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50 Years of Travel Tips

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Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#11

Post by melling »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #8
melling wrote: post #7

I spent 9 months traveling from Mexico to Buenos Aires with a backpack eighteen years ago. Spent most nights in hostels in shared rooms for a few dollars a night. It was a great experience. Carried a MacBook Pro and a digital Nikon D70. Actually had the first iPhone but hardly used it. Do have a selfie of myself on a bus somewhere in Central America. These days I’m taking more expensive vacations in cheaper countries…

1/3 of 2000 USD is still 650 USD a night. This is quite a price. I am sure that plenty of people can afford it (I could if I wanted to) but this is rather expensive when you compare to, say a stay in Chamonix (French Alps, a "posh" station) where you can have a 65 m2 appartment next to the slopes in high season for about 250-300€/night.

Instead of $650 there’s always the AirBnB and living on less than $100 a day. When I backpacked I was spending probably $1000 a month. I recommend trying both.

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#12

Post by notahacker »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #8
melling wrote: post #7

I spent 9 months traveling from Mexico to Buenos Aires with a backpack eighteen years ago. Spent most nights in hostels in shared rooms for a few dollars a night. It was a great experience. Carried a MacBook Pro and a digital Nikon D70. Actually had the first iPhone but hardly used it. Do have a selfie of myself on a bus somewhere in Central America. These days I’m taking more expensive vacations in cheaper countries…

1/3 of 2000 USD is still 650 USD a night. This is quite a price. I am sure that plenty of people can afford it (I could if I wanted to) but this is rather expensive when you compare to, say a stay in Chamonix (French Alps, a "posh" station) where you can have a 65 m2 appartment next to the slopes in high season for about 250-300€/night.

Yeah, $650 per night in Morocco is staying in La Mamounia, famous mingling place of world leaders and celebrities with a Paul McCartney song named after it...

You can stay in quite a nice palace for a lot less than that

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#13

Post by vintagedave »

ghaff wrote: post #5
baal80spam wrote: post #3

> If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. Uhh, I really can't imagine this one working well in a Western country.

Almost certainly would seem weirder in some places or circumstances than others. One of those things in the list I have certainly never considered.

Once in Vietnam, our cab driver asked if he could pause at home on the way. We said yes. So he drove home, his wife gave him lunch, we tried it too, met her and his kids and his friendly half-street-half-pet dogs, and then went back to our hotel.

And I still remember it... whereas I cannot remember our other taxi rides!

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#14

Post by jajko »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #8
melling wrote: post #7

I spent 9 months traveling from Mexico to Buenos Aires with a backpack eighteen years ago. Spent most nights in hostels in shared rooms for a few dollars a night. It was a great experience. Carried a MacBook Pro and a digital Nikon D70. Actually had the first iPhone but hardly used it. Do have a selfie of myself on a bus somewhere in Central America. These days I’m taking more expensive vacations in cheaper countries…

1/3 of 2000 USD is still 650 USD a night. This is quite a price. I am sure that plenty of people can afford it (I could if I wanted to) but this is rather expensive when you compare to, say a stay in Chamonix (French Alps, a "posh" station) where you can have a 65 m2 appartment next to the slopes in high season for about 250-300€/night.

Are you talking about my flat in Chamonix? :) Those are top season prices, one can go much lower and mountains are still roughly the same, meaning absolutely awesome and most accessible brutal high alpine terrain in Europe, possibly globally. Skiing Vallee Blanche is top experience (just take helmet at least).

Anyway backpacking is the most intense form of travelling by huge margin, the cheaper the better. I did two 3-month trips in India & Nepal around 2010, all costs combined apart from return flight tickets were around 500$ per month. Best time of my life, literally life and personality changing experiences that will stay with me till my last breath. No plans, just 1 thick Lonely planet book

Adventures don't need to be always positive experiences, intensity is what matters much more, the further away from comfort zone one gets more impactful the experience is.

Also it feels significantly longer, each time those 3 months felt like decades, hard to describe with mere words

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#16

Post by kjellsbells »

ghaff wrote: post #6
gadilif wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on traveling light. The author did mention this, too: " Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage."

Ah. Missed that. It's certainly not always possible if you need real dress clothing or real hiking/camping gear. (I've never gotten to the point where I can do a month-long trip that includes a long distance week-long+ walk along with some fairly formal evening wear in a carry-on.) But you can probably get closer than you think. By myself, if I'm mostly just traveling in cities with "business casual" as dressy as it…

For men, mixed business/pleasure trips to countries with a conservative dress code can be tough (Japan for example). I have found that higher quality suits have better fabrics that are more able to recover from being stuffed in a small space. The problem I have yet to solve is shoes. In the West, not only are suits for meetings becoming rarer, but dress sneakers are acceptable almost everywhere, and they can do double duty for leisure. In Japan I would feel underdressed if I wasnt wearing standard black leather shoes. Maybe it will change with the new generation. Things are certainly lighter than in the early 2000s and 2010s, when there was a distinct echo of the infamous Burleson dress code[0]. (Though the cultural disdain for tattoos still exists.)

[0] https://archive.is/Shp8G

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#17

Post by vintagedave »

This is great advice. On his 'laser out' approach, I often find after travel I am tired and I _really_ don't want to spend hours more getting to where I'm really going, so I usually stop in the city that I landed in.

But I have a policy: never go to sleep without going to walk in the city. That is: never land and sleep. _Always_ absorb some of the local environment. Then when your brain knows it's somewhere else, then go to sleep.

This has worked to varying degrees. I always wake up with the excitement of being somewhere. But once, on my very first trip overseas, I got lost and spent three confused hours very late at night in a dark 2AM-no-one-around city trying to find my way back...

...but it sure is a good story now.

Which is very much the point of this article's advice. It seems to be: optimise for experience and stories.

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#18

Post by susam »

One travel technique that has worked very well for me takes place the day before my trip: using a pre-travel prep-and-packing checklist. I created this checklist about 15 years ago and still refine it occasionally. This list has three sections:

A) Preparation tasks: Like printing essential travel documents, saving a backup to my mobile phone, buying foreign currency, activating data roaming, etc.

B) Packing list: Mine currently has about 30 or so items, covering everything from the very basics, like toothbrush and toothpaste, to the often-overlooked, like reusable ziplock bags, microfibre cloths, etc.

C) Last minute checks: These are final tasks to complete just before leaving home. This includes double-checking that passports are packed, non-essential electrical appliances and lamps are switched off, balcony doors are locked, wet waste has been properly disposed of, etc.

By the time I step into a taxi or train to the airport, I can fully focus on the journey ahead rather than worrying about forgotten items. After all, this checklist has served me well for the past 15 years. Every item is checked off before I leave home, so as soon as I get into a taxi or train, I can relax, knowing that nothing has been forgotten.

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#19

Post by ghaff »

kjellsbells wrote: post #16
ghaff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. Missed that. It's certainly not always possible if you need real dress clothing or real hiking/camping gear. (I've never gotten to the point where I can do a month-long trip that includes a long distance week-long+ walk along with some fairly formal evening wear in a carry-on.) But you can probably get closer than you think. By myself, if I'm mostly just traveling in cities with "business casual" as dressy as it…

For men, mixed business/pleasure trips to countries with a conservative dress code can be tough (Japan for example). I have found that higher quality suits have better fabrics that are more able to recover from being stuffed in a small space. The problem I have yet to solve is shoes. In the West, not only are suits for meetings becoming rarer, but dress sneakers are acceptable almost everywhere, and they can do doubl…

The last couple of trips I took to Japan were for events with essentially a developer/marketing oriented organization and I was able to comfortably get off with pretty much business casual. Maybe I wouldn't have felt as comfortable for a customer event.

The last trip I really felt I overpacked for with respect to train/transit was some time in London, followed by a long-distance walk where I really needed everything I had with me, followed by an ocean liner return where I needed jackets and real dress shoes--which, as you suggest, even Rockports aren't really general purpose. You always want more shoes than you can reasonably carry.

Wheeled vs. non-wheeled luggage is definitely a tradeoff. I lean towards non-wheeled in general and just maybe take a few more taxis if the luggage is too heavy to schlep around the city a bit.

Re: 50 Years of Travel Tips

#20

Post by ghaff »

susam wrote: post #18

One travel technique that has worked very well for me takes place the day before my trip: using a pre-travel prep-and-packing checklist. I created this checklist about 15 years ago and still refine it occasionally. This list has three sections: A) Preparation tasks: Like printing essential travel documents, saving a backup to my mobile phone, buying foreign currency, activating data roaming, etc. B) Packing list: Min…

You do get used to it and I keep a travel pile, but, yeah, checklists are never a bad idea.
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