Where To Next? A Guide To International Backpacking

By Kevin Blanchard

When you're getting ready for a big backpacking trip to a foreign destination, where do you look for advice?

Do you dig through all of the travel websites for the information that you need? Do you jump onto travel forums and post questions in hopes of getting a prompt response? Do you talk to your friends and parents?

Save yourself some trouble and start right here. Where To Next? is designed to be a "how to" guide for the international traveler. Whether you're a more seasoned travel veteran, or getting ready for your first trip abroad, this book is designed to guide you from the planning process all the way through when the plane's wheels touch down back home.

This book contains real-life advice complete with stories from travelers from around the world.

Topics covered include packing, health, safety, transportation, budgeting, hostels, social scenes, and foreign cultures. Useful web links are provided along with a packing checklist to make sure you don't leave any critical items behind.

You're getting ready for the trip of a lifetime. Let this book be a guide along the way. Safe travels!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Blanchard
• Release date: Feb 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465835529

Kevin Blanchard

I continue to make travel a priority in my life and work to make it to at least one new country each year. My hope is to provide some insight and lessons learned to other travelers while also providing some humor and stories along the way. Please feel free to leave any thoughts on the book or questions about travel. I love to hear travel stories and learn about new hidden gems in the travel world. I can also be reached at [e-mail]. Thanks for stopping by!

Book preview

Where To Next?

A Guide To International Backpacking

By Kevin Blanchard

Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Blanchard

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations, with proper citations, embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Global travel can be unpredictable and dangerous. Every effort has been made by the author to ensure that information contained herein is as accurate as possible. However, the author is unable to accept responsibility for any inconvenience, loss, or injury sustained by anyone as a result of the advice and information given in this guide.

Dedicated To: The wonderful friends I’ve made all over the world who made the experiences in the book come to life, family who let me live at home as I wrote this, the lovely ladies at Bean n Berry who put up with me for hours on end for weeks at a time, and most importantly, Chelsea, who was patient enough for me to write this while putting off looking for a real job.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part 1: Prep Time

Chapter 1 - Why We Travel

Chapter 2 – Who’s Coming With Me?

Chapter 3 – When and Where to Go

Chapter 4 – What to Prepare

Chapter 5 – To Plan or Not to Plan

Chapter 6 – Booking A Flight

Part 2: Arrival

Chapter 7 – Clearing Customs

Chapter 8 – Safety and Scams

Chapter 9 – Arriving at a Hostel

Chapter 10 – The Dark Side of Hostels

Chapter 11 - Bathrooms

Chapter 12 – Food

Chapter 13 – Transportation

Chapter 14 – Culture and Etiquette

Chapter 15 – Bartering and Negotiating

Chapter 16 – Nightlife

Chapter 17 – Love, or Something Similar

Part 3: Coming Home

Chapter 18 – Culture Shock

Chapter 19 – Keeping in Touch (At home and abroad)

Chapter 20 – Where to Next?

Chapter 21 – Lessons Learned

Chapter 22 – Looking for Trip Ideas?

About the Author

Useful Websites

Packing Checklist

Prologue

How does it feel? Most people tend to describe it a little bit differently. Is it a need to get away from everything and everyone? A need for change? Do you need to get out of your comfort zone? Need to try something new? Do you feel like putting off the real world and taking some time for yourself? Some have described this feeling as an itch. It could be an itch to make a difference, an itch to shake up their life, or an itch to take a different path than the one laid out for them at home. These symptoms are collectively referred to as the Travel Bug. Typical symptoms include a desire to go to places where nobody speaks your language, a desire to meet people from all over the world, and a desire to have experiences that your friends and family back home have only read about in National Geographic, or seen on The Discovery Channel.

This book is geared towards anyone who is going on a trip abroad. While the following is useful to anyone who is planning a backpacking vacation of one to two weeks, it is primarily intended for those planning an extended trip anywhere from a month to a year or more. In writing this book, I have drawn both on my own experiences traveling over the last ten years as well as stories from fellow travelers that I have met along the way.

Part 1: Prep Time

Why We Travel

One of the most amazing aspects of meeting people while backpacking is learning what it was that motivated them to take the leap and go abroad in the first place. The stories are too numerous to count but more often than not, they boil down to one thing. I wanted/needed to get away. Getting away can mean different things to different people. Maybe you need to get away from friends and family. Maybe you’re looking to get away from the corporate grind of a full-time job. Maybe you realize that you’re not living the life that you envisioned and you want to get away and reassess your priorities. For our European (and increasingly American) audience, maybe you’re taking a gap year before college/university or before finding a full-time job. One story that I’m hearing more and more of these days is the desire to get away and do something greater than yourself and give back to a community through volunteering. Whatever the reasoning might be, the answer to the why question generally results in an entertaining conversation.

A few of the more incredible stories addressing why it was time to get away, I heard on a trip to Africa in 2011. The first was a woman who had been married for a week before filing for divorce because in her words, when we got into an argument, he argued with his fists. The second story involves a man in his mid twenties whose father had recently been put into jail because he had hired (unsuccessfully) a hit man to kill his mother and had burned down his house. My personal favorite took place in Europe in 2006. I was lying around in a hostel and met a doctor from Rio de Janeiro. He informed me that he was traveling abroad to study medicine all over Europe so that he could bring his newfound skills back to his hometown. These reasons might sound extreme, but you will find, nearly everyone has a story capable of blowing your mind.

In my experience, far and away the most common reason for somebody taking an extended trip abroad has to do with a broken heart. I’m not saying this is everyone’s story; it is simply the most common one that I’ve come across. On top of everything else, the young man mentioned in the hit man story above had also recently gotten out of a serious relationship to a woman that he intended to marry. Nothing seems to feed the need to get away from everything you know and hold dear than a relationship that has gone down hill. Maybe it is a divorce from a husband or wife. Maybe it’s watching an ex flame that you weren’t quite over get married. Maybe he or she left you for someone else. The possibilities are endless. This is where my own personal story comes into play.

Story Time: In 2004, I’d had enough. I was burnt out. I was exhausted and I didn’t like who I was becoming. A few years earlier, I had tried dating my best friend since elementary school and it hadn’t gone well. Within nine months, we had broken up and the friendship was irreparably damaged. We had spent a couple of years trying to repair the friendship to no avail and I was mentally exhausted. Everywhere I looked, people and places reminded me of her. Every conversation seemed to somehow loop back to her. I was annoying myself as well as all of the friends and family that had to deal with me. It was time to get away. Moving out of town wasn’t going to be enough. I needed something more drastic. I needed to go somewhere where nobody knew about her, nothing would remind me of her, and I wouldn’t be able to easily get a hold of her even if I wanted to. For me, the answer was hidden on the other side of the world. With minimal planning, I booked a ticket and spent four months backpacking in Australia and New Zealand. I had never left the country alone, yet here I was going to the other side of the world. This was the beginning of the end for me. Upon my arrival in Sydney, I laid out in a park under fireworks with the Sydney Opera House on my right and the Sydney Harbor Bridge on my left, ringing in New Years 2005. I knew the travel bug had bitten. There was no turning back. The End.

Getting away is sometimes the perfect solution to a nagging problem, but I want to provide a word of caution: Don’t expect it to solve all your problems. Without fail, whenever I’ve sat down with a fellow backpacker to discuss why they went abroad and whether or not they have been able to resolve any issues that they were handling back home, 100% of the time, the answer has been no or not really. If you’re abroad putting off school or work, you’re still going to have to cross that bridge when you get home. If you’re trying to get away from a broken heart, you will still find things abroad to remind you of that person back home. You may find yourself in your hostel bunk bed at night thinking about him or her. If you have family issues that you’re trying to escape, don’t expect them to resolve themselves while you’re gone. More than likely, whatever you went abroad to escape will still be waiting for you when you get home. That being said, going abroad can change your perspective as well as provide a mental break from you issues. This can allow you to re-focus when you get home and you may have a little more perspective since you’ve been able to get away and take a step back from the situation.

As for my story, even on the other side of the world, I wasn’t able to get my mind off of her. It didn’t help that during the course of my trip, I met seven different girls by the same name, two of which I became good friends with. How is that for a daily reminder? In the end, she was still there waiting for me when I got home calling and wanting to know how the trip went. Nothing had been resolved, but I had gained perspective and had to some degree come to peace with the situation. We continue to stay in touch but it never has been, nor will it ever be, the same friendship that it was years ago. While going abroad didn’t fix the situation, it helped me gain perspective and move forward with my life. I will admit I moved forward at a slow pace but I do believe that it was my travels abroad that got the wheels turning in the right direction in the first place.

Who’s Coming With Me?

Seriously though, anyone want to come with me? Anyone? When planning a trip abroad, it is very natural to want to see if any friends, family, and/or significant others can come with you. There are a few different schools of thought at play here. It can be intimidating to go abroad and it’s natural to want to have someone with you that is familiar and can help you through the process. For anyone, but more specifically women, safety (detailed later in this book) can be a large (and valid) concern. Having a travel companion can help ease that fear. Maybe you’ve traveled before and you’ve realized that you want someone with whom to share your travel stories. Whatever the reason, it’s perfectly normal to want to have a travel companion from back home. While many a fellow backpacker may disagree with me, I’m