One Giant Step…Is All It Takes

How are we going to manage all of this? It certainly was overwhelming at first when we started listing all the tasks that would need to be done. Fortunately, we had plenty of lead time to allow for panicking and planning.

We started with some high level lists of stuff that had to be done and slowly built more detailed to-do lists to ensure that we had covered everything. It’s gratifying to tick items off the list and slowly see everything get done!

While we were list making and researching, we spent lots of time on-line reading plenty of travel blogs trying to find out information that would help us in our planning. Here is our information for those of you looking:

Budget. This was a big one. We found that people’s travel budget varies widely depending on the type of travel and the locations visited. We will be traveling as backpackers or, more specifically ‘flashpackers‘ I suppose. This still means hostels but we’ll try to have our own room and bathroom when available - and maybe we’ll be able to ‘blow it out’ once in a while.

Jason researched the estimated budget with a generous amount of padding. He planned on eating out 2 meals a day (we usually self cater either breakfast or lunch), having our own room and bathroom, drinking a couple of beers a day and any local entertainment/attractions. The daily budget does not include any long haul travel from country to country - we’ll track that separately. 

Check the side panel for a link to our budget. It includes our estimated cost per day, plus a breakdown of what each day actually cost us in food, transport, lodging, booze and misc. Hopefully we padded it well enough so that we can stay in the black!

 

Visa’s and Entry Requirements. This one is specific to where we plan on going and to the country we are from. We are Canadians. The information here is for Canadians traveling to these countries. Most of the visa’s are available on entry into the country, but some we will have to apply for while we’re on the road - should be interesting. Here’s the spreadsheet.

 

Immunizations. Turns out we’ll be spending most of our time in disease endemic areas. This is definitely an exersize in risk management. You can read about the process here, and see what we decided here. 

 

Packing List. Figuring out the packing list has been a long process. Ever since we decided to travel we’ve been slowly amassing a packing list in our heads, but actually having to decide and write it down was a little overwhelming. I have looked at countless other packing lists and listened to other travelers advice regarding what to bring and, finally, we came up this packing list. It will be interesting to see how it holds up.