For the past month(ish) I have been planning a trip to
Vietnam and Cambodia with one of my friends! We will be leaving later this
month for a 16 day, 4 city tour of these two countries so I thought I’d make a
series of it on here. So welcome to #VietBodia2015! Hopefully “VietBodia” isn’t
offensive, but who knows.
I’ve got roughly ten posts planned out, starting with this
one. Five before the trip and five after. Since I’m leaving in 20-something
days, I am going to try and get a post out every four days!
Here is a list of posts I am hoping to make over the next
few weeks, I’ll add links to the posts as I make them for easy access!
1. Early stages of planning a trip (what you’re currently
reading!)
3. Traveling between countries and visa processes.
4. Places I want to visit in Vietnam and Cambodia
5. Packing: Is “backpacking” really possible?
There are five post-trip posts I have planned, but I can
deal with that later. J
The early stages of planning a trip are always the most
exciting for me. I decided randomly that I wanted to travel in April, as I have
the entire month free of work. After I acquired a traveling buddy, I began my
fervent planning process. I love planning things. Sometimes I feel like I
missed my true calling when I get into planning, but then I remember just how
all-consuming and how much of my entire life it takes up and I realize that
doing this every day for the rest of my life would easily kill me.
The first step of any trip is deciding how long the trip
should be. It was originally going to be a Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand trip
of roughly three weeks, but due to some outstanding circumstances my travel
buddy wasn’t able to have as much time off as originally expected, so we cut
Thailand from the trip. Vietnam and Cambodia have places that I must see, whereas Thailand doesn’t (plus
she’d been there before).
Once a rough outline of days (two weeks) was picked for the
trip, I began researching the places that I wanted to visit. This involved
Excel and lots of googling. The site http://visit-mekong.com/
was a great resource for learning about different sites and their locations. So
I recommend it if you’re traveling in the Indochina area! Japan has a similar
site (http://www.japan-guide.com/)
that I’ve used for planning trips in the past. Lonely Planet (http://www.lonelyplanet.com/) is always
a good choice, but I prefer sites that are focused more on the area I am
visiting. Googling things like “top places to visit in Vietnam” or “must see
spots in Cambodia” are also great ways of finding the things that you can’t
miss out on when traveling. Later you can go in and add little places to visit
once you see how much time you will have.
 |
| This is my actual Excel sheet. |
Now, because I love planning, I take this spot a step
further. I like to open Google Maps and type in all these places and see which
ones are located where, and then decide a rough daily schedule based on these
locations. Things that are closer together get seen on the same day. Places
which close early get seen early in the morning. While this may sound time
consuming, it really isn’t, and it gets me super excited for the trip as I get
to actually see where it is I will be going. This daily schedule also makes me
see how much time I really need to dedicate to each thing and finalize the
number of days that would be best for each city I am going to.
We’ve decided on four nights in Hanoi, a flight to Ho Chi
Minh and a bus to Phnom Penh that same day. Two nights will be spent in Phnom
Penh followed by an overnight bus to Siem Reap with a four night stay there.
Finally an overnight bus back to Phnom Penh and a bus back to Ho Chi Minh with
a two night stay there. This may sound kind of crazy, but a round trip ticket
from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh was very, very cheap and this is the easiest way to
do that!
Now that the dates have been decided, it is time to book the
flight! This is where I got in trouble with my friend. We waited far too long
to actually do this, as it took time to finalize the amount of time we would
have free. Due to this, we missed out on the perfect flight by hours. When I
checked it at school it was there and when I got home that evening it was gone.
We booked the tickets almost exactly a month in advance, and that was cutting
it really close. I strongly suggest booking it earlier than that. The prices
didn’t change much over the span of the weeks, one of the flights we needed
just got full so we couldn’t get the days we wanted. We ended up pushing the
trip back two days (because that makes sense…) to get a much cheaper flight,
which just meant that I needed to take a couple of my last days of work off. Oh
well!
We are flying via Korean Air from Sapporo, with a six hour
layover in Seoul before landing in Hanoi late at night. This sucks, but can’t
be helped. It’s part of traveling overseas. You’re going to lose a day no
matter what. I’m sure if you book well in advance and are willing to dish out
more money for premium flight times you could spend only half a day flying from
Japan to Vietnam, but we aren’t those people. The flight back is similar,
flight from Ho Chi Minh early in the afternoon to a 10pm flight from Hanoi to
Seoul. Landing in Seoul at 5am and a five hour wait until our flight back to
Sapporo. At least I can say I’ve been to Korea!
These are the early stages of planning. Once all this had
been decided it is time to move onto the next exciting part, deciding where to
stay! My friend and I have decided on staying at some hostels in each city,
because they’re cheap and I love staying in hostels when traveling. Look out
for the next blog post where I go into detail about hostels!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and that it is helpful (or
inspirational) to your travels! I’d love to hear how you plan trips, so leave
your methods in the comments!
Here’s some questions for you:
Have you ever been to Vietnam or Cambodia? What do you
suggest doing there? If not, have you ever wanted to go?
How long does it take you to plan for trips and what are the
things you do early on in deciding how the trip will pan out?
Click here for part 2 about hostels!
Click here for part 2 about hostels!
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