family.  The second was another 14 day trip to Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley and Lake Titicaca in Peru in 1999 with my husband.  Then, in rapid succession during our salad days, Turkey (2000), Vietnam (7 days), Laos (3 days), Argentina (3 weeks), the Netherlands (10 days), New Zealand and Queensland (4 weeks), Iceland (1 week), and Kauai (3 weeks).  I am not including other trips where we stayed in one place—too easy!

I love planning my own travel!  It gets me in the anticipatory mood for a vacation and new experiences which is almost as beneficial as the travel itself.  Seriously, there is research on this:  What a great trip and I’m not even there yet! Now that I am retired I have plenty of time to Google around on the web, learning about the area, deciding what places and experiences fit my goals for travel. But I did this when I was working fulltime too, even with young children at home when there was no web.  Here are the pros as I see it:

1. Your travel is tailored to your goals, budget, and interests.
2. It costs much less.
3. You are more likely to meet the locals or other diverse travelers that enrich your experience of the place
4. No jerks in your group to harsh your mellow.
5. The ability to have more unusual experiences that a group and a travel company can’t manage.
6. More knowledge of the area because you studied up, rather than waiting for a guide to give his or her spiel in the front of the van and you are in the back.

Here are a couple of cons:

1. Time
2. Advance planning

These two can be avoided if you are willing to be a backpacker, decide on the fly, and have a lot of time to spend once you get to where you are going.  Since I am not a millennial, don’t like most backpacker hotels, and have more limited time abroad, I plan my travel, have a detailed itinerary, and have made most reservations ahead of time. We have made lodging reservations on the fly on a hiking trail using a smartphone and hotels.com

Before you begin, what do you want out of travel? I do not have a bucket list that I got from a book or magazine. Here is one: The Ultimate Travel Bucket List  It happens that I have done 8 of the 31 on this list. But I do not have a list.  I also do not have a bird list.  Frankly, I don’t like following the herd (or flock).  I do have a grocery list, which a planned itinerary is.  Here is my other list of ideal criteria for planning my own travel:

1. I want to see places that are very different from where I live—beautiful, ecologically distinct, ancient, culturally different, creatively modern
2. I don’t have unlimited resources, so less expensive venues are a boon
3. I am not looking for glamor or pure relaxation. Boring!! OK, cheap glamor is acceptable.
4. I want to meet people from that place, to learn more about how they live, what they eat, how they house themselves, what they believe in, what kind of music they listen to.
5. I want to explore on my own, by car, bus, bike, on foot without keeping up with a group. Serendipity is fun.
6. I want to eat different and tasty foods– fresh, made-from-scratch, gourmet, street food.
7. I don’t want to blow my budget on lodging. (See Finding Great Lodging post)
8. I want to meet other travelers, especially non-Americans who can give me a different perspective and/or are fun to hang with for a while.
9. I want to find local guides for particular excursions who know the terrain, the language, the opportunities.

Do you agree with any of these criteria?  What would you add or subtract?  If you don’t know what you value out of travel, you are more likely to be disappointed, either from your own planning or group travel.

Here is an example of a partially self-planned trip that eased our nerves about visiting a famous area known for tourist throngs, but without submitting to group travel. It ended up meeting all 9 of my ideal criteria. The trip was to Machu Picchu, Cuzco, the Sacred Valley, and Lake Titicaca, in Peru, in 1999.

My husband found online a moonlighting flight attendant travel planner who traveled regularly to Peru on Delta (Tambo Tours).  Through email we told him what we wanted to do, including our preference for 2-star lodging.  I had read up ahead of time on Lonely Planet about the four parts of Peru we decided to visit, and had talked to friends who had been there.  We decided not to walk the old Inca Trail up to Machu Picchu, as many group travel companies encourage, because it would add many days to our trip, and possibly result in sickness (altitude or microbes) that would spoil the experience.  Our Tambo Tours online agent booked half of the hotels needed along the way and we found the rest.  He arranged two personal van tours with local guides to take us around Cusco and Pisac and then through the Sacred Valley, dropping us off at the train station to Machu Picchu in Ollantaytambo and the Auberge run by Seattle expat Wendy Weeks.

The final leg of our journey would be on the “most beautiful train ride in the world” to Lake Titicaca. Tambo Tours would buy the tickets and supply a local guide once we got to Puno on the lake.

We sent him a check in the mail, with some trepidation, and received shortly a manilla envelope with receipts, tickets, and info on how we would meet up with our guides.  We were delighted with all the arrangements Tambo had made. We were also delighted with the lodging, restaurants, and unusual experiences we found ourselves, the unexpected locals and fellow travelers we happened on during our trip, and the opportunity to dive into much of the diverse beauty, culture, and history that is Peru.

In another post I hope to regale you with some of the crazy, lucky, funny, poignant, and scary things that happened on that Peru trip that would not have happened with group travel.

*This phrase reminds me of my intrepid granddaughter who just turned four.  She is a tiny thing, but due to how she has been raised, she is unafraid of: holding chickens, gathering fresh eggs, hanging around goats and large dogs, and putting her head under water. She is proud of being able to : put on all her clothes, buckle up her own car seat, carry around her own step ladder to watch the action, identify plants, try any food, break eggs into a cake mix with no shells, go up and down little hills on her strider bike, you get the picture.  I hope we all can be at least as intrepid as this four year old.