We’ve only been on the road a short time, but that’s still been long enough to make a few schoolboy errors, here are a few things we have learnt the hard way which might help others when planning a long trip…
1) Money makes the world go round – we have very quickly found out that places are more expensive than the guide books/travel companies tell you. Although we have found lots of free things to do, daily living costs have been higher than expected. Our advice would be to have extra in your budget as a contingency to make you feel more comfortable.
2) Be in it for the long haul – we spent the first 4 days of our trip in Melbourne, we absolutely loved it, but we also spent 4 days absolutely shattered! We approached it very much like we would a normal city break trying to fit in as much as possible (knowing we might not have the chance to visit again), which was great but left us exhausted and little time to plan the next location. It’s been a learning curve to get in the mindset that you can’t do everything (as much as we might want to!)
3) Think about your packing priorities – it’s still early days to find out whether or not we have packed all the right items. When planning the trip, we were very conscious that we would only have one rucksack each (60L for me and 70L for Ben) and a day sack to fit in everything we would need for 6 months. Prior to the trip we read lots of travel blogs for packing advice, asked friends who had done similar trips what they thought we should pack and eventually came up with a master list of all the items we thought we would need. At the moment, it seems to be working ok – however I have quickly found out that a lot of what you pack should be down to personal preference and what items are the most important to you – clearly many people who go travelling don’t have crazy hair like mine!! A lot of my friends will vouch that natural hair is not a good look for me. I lasted just over a week before I went out and purchased a travel hair dryer (luckily I already had my straighteners – they’d definitely be on my list of things I’d save in a fire). At least now I can appear in some of the photos! Ben also thought he could get away with only one pair of shorts – that was until the second day when he spilt something down them in the crotch area which looked very suspicious!
It’s still early days so I’m sure there will be many more lessons learnt along the way!
(Posted by Em)
Emma & Ben... Far From Home 