With regard to upcoming travel, it’s important to understand that “planning” and “booking” are not interchangeable. Planning entails researching potential destinations, outlining sample itineraries and gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the region where you’ll be traveling.
Booking, on the other hand, takes this one step further — and I would argue a step too far. Booking assumes the planning you’ve done is sufficient evidence that one route, set of destinations or accommodation is the best one for you to choose.
Although booking in advance does tend to save money, it effectively kills any spontaneity your trip might have had — and has the potential to ruin it, if you end up hating it halfway through and can’t pony up the required cancellation fees or pivot quickly enough to end up back on the right track.
Someone more famous — and, oddly, more anonymous — than I once said that a “traveler sees what he sees,” while a “tourist sees what he’s come to seen.” Research upcoming travel so you can appreciate certain famous attractions and get an idea of how each fits into the whole of the trip, but don’t get so blinded by “what you came to see” that you miss what’s in front of your face.
The Importance of Research
I bring up my trip to India often in articles on how to make travel happen because it was my first experience taking a trip that didn’t have a completely set itinerary — something that makes it a perfect introduction to today’s topic.
Before I even got on my plane to Mumbai, I had planned a sample itinerary around the country. More important, however, was that I had familiarized myself with destinations along the route I planned to take and the transportation infrastructure between them — planes and trains, mainly, although I did do basic research on private taxi fares over long distance, just in case.
Sure enough, after a few days at Palolem Beach in Goa, Dora and I decided to slow the breakneck pace of our three-week tour of North India, cutting out a planned flight to Kolkata, a brief rail excursion up into the Himalayan foothills and a stop in Varanasi, where Hindus go to die, in favor of savoring the chill of Goa for another week.
Thanks to my careful research and planning, it took me only 10 or 15 minutes to realize that we simply needed to contact low-cost airline IndiGo to change our Goa-Kolkata flight to Goa-Delhi, which would get us to the Indian capital in plenty of time to catch the last train to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, and where we’d planned to end up after Varanasi. I’d acquainted myself with IndiGo’s cancellation policy, so I knew we’d only be out a nominal amount of cash for changing the air tickets.
Unfortunately, as you may have read in my blog on being scammed last week, we didn’t end up making our train to Agra thanks to a hustler at the New Delhi railway station. My planning and research once again came in handy in the wake of this situation: Knowing we had to be back back in Delhi by a certain time in order to spend a full day there helped me negotiate a lower rate for the taxi we got fucked into.
Researching a trip thoroughly without booking it allows you to travel spontaneously, even if you have an ideal schedule in mind. It also minimizes financial damage in the event that you have to alter your plans last minute, where or not it’s by your own accord.
Just Say Yes, You Little Arsonist
I arrived in South America this past February knowing only one thing: I had exactly two months to get from Lima, Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tentatively, I planned to visit three other countries on route and knew I had about 12 days to devote to each of the five, but I hadn’t booked any accommodation or transportation. I also didn’t pre-book any tours, such as to Machu Picchu or the Uyuni Salt Flats, even though I knew almost for certain I would visit both.
When I arrived in the southern Peruvian city of Cusco, the Inca’s former (and the Gringo’s current) capital, only a week had passed since I touched down in Lima. After a few days in the city’s Miraflores district and a brief excursion to Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city and gateway to the Colca Canyon, I had re-acclimated to super-fast travel.
As my taxi brought me up the hill from the Cusco bus terminal to the Loki Hostel, whose sister property I’d stayed at in Lima, I imagined I would spend one or two days there at most, before getting Machu Picchu done and over with and heading on to Puno and Lake Titicaca.
After only a few days at Loki Cusco, however, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Although I’ve found it to be the case in only a handful of instances during my years of travel, the hotel (or, in this instance, hostel) happened to be the destination in the case of Loki. It was like summer camp in the Andes Mountains, an incredible setting — and an even better group of people.
Rather than heading to Machu Picchu on my second or third day in Cusco, I took an impromptu trip to the Sacred Valley near the Peruvian city of Ollantaytambo with Assaf, an Israeli traveler I met in the hostel. I’d heard of the valley and its purported sacredness in passing, but didn’t know anything tangible about it. One three-sole bus ride, 20 miles of hiking and an entire afternoon surrounded the most beautiful scenery I’ve yet to see later, I was incredibly thankful I hadn’t pre-booked a Machu Picchu tour.
When you alter your own plans a bit and tag along with someone else who’s on an adventure of his own, you get to spend a day or two in a way you never imagined — and hopefully, one friend richer in the end.
Going With Your Gut
One problem inherent in pre-booking transportation, tours and accommodation is that it assumes you’ll want to visit certain places based on the testimony of guidebooks and individuals. While I would never recommend against assaying all your options well in advance, I would advise you to go with your gut as to whether or not you want to devote the time and money to visiting somewhere.
As I mentioned in this previous section, I knew well in advance of my recent trip to South America that I wanted to visit Machu Picchu, but wasn’t comfortable booking online in advance. Something about the arrangement and the price told me I was going to end up ripped off and disappointed.
I’d been right to go with my gut: Rather than paying $400 so that disadvantaged locals could carry my things and cook for me as I hiked slowly for four days, I researched a series of trains and taxis. My hypothetical transport would get me to Aguascalientes, the tourist trap at the base of Machu Picchu, in time for me to make the two-hour trek to the Machu Picchu summit roughly 24 hours after departing Cusco — and, therefore, in enough time to enjoy it thoroughly and hike back down in order to get the train back to Cusco that night. The cost for this entire venture? Just over $100.
I even arrived back in Cusco just in time to hop on a bus bound for Puno, Peru (gateway to Lake Titicaca and the Bolivian border) alongside my new friends Bethan and Danielle from England. I was certain even before I hopped on the plane that I wanted to spend at least a couple days at the lake, but once I arrived in Puno and realized the sort of conditions I’d have to endure to make that happen, I being feeling that I didn’t need to make a stop.
Bethan and Danielle had been equally flexible in their planning, so thanks to not having booked a hotel in Puno, we were able to go with our gut feeling — that Puno was not a place we wanted to visit at that particular moment and — and head on to La Paz the same night.
By the time all was said and done, I had spent about three days longer than the 12-day interval I’d set for myself in Peru. Four days in La Paz, however, and my three-day tour in Uyuni proved to be all the time I needed in Bolivia. As a result of my willingness to extend my stay in the Cusco area — and to go with my instinct that one week in Bolivia was enough – I still ended up crossing the Chilean border a day ahead of “schedule,” even factoring in the day it took me to travel from La Paz to Uyuni
Trusting your instincts and going with your gut costs you from time to time, I won’t lie. But if you continue allowing yourself to travel inductively for the rest of your trip, time, finances — and, most importantly, how rewarded you feel for having taken the trip in the first place — will smooth out beautifully.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
