Planning for backpacking

Planning a long trip is a daunting task. Especially if you have no idea what you are doing. But there is hope in the form of thousands of blogs, books, and apps that can help you.

The destination

The first step is deciding on where you want to go. This was easy for me because we would go to Malaysia and Thailand. The first because Maarten has family in Kuala Lumpur and the second because a lot of friends came back from trips to Thailand with amazing stories.

Cost

Having a country or even a city as a destination makes it easier to plan. After we picked the country we decided on all the place we wanted to visit and all the things we wanted to do, this formed our time frame. Now was it easy to research living cost and how expensive it would be to backpack, visit all the place we wanted to see, do all the activities we wanted to do while staying in nice hotels and not be broke on the end of the trip. This gave us a good idea how much to save for our upcoming trip.

Flight and accommodation

Booking a flight was the next step and then the accommodations. I wanted to go with only the first few days planned but Maarten wanted to plan everything, so in the end, we booked all the hotels but no activities or whatsoever.

Places to see and things to do

Since we are backpacking is it important to take into account that you want to be somewhere for more than one day. You do not want to travel too much between cities at one time. So I had a rule: Do not spend more than 4 hours in a plane, bus, train, taxi or another form of transport from one city to another, in one day. This resulted in the following trip: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_T-YuogC68DxJBsK4h-zFmeal60&usp=sharing