How to Plan Travel Part 1: Region
We travel the world fulltime and we’ll show you how to hi guys it’s Tim and Kathy with taste life with us and guess what we left California 7even eight months ago we sold everything and now we hit the road and we’re traveling yep we’ve been in Australia
New Zealand and I planned all of this out before we left but now it’s just about time to move on and we’ve got about eight months ahead of us that we need to plan before we return to the US wow that sounds like some work are we
Going to be able to do it of course so two months of that is already planned for Bali but it’s not it’s not planned we just know we’re going to Bali and we’re going there in a month so we need to plan that soon and that’s going to be
In part two of this series okay because planning your specific accommodations and transportation inside of a smaller area is a whole different process than what we’re going to do today well what are we going to do today well to get that visa for Bali we have
To have a ticket out of Bali so we got to figure out where we’re going okay we know we want to be in southeast asah but we need to narrow that down and figure out where we’re going to be and where we’re going to enter and so we need to
Evaluate all the countries that are possibilities and look at weather and rainfall and what we want to do and you know we want to go snorkeling is a good times to snorkel you everybody has their own thing so I’m going to teach you how to use some free tools to plan and we’re
Going to make a grid system that shows us where to uh spend our time and kind of what order to go in okay so what I’m hearing is you’re going to lay out some steps for us to figure out how to plan this trip exactly we’re going to plan
The region step by step and you don’t have to know how to use spreadsheets we’re not using any spreadsheets in there let’s not get complic going a little bit old school now if you want to amp it up you can use your own system but this is just a this is a framework
That you can impose your own travel Style on your own destination on and your own planning Style on I’m just giving you a framework for what to consider and I may come along with a few tips on how to save some money because I’m a tight
Wad saving money is always good let to travel more hi guys I can’t wait to travel plan with you today I’m going to look at planning our southeast Asia trip so first of all I need to know where am I going to put this data so that I can
Organize it I use Cola note which is on the App Store it’s a free app you can also download PDFs into it so I download a PDF calendar from Etsy you can either either get a whole travel planning calendar or you can just get a straight calendar I’ve used both and um depends
On your style okay so also Cola note comes with paper in it that you can then use different colors of ink it has a ruler so you can draw straight lines you can just kind of use it however you want to use it okay so I’m going to use colon note
To create myself a graph on the countries in the region so I’m going to go to Chrome and I’m going to open multiple windows so that I can look at the weather and climate.com the um I can open visas on different countries on my search I can
Open uh I can search for public holidays in blank country and use that I can look for jellyfish season because we like to snorkel and and I can look up everything I need for my little grid I’m going to show you some screenshots of it a region may include multiple
Countries or areas of a large country so first of all if you can’t even decide what region you want to go to uh even after talking it over with your partner you just have a lot of options maybe start with Google flights I’m going to
Put a little thing in here on how to just look and search the whole world for what’s a great deal right now and go there get started there I mean it’s a it’s a point to start don’t book your flight till you’ve kind of checked it
All out the situation and see if you really want to go there but that’s a way to decide or if you already know your region like we know southeast Asia we can look on the flights and decide where do we maybe want to start that’s not the
Only thing that matters to me the flight price also the weather and whether we can do the things we want to to do there during that month matters to me so I’m going to look at all of those options okay I want to real quick mention a couple things if you’re trying
To find where you might want to start you can use Google flights you can use the explore option you can say where you’re coming from you can just put trip in the next six months you can move your your map around to the areas you might be interested in
You can say okay in this general area I can get some really good deals right so let’s see maybe I want to go to Vietnam prices are currently low that’s good wow if you want to uh click on one and check it then you can actually go to
The website if you want to book it you can put in different variables you can change your dates you can look on to a map and say well what if I really want to go in July is it still going to be cheap because right now it’s you know
It’s a it’s a deal okay so if I want to wait till July that price is going to go up unless I travel on certain days which maybe I can do because I’m flexible so anyways those those are the kind of things you want to look at you definitely want to take into
Consideration bags so once you’ve dialed in on something go to the website look at what your bags are because those can really add a lot to to your cost so once you’ve narrowed down talk to your partner thought about which countries you might want to see uh a couple other factors to think
Of where you’re choosing an area is the cost because some geographical areas are cheaper some are more expensive you can balance those out across the year um with you know some Maybe southeast Asia against Australia New Zealand that’s what we’re doing this year maybe you want to balance shenen time in the
Western European countries with cheaper stays in Eastern Europe or turkey or Morocco outside of the shenen zone so those are some options also another thing to keep in mind before you start planning is what do you have in the way of points on airlines or free night stays at hotels because you
May have a bucket list place you want to go that’s really expensive like say the Mal Dives but if you have some free nights you can use makes it more affordable or when you’re looking at flight prices and you can’t afford to go quite where you want to go in a
Reasonable amount of um dollars you might want to look at how many points would it take me and use some of your airline points or transfer from Chase to a different partner and use points there uh I like to get the most bang out of my
Points so I don’t usually use them in cheap cheaper countries I use them in more expensive countries and longer Hall flights and finally before you get started look at your anchor points so anchor points for us are maybe a repositioning cruise that will take us to a different continent uh for example
Our Anchor Point on this trip at the end is October 12th we leave for the US on a repositioning cruise out of Singapore so we need to be in Singapore a few days before that other than that um we already have booked on points of flight from Christ Church New Zealand to to
Bali in Indonesia and so we know we’re getting to Bali on March 27th we have a 60-day window of visas because we can renew it a 30-day one time and uh so we want to be out there at about out of there about day 57 58 so probably May
22nd or 23rd we want to leave Indonesia once you’ve decided on your geographical area you need to choose your countries that you want to include and you can cast a wide net while you’re researching if you want to or if you already know which countries you’re most
Interested in maybe just keep it narrow because the hardest part of travel planning is deciding where not to go there’s plenty of wonderful places to go but there’s only so much time and you want to have a real experience in each one you don’t want to be so worn out
That you’re waking up saying what country am I even in today so choose a few that you think you might be interested in but then narrow it down to how many you can realistically do a quality time of seeing if you’re a nomad you’re going to be back it’s okay you
Don’t have to see everything so try to choose some countries that are near each other and that will be easier and cheaper to travel in between uh when we’re looking at southeast Asia it was real easy to kind of oh maybe we should go to Sri Lanka it’s only $100 but if
We’re in Sri Lanka maybe we should go to India and that just got way out of control so we had to dial it back down we even didn’t put Lao on this grid because we had looked at Lao and then we were like you know it’s just one more
Thing and we’ve already got enough so you definitely want to narrow down to what you can do a good quality time at visiting and get everything out of it that you want out of it but also have enough to fill the space that you’re trying to fill jumping ahead a little we
Did decide to possibly add some manra or since the exchange rate is great right now in Japan we may add Japan right before we have to be in Singapore I know you just saw us add somatra so it looks like we’re going too far out but we had considered doing
Borneo and Borneo is a lot farther out of the way and a little bit more complicated once you get there and so so Mantra is actually a lot cheaper closer and I think we can just go specifically to one place spend our week and leave so
We’re going to try this is a thing as you’re establishing the countries you’re going to research a bunch of countries and then discard some because they just don’t fit the timeline they’re not a good season to go what have you or even places within a country that you thought
You really wanted to go all of a sudden you’re you know deciding that place is just it’s not a good time of year to go and you’re going to see that happen in some of our grid you’re doing this to figure those things out before you put a lot of time into
Planning them so we’re going to try to narrow our countries down we’re going to try to set General times when it would be best for us to be there and then we’re going to leave the country planning to a different time we’re looking for what’s our Gateway into the rest of Southeast Asia
Do we want to go to Thailand first or Cambodia first or or what so to decide that we need to know what the weather’s going to be what the rainfall is going to be we definitely want to see anchor watt we’re not going to be there very
Long in Cambodia so we want to be sure that we don’t go with a super super rainy time of year where we might not be able to enjoy it so we’re going to look at all those factors I’m going to create a grid right now in Cola note and I’m
Going to kind of show you how it goes so first I’m going to mark down the countries I’m looking at and I’m going to look at the factors involved in them so we’ve got those items there’s certain places we know we’re going in those countries so I’m going to especially
Dial down on those areas of the country Thailand for example example has a lot of different weather conditions in a lot of different areas whether you’re up in the north by changai you’re going to have different situations seasonally than if you’re in the Gulf area versus
Whether you’re over by pukat or uh that side so we’ve got our our grid okay now that we’ve got our grid we’re going to fill in some weather components I’m going to look these up online I use a lot of like weather and climate.com but also um just Google and
Blogs and trying to get an idea of the specific areas that I want to go to and how the weather affects those areas for instance we like to snorkel rain can be very bad in snorkel areas monsoons definitely wreck the water okay so then we want to look at public holidays and
This is really important for example in Cambodia uh anchor watt is closed on public holidays so if we look at the beginning of June which is looking like the best weather we can see the queen mother’s birthday is on June 18th and anchor wat will be closed so we want to
Avoid that it’s also good if you want to go to a specific historical place to check and see if there’s any Renovations going on or any kind of closures for whatever reason sometimes you just can’t tell far ahead but sometimes you can find it on their website
Okay we’re going to look at the public holidays for each country and note those because sometimes it’s great to be in place on a holiday it’s an extra cultural experience but you definitely don’t want to be traveling on a public holiday because it just is going to
Create all kinds of situations where um things are close you can’t get you know your tax can’t get through town whatever there’s a lot of situations like that festivals public holidays that can really just put a kink in your travel so I try to avoid traveling on those days
Now sometimes you’ll find out something you really want to do like in Hoon there is a Lantern Festival that we definitely want to make it to so uh we are going to try to do that also want to look at your visas you can look these up Google say blank country
Visitor visa for us citizens and then I’ll dial down I’ll scroll down until I can at least go to the US state department site which is not always completely up to date or preferably go to that country’s actual Visa or immigration site and get the information there’s anything specific
You want to do like when we’re in penor uh we really would prefer to see the bioluminescence they have this thing called Blue tears and um it lights up the water it’s really cool so I wanted to do a little research on when does that happen well usually you can see it
Best during when it’s really dark obviously uh so the first three days of the new moon cycle so then I had to look up when are the moon phases in that area of the world and so I found it I found the dates so I’m marking that in because I
Really want to try to be there for that our chart I kind of picked months that seemed best for different areas and then I started looking at the uh flights because if we want to start in Cambodia in cm R before the rain starts we want
To get in there as soon as we can after Bali that would be the end of May if we’re flying straight to see a rap it’s like 15 hours and layovers and it just looks like a pretty hellish flight to be honest so I started looking at what if
We fly to Bangkok and then we spend a little time in Bangkok first and then we fly to CM rate the whole thing came out to pretty much the same price and we have a week in Bankok and uh we still get to CM rape in plenty of time before
The rain so look at those options uh I tried to look at then based on where we’ll be in cm reap where’s the best next place to go based on flights so it’s looking like maybe kosui uh in Thailand we might go ahead and go down there hit Samui hit to um
Kotow maybe go up to Huen after that I have to at this point start really watching my tai Visa because it depends how long we’re staying we can only stay the 30 days without leaving the country and coming back so then I was looking at going to
Kip and going to Lano which which is in Malaysia because you can take a ferry between those two both great snorkel areas however the more I kind of tried to fit it in and the more I dialed down into the dates and Googled those places I found out that that’s really monsoon
Season and number one monsoons are not good for snorkeling number two the ferry shuts down and in fact the tourist areas around there kind of shut down so I think we’re going to ax those you can see on screen I’ve got a picture of kind of our our general idea we put together
And then in the blue how those things kept getting axed so instead we might go do Elephant Hill in Thailand and uh the cowak national park but we’re going to have to really watch our Visa days we may have to go somewhere else first and then come back um we definitely want to
Go to that pan Court in Malaysia to see the bi luminescence and actually July is a great month for snorkeling there for whatever reason they don’t seem to have the rain problems and then we definitely want to be in Hoy on for the festival which I must have written down on a
Different page but we want to be there for the Lantern Festival debating between there and D but anyways now you can see I’ve got a big hole in the middle so this is a work in progress and this will develop as I plan each country individually I’m not going to do that
For Southeast Asia right now with you guys um but I wanted to show you how we kind of uh decide how to navigate between the countries so we want to constantly have those cheap short flights to go in and out to stay within our visa and also to hop around to
Different areas as it’s logical um you don’t have to stay in the country the whole time you can hop in and out of time land it’s just a stamp visa for 30 days so it’s a it’s a long country and sometimes it’s easier to go in and out
Of the other countries from there and that’s fine too we hope you’ve enjoyed this video and you’ve got some good information out of it now please don’t forget to subscribe and like we need that and also don’t forget about part two it’s coming that’s going to be where
You really look at setting up the plans inside of a specific country right I’m going to show you how to do it for Bali and uh you know want to miss it so hopefully it comes up at the end of this video and you can click right on it but
If it doesn’t be sure you subscribe so you’ll know when it’s posted yeah hit that Bell so you know when notifications are coming yeah and subscribe anyways just CU we got a lot of good stuff on top and we need subscription thanks for tasting life with us today we hope that we’ve been Helpful M
Our How to Plan Travel Series gives you a framework, free tools and money-saving tips to plan your full time nomad travel or long trips. Part 1 helps you choose a region and and an optimal route through desired countries based on factors like weather, holidays, activities you enjoy, cost and comfort. We show you tools to research, organize and plan your travels. As an example, you can join me in planning our travel to Southeast Asia.
Subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the series!
We’ve provided the basic outline of steps in this video and the tools we use on our website: www.tastelifewithis.com/travel-planning