Travel Essentials

When you tell people that you’re planning on going travelling for 18 months – 2 years they do one of two things.

Either look at you like you are mad or express their jealousy and ask a million questions. Some of these questions are:

How much does that cost?

How do you save?

How do you plan?

How much do you book in advance?

But the one question that comes up time and time again is ‘How do you pack for two years on the road?’

I’m not sure that this is something that we have mastered but we certainly learned a few lessons from when we went previously.

One thing you must never leave home without is Travel insurance! It’s just not worth the risk. If you never need it then great! But if you’re travelling in a foreign country for an extended period of time the chances are that you may need something, lots of travellers hire scooters and come a cropper, so just be wise and take some out.

Lessons I learned from the last time we travelled

Jeans are a waste of space – far too heavy

You don’t need hair straighteners. Not even gas powered ones

Take loads of hair bands

Don’t take white socks (that lesson is more for Joey)

Take clothes which you don’t mind getting ruined

And also dry quickly

You can pick up anything you need abroad, they do have shops

Advanced booking

This is personal preference really. Last time all we had booked were return flights and the first two nights accommodation. This time we have gotten ourselves a little more organised. We have a flight to Delhi booked, three nights accommodation booked there, before we fly to Leh in Ladakh where we are staying for a week. So we have a weeks accommodation booked there. We have a night in Delhi (which we haven’t yet booked) before we catch an overnight train to Amritsar on the Pakistani border. After this we have nothing booked, just a vague idea of where we want to go and how to get there.

Planning

How do you plan for two years on the road? We had a vague idea of which countries we wanted to visit and tried to plan a vague order to traverse them. After that it was a case of reading a lot of travel blogs to get ideas and reading a lot of Lonely Planet books to find places easy to get to and worthwhile of a stopover. We plan to travel slowly to maximise our savings and to fully appreciate each town and country.