Making the Most out of Your Round-the-World Travel Adventure
Deciding to leave home to see what the world has to offer is never an easy decision. You need to do some explaining to your family and close friends, turn a deaf ear to naysayers, and basically set all your affairs in order. However, as much as it is challenging and scary, it is also very much exciting. Nothing else can give you the opportunity to experience new things, places and people than traveling.
And if you’re in this journey now or are one step closer to fulfilling your dream long-term travel adventure, then you’ve landed on the right place. Here, we share a few tips to help you make the most out of your round-the-world travel.
Stay longer in one place. A round-the-world trip isn’t merely a long vacation. It’s not even a race. It’s a chance to truly explore a place in depth. So instead of aiming to visit as many countries as you can in a month, it would be better to slow your pace down and plan longer stays in one place. You can rent an apartment for a month and then explore nearby cities in depth. Staying in one place longer can also be a big money-saver since you can rent apartments on the cheap and cook more instead of eating out all the time.
Beware of travel burnout. Like working in a 9 to 5 desk job, long-term travel can also lead to burnout. When you’ve been on the road for too long, it’s likely that there will come a time that you’ll get sick of dealing with all the stuff that comes with long-term travel — from taking buses and trains, having to buy travel insurance and constantly updating your provider, and never being able to settle in one place longer. You may get frustrated and annoyed, but it’s only normal. In order to cope with this, it’s better to take a step back and take a break. Take a trip away from your original planned trip. By addressing such feelings head-on instead of ignoring them and going on with your itinerary, you’ll be able to regain your enthusiasm for travel and recover much quicker.
Don’t schedule the most tough-to-travel region at the last of your itinerary. This particularly applies to travelers who’ve booked multi-stop plane tickets and have arranged their itineraries in advance. Saving the hardest region for last may seem like a good idea at first glance since you’d expect to be seasoned by then and would be able to apply all the lessons you learned along the way. But the truth is, doing so may only spoil the quality of your travel. Exhaustion, impatience and frustration can get the best of you and negatively affect how you perceive the place and its people. It’d be better to schedule difficult places somewhere in the middle of your trip instead.
Open your mind to whatever the world throws at you. Some parts about long-term travel can be planned and organized accordingly, such as securing the best travel insurance and identifying which places to visit. But there are also some things you simply can’t plan for. And this is how you learn. So let yourself go once in a while. Be open to everything — you’ll never know what you’ll find out about others or about yourself.
