No guide needed: how to plan your trip yourself

Plan ahead

Start preparing six months before your trip. Immediately after choosing a country, buy round-trip tickets - this will indicate the boundaries within which you will plan your trip, and will also save money, because it is always cheaper to buy tickets in advance.

After that, find out if you need a visa to the country of departure. If necessary, apply for it on the embassy website. Come on time to the embassy or visa center with all the documents listed on the website. Usually, a visa is made from two weeks to a month. When you finish all the boring bureaucratic procedures, the most interesting part of the preparation begins.

Explore the country through social media

Start your preparation by searching for pictures on a search engine or on Pinterest. Enter in the search bar of the social network the name of the country where you plan to go. She will give you photos of the most picturesque places taken by other travelers. So you can immediately understand what you want to see with your own eyes, and what you can do without, determine which sights are especially popular, and find unusual places that not every guide will tell you about.

For example, this is how I found Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka, which is located at an altitude of 2,234 meters above sea level. Buddhists believe that Buddha left his mark there, and monks climb there every year. Guides do not offer excursions to this mountain, so you can only get to it on your own. And it's worth it!

Watch videos on YouTube. When we were in Peru and descended from the mountains after a four-day hike to Machu Picchu, my husband and I really wanted to drink delicious and inexpensive coffee. For everyone, this path ends in the same way - in the village of Aguas Calientes. There are insanely high prices in the cafe for travelers. After an hour of searching, I remembered a video of one traveler: she told me that on the second floor of one of the buildings there is an inconspicuous market with low prices. There we drank excellent coffee and bought water and biscuits for the trip to Cusco.

Read what they write about the places you like

In the photos, you may like a beautiful lake with rose water or an eco-hotel in the form of a tree house. Read how to get there and what reviews other travelers have left about the place. Routes can be found on Vinsky's forum, reviews on TripAdvisor. It may turn out that you have to walk half a day to the hotel through wild tropical forests, and the lake may turn out to be someone's invention. Calculate your strength and check the facts.

Find friends in the country you plan to travel to

You can use Instagram or Facebook. Or see who is looking for a place to sleep in your city on CouchSurfing. It is a service for travelers around the world to find free accommodations and meet locals.

Before the trip to Peru, the Peruvian Anna stayed with us. Thanks to Anna, we learned that the safest places in Lima are in the Miraflores and Barranco areas. At the same time, the coolest parties are held in dangerous areas and you can get to them with locals who are easy to find on the same CouchSurfing.

Make a route

Redraw the outline of the country in a notebook, mark the planned places of visit. This will make it clearer how to build a route.

Usually I build a route in the form of a closed circle clockwise: from the lowest point on the map I go up and then go down. Many travelers use this method. I don’t know how else to explain that from city to city we always meet acquaintances from the very beginning. Communicating and sharing routes, we always find out that we have the same plans. The main goal of such tricks is to build a route most efficiently, spending less time and money on the road.

Write down the coordinates of the places you want to visit, according to the scheme: name, city, address or location, phone numbers (if any).

Write in English or in the language of the country where you are going, so that you can show passers-by and ask where to go.

Take care of your comfort: food, accommodation, luggage

Following the route, you will be staying all the time in different hotels and cities. Allocate two to three days for each city, depending on the attractions you plan to visit.

Since you don't have to stay there for a long time, you can experiment with housing formats. For example, in one city to stay in a noisy party hostel, in another - to book a room in a luxury villa, in the third - to spend the night with someone from the local. Booking, Airbnb and the already familiar CouchSurfing will help you with this.

Think in advance where you will eat. Explore the Entertainment, Accommodation, and Restaurants tabs on TripAdvisor. Write down the names and addresses in a notebook. Most likely, you will not need them, but it is so nice to meet familiar names in a city that is distant from your home. You feel like a local.

Try not to take a lot of things with you. You will be more mobile if you have only the essentials with you.

Take care of internal movements

Examine the transport on which you will move between points on the map. Usually, it is enough to enter the name of the country and the method of travel you have chosen into a search engine: train, bus, plane, rented car and others.

Buy your tickets in advance. If you don't want to buy in advance, find out and write down how and where to do it when you arrive in the country.

Just specify how long you can buy a ticket. It was a shame when we did not buy tickets in advance for the scenic railway from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka, and on the spot it turned out that they were sold out in a month. Don't repeat our mistakes.

Make your guide

Collect all the knowledge about the country and your itinerary in a travel guide. You can color it in, paste in colorful illustrations and clippings, write down all the information you need and even basic phrases in the local language.

I always do this when preparing for a trip. My travel guide always contains all the key places to visit, addresses, phone numbers and important information.

Instead of a conclusion

Once a year my husband and I travel according to the described scheme. We do not like to sit in one place, so during the standard two weeks of vacation we manage to visit 4–5 cities and explore all the sights of interest to us. Such a regime requires a high degree of discipline and clear planning, but it gives us freedom, because all these plans are ours and we can change them as we please.

In six months we manage to tune in to the country and come there as family. And in the guidebook, I paste all the tickets, receipts and other memorabilia from the trip. Then I put it on the shelf and it becomes part of our family history.