Planning a two month trip across south east asia and India, in the space of a month and change, is no easy task. I’ve been staying up to one or two in the morning pretty much every night for the past month. I have an arsenal of resources, which I thought it’d share. The item’s on the list below have stayed open in their own tabs in my browser since the beginning. These are tools that make for good planning:
- Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Forums - indispensable advice and suggestions. i have several active threads right now, from all legs of my trip. for the past month i’ve been on Thorn tree more then my own site (now you know where i’ve been). My Threads on Bali, Thailand, Cambodia / Vietnam and India
- My Backpack account - it’s the life blood of my operation and i’ve become a skilled user along the way. cut-n-paste directly from any web page right into backpack for printing later. it’s my own personalized guide book: Bali, Thailand / Cambodia / Vietnam, India
- Yahoo’s currency converter - amazingly handy
- Seat 61 - great resource for train and bus info. astoundingly detailed
- Kayak.com - my first stop when pricing airline tickets. doesn’t necessarily come out the cheapest, but gives a good/quick idea of what cities are connected. great web 2.0 service, makes travelocity look ancient
- Flickr - that’s right! Sometimes I’m so surprised about how off i am when i read about a location in the guide books and then check it out in flickr. navigate by tags set to ‘interestingness’, example: Hoi An (vietnam). This also works for hotels. tags really do work! I’ve also been posting in the Visit the world group and theCanon DSLR group
- DPreview Forums - the best online forums for working digital photographers. I’m bringing the Canon 5D with me and I’ll be shooting some serious amounts of photos. Gotta do what the pros do, this is where to find out
- Jeremie & Rita’s blog - I ran into these guys on the Thorn Tree forums. They have a great travel blog full of great images and useful info. They turned me on to the a driver service for Rajasthan and I am almost literally copying their exact travel plan for Raj. Without their wonderful blog to light my way, I’m not sure I’d be nearly as dialed in as I am. thanks guys!
After countless nights of research, forum posting and general back and forth, here is our rough itinerary by location. I booked the flights to Bali, Thailand, India and home, as well as first night’s hotel at the beginning of each leg. I’ve roughed out itineraries for each leg, but resisted the urge to solidify anything at all. So without further ado, here’s where the world tour stands:
- Bali: Ubud, Nusa Lembongan, Dreamland Beach & Uluwatu
- Thailand: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Song and possibly Ko samui or Khao Lak
- Cambodia: Phnom Penh, Siem Rep
- Vietnam: Hanoi, Halong Bay
- India: Delhi, Varanasi, khajuraho, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Deshnok, Mandawa
Needless to say, this trip is gonna be bananas and if we come home in one piece, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I’m fully prepared to have my mind blown. With all roads leading to critical mass when we hit india, I’m glad i’ll have a month and change of traveling before we land in Delhi and just to lighten the load, I’ve been contemplating hiring a car and driver for two weeks during our trip through Rajasthan (it’s actually quite affordable). This would be a nice treat, for our last two weeks.
I’m gonna be taking some heavy pics on this trip. I’m not bringing a laptop, for weight and philosophical reasons, so I spent countless nights trolling photographer forums putting together a decent solution. After weighing all the options, I purchased two 120gb Compact Drives. These drives are basically a card reader, copying device and hard drive in one. No fancy color screen, no editing. Just raw hard drive space and simple verification of copy completion with an added bonus that they run off of rechargeable AA batteries. The idea is to have two, for redundancy’s sake, in case anything happens to one, I have another (theft, malfunction, etc…), traveling with them in separate pieces of luggage. Although with my uncanny ability to shoot 4 gigs of images in a matter of hours, I’m not sure 120gb will last the entire trip. I’ll most likely have to do to some in-camera editing or stop in various locals and dump to DVD and mail home.
Well, that’s the lion share of what i’ve been doing with my nights for the past six weeks. Almost a week til we take off to LA and then off to Asia on the 9th of Dec. I can’t believe how close it is. just around the corner. we are so ready for a good adventure…
I hope you enjoy the adventure and that nothing serious happens, but do you think it is wise to tell the world exactly where you will be in the near future ?? There are all sorts of Wackos and Pendejos out there, Guys, be careful! you could allways post the places without the real timetable. I hope you actually did it, already!
Pedro (Lisboa)