Everything I learnt from 3 months of travelling
Thinking of taking a travel sabbatical? Here's everything you need to know...
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I’ve just returned to London after spending the last 3 months travelling around Asia and Australia with my husband and sister.
Taking a significant chunk of time off work to travel is something that each of us had dreamed of doing for many years until we finally decided to take the plunge: it felt pretty serendipitous that we were all able to do so at the same time and travel together. My sister and husband both decided to quit their jobs before setting off; as I’m freelance, I was able to work while we travelled.
If you’re in the position to take a travel sabbatical and weighing one up, I simply can’t recommend it enough. Nothing quite beats that thrilling sense of freedom while you’re on the road - and the experiences and memories you’ll gain along the way are priceless. Below I’ve shared some of the lessons I learnt over the last three months of travelling…
Choose your travel companions wisely
This might seem like an obvious one, but unless you’re travelling solo, picking your travel partners carefully can make or break your entire experience. Your starting point should be choosing companions who are able to travel on a similar budget to you, and want to prioritise the same destinations. You may want to visit the same countries, but are you keen on the same regions and cities? When it comes to spending money, do you want to prioritise the same hotels, flights, and experiences?
It’s also important to choose travel partners who want to move at the same pace as you, whether you’re keen on slower-paced travel or moving quickly to tick off lots of destinations. You’ll also want to travel with companions who are reliable, happy to share the mental workload of planning and organising such a big trip (it takes a lot of research!), and can stay positive even in stickier situations.
Bring the right gear
The right gear will make your life so much easier. I’ve rounded up the items that I can’t travel without below:
There’s nothing worse than your phone running out of battery when you’re on the go. Make sure to get yourself an all-in-one plug adapter that works around the world, a long extension lead that can charge several items at the same time, and a battery pack.
For long-haul flights, you’ll want a comfy neck pillow, noise-cancelling ear buds, and an eye mask (the latter two may come in handy at some of the places that you end up staying too…).
Packing cubes: these are absolute game-changers, especially if you’re moving around a lot, and will save you from having to unpack and repack your suitcase every time you arrive somewhere new. Make sure you have separate packing cubes for dirty laundry and shoes.
You won’t have everything all planned out in advance - and that’s fine!
If you’re anything like me, you’ll travel easier knowing that you have all of the important details (especially flights and hotel bookings) locked in before taking off. However, when you’re travelling for an extended period of time, it’s pretty challenging to nail every single detail down before you set off, and in some cases, it can be wise to allow for flexibility in your schedule.
Before we headed off on our trip, we had most of our international flights and hotels booked for our first two months of travel. We booked domestic travel within each country (whether that was internal flights or trains) closer to our actual dates of travel, and sometimes only once we had arrived in each country: this allowed us to chop and change our original itinerary as we pleased (on one or two occasions, we arrived in certain locations and realised that we wanted to spend more or less time there than we had originally anticipated).
It was only when we were already on the road that we started booking flights and places to stay for our third month of travel. This did mean that we had to set aside time on some evenings to research and plan our next steps (which can take much longer than you think!), but it would have been impossible for us to decide on every single detail before we had left London. In some cases, we did leave things too last-minute, (we’d find that certain tours were booked up, or flights were marginally more expensive than they had previously been) but overall this gave us greater freedom to stay spontaneous, and change our itinerary as we moved along.