We don´t book any room and neither we search in internet for what we can find on those countries that we decide to visit. Not only for our travel philosophy but also because our trips use to last for months, and for us is very clear that the more time we want to spend on a trip the less planning is needed.
Our experiences tell us that the more time we want to dedicate to a trip the less time we have to spend in its planning. Have it all organized means to travel with expectations and when the trip exceed a month you must understand that not everything is going to happen as you plan, then expectations begin to fail and your plans will fall one after another like the Domino tokens, making a bitter taste installed in your trip that won´t leave you chance to enjoy many other things, not planned, that are happening in around you.
Beside that, to have it all planned means to be more focused in your agenda or your GPS than for the local people from the places you are visiting. We rather prefer ask and talk to local people, learning with them and their culture something new every time we visit a new place, otherwise we feel the trip was wasted.
For example when we decided to make a travel around the world we simply put a map in front of us and we choose 3 locations which looks to be the farther possible from where we would start, in this case Spain: so with our finger we pointed Uluru in Australia, Ushuaia in Argentina and Deadhorse (see post) in Alaska. From here the plan was only to connect these three checkpoints with our journey by road, with our motorbike and visiting all continents. How we would arrive there, which countries we should cross, which visas we are going to need, where we would spend the night, how we could keep financing the trip or where we could find spare parts for the motorcycle were just some of so many issues we left to be solve along the road as we keep going. Of course for that kind of challenge we had not a time limit, the journey ends when we got to visit the 3 checkpoints and came back home.
If you are in a similar situation, maybe you have everything organized back home and you have no rush for turning back, so then try as we suggest a series of challenges to face until the destination you choose for your trip. We decided to get there by motorbike, you can choose reach your destination without take a single plane or choose a different way transportation for each continent like we could say Asia by bicycle and South America by hitchhiking. You will see that the route will surprise you with a lot more stories and experiences that you could imagine.
But let’s say that you can’t travel for unlimited time but still you have one, two or three months for your trip, so if you want to make some sort of planning do it in a challenging way. So for example if you want to visit the Southeast Asian countries choose a challenge for each country and once there start looking for the formula to get them done. You could plan to reach the top of a Mountain over 5,000 meters in Nepal or learn diving in some of the islands in Thailand, but don´t plan exactly which mountain or island will be until once you get to the country and begin to ask.
But if you really need a different kind of travel with unforgettable experiences then you need to avoid to deal with a travel agency, they usually they will lock you in a cruiser ship or in one of those resorts hotels with a wall around them that eliminate completely the contact with locals and their culture.
These agencies are experts scaring people and making them feel that the exotic countries are a dangerous place to visit except if you let them to organize your journey. But dare to choose to a solidarity travel, a trip where you can collaborate as a volunteer with a NGO or by starting a fundraising campaign so you can end your trip with a charity.
For example you could contact an orphanage for orangutans in Sumatra where you can help with so many baby orangutans who lost their parents because of the deforestation of the jungle, or collecting funds with your journey through donations to open a water well in a small Hammer village in Ethiopia which is suffering increasingly droughts caused by climate change.
The world always receive travelers with open arms and takes care of them, but also if during your visit you provide a little help you’ll see how your hosts will make your idea of a dangerous and hostile world changes completely.
During our travels all kind of experiences, we felt how a huge whale shark talked to us with its eyes when we were swimming in a beach of Baja California, we have recovered strength in the middle of the Sudanese desert with the energy of the pyramids from the Millennial cemetery of Nubians Kings where we camped, we cry with the life story of a giraffe woman from a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand who receive us to sleep in her hut and we couldn’t stop laughing when we arrive to a small supermarket recently opened in northern Namibia where many Himba women (see post) that, used to a wilder life, lost control when they see themselves surrounded of so many colors and flavors of products they had never seen before. This kind of experiences can not be planned, simply it happens.
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