Recommendations and Advice

When planning this trip, I’m always asking for advice from others who have travelled or been to the destinations we are heading to. I love getting information from other people rather than guide books if I can. Guide books do have a place in travelling and I always travel with one but they do annoy me a little.

Firstly they are so large and have so much information about EVERYTHING, which is ok I suppose but it is also difficult trying to read it all, only take the information you want and I usually get bored after a while and give up. And secondly, I’m not sure about their recommendations, I know most authors and contributors have been there and tested out the products and services but do these businesses offer free accommodation and food as an exchange to be included in the books? I work in marketing and have a lot of businesses call me up from various guide books, travel pamphlets etc that would like to include our business but only if we pay for the inclusion and I really dislike it. When people look to these guides, they want quality products and services, not the company who could afford the money to be included. Now I’m not saying that guide books do this but I’m not 100% sure they don’t so I rarely use their recommendation unless I have no other information, but with blogs and the internet I usually find something that people have recommended.

Most businesses now have realised the advantage of word of mouth and recommendation advertising and this is why websites, like Trip Advisor are doing so well. I know you will always get people who just love to complain and you need to take this into consideration when searching attractions, hotels and restaurants on trip advisor, but if you do your research properly you can always find the stand out places within any budget. In the past, I would never write recommendations on Trip Advisor as I didn’t think my opinion really mattered to others but now that I’m researching our trip and all the helpful information I am finding from strangers, I can see how vital it is for other travellers to get up-to-date reviews . I will now start making this a priority, even if it is just a basic hotel or hostel.

Getting advice for travelling in general (things to pack, types of backpacks to use, the best trekking shoes etc) is a little more harder to find on the internet and when you are going away for 5 months you want to make sure you are packing and preparing efficiently. While in the past I have stayed in hostels and tried to stick to a budget, I always took my hair straighteners (Troy wont let me take them this time :() and high heels away with me, so I wouldn’t really call it backpacking. This time we would like to do a little differently (now im not saying I will be sleeping in the street and not washing my clothes) and I always welcome any advice I can get.

For christmas last year, we received some awesome advice and helpful things to assist us in our travels from my brother and sister-in-law. Both Josie and Shannon have travelled a lot around the world and Josie really know her stuff about being a backpacker. I love picking her brain about different countries and what I should expect about certain things. We both got a gift pack which included lots of different things like travel socks, towels, zip lock bags, safety pins, cable ties and rubber bands. Along with each item there was a little tip and advice on that particular product.

The collection of our christmas gift – zip lock bags, eye mask and ear plus, adaptor and power board, travel socks, mini travel towels, cable ties, sewing kit, travel journal, scratch off map of the world and an iTunes voucher. Plus wonderful tips and advice for our adventure.

My favourite pieces of advice are the rubber bands – Use rubber bands as friction on your wallet. They provide friction so  if someone tries to take it you can feel it being taken away. These can also be used to keep things together within my pack and attached to the pack as well. The mini towels – Dont take a towel, use these small ones for your face and brushing your teeth etc. Buy sarongs at each destination, they are lightweight and try very quickly. Towels will be a nuisance to lug around wet and can be heavy. And after a while they start to smell. I never thought about using sarongs as towels, but it now seems like the perfect idea. They are so light and can really be squished down to nothing in our packs. And once they start getting old we can buy new ones (for next to nothing) and throw away the old ones. We will have  towels available in some of the hotels we are staying at but sarongs will work for the rest. The cable ties – use when traveling on trains and buses overnight. It provides the extra security and you can tell if they have been tampered with. Cable ties can work for anything and I use the all the time at work, so it would be crazy not to take them with us on our trip. We can provide the extra security on our packs but also use them when we want to hang stuff off our packs and if anything breaks.

               

Another amazing tip I was given was to buy a silk sheet. All through my travels in Europe I never had a silk sheet and never took a sleeping bag so I had to sleep in the hostel beds and just be ok with it. I usually did have a sarong that I would put down if it was really bad but usually I just sleep on their sheets. Most of the time this wasn’t an issue, except in Hungary when the hotel was less than impressive. This trip we have purchased silk sheets and I will use them everywhere.