Idle banter forum

Hello

I am making this ‘post’ to explain a point of view, and hopefully help those that are new to travel in SE Asia.

All too often I read contributions on these Travelfish pages where a prospective traveller seeks to visit an amazing number of places in a relatively short period of time.

Often, these prospective travellers have spent much time searching through Travelfish. It appears to me, the searching has revealing places to visit and the prospective traveller appears to have overlooked what they are actually going to do in each of the places.

To my way of thinking, and from years of experience, travel is always a competition between two components: places to visit and experiences to soak up, enjoy, and remember.

Places to visit.

There is no doubt that when you sit down to rough out a journey plan, there WILL be many places on your WISH LIST.

When reading about potential places, every travel recommendation makes that place sound so compelling. Remember that travel is an industry, and getting YOU to that place to spend your money is the travel promoter’s job.

A major problem is that travel is time consuming, often boring, mentally and physically taxing, costly, and tends to make the traveller irritated (even argumentative). Did I mention time consuming and irritable-making.

The problem facing the travel planner will always be finding ways to link these various must see places up in the shortest time possible.

But, travel is not only the time from A to B. It is also the time needed to get to the travel departure point, it’s the waiting time at the departure point, the time needed to plan for breakdowns/delays, and the time needed to get from the destination drop off point to the accommodation. For example, a one hour flight between Bangkok and Siem Reap will ‘take up’ at least 5 hours of your day - maybe more.

Another problem of travel - especially in the backblocks of SE Asia - is that it can be downright uncomfortable. Many SE Asian buses (and boats) have seats designed to cater for the smaller and thinner Asian body frame. Leg-room can also be a squeeze. These seats can be really uncomfortable over long distances.

Another problem of travel is that unless the journey is a nightmare, it tends not to be memorable.

IMHO, a trip on a bus is a means to get from A to B. Because scenery is just flashing by, its sort of like watching TV commercials: they attract for the seconds you watch, but you forget when the next frame comes to the eye. Simply, for fast bus travel, you tend not to remember what you saw 5 minutes ago. Sure, you can team up with people to have fun, but you do that because the scenery out the window goes on relentlessly - simply put, you quickly get bored with the scenery.

An alternate problem of travel is that too much air travel means you miss out on experiencing the local flavour of the bus/boat journey. Travellers that merely visit cities, and fly between can’t really say they have experienced the Asian way of life: land based travel is part and parcel of the Asian way of life. But, to the prospective traveller, a compromise needs to be reached where air travel forms parts of the journey as does bus/boat travel.

Travelfish recommends not trying to do too much travel. If you haven’t read the suggestions in the grey section up above, go read these words of advice and also this advice

Things to do/experience.

This is where the whole travel planning bit comes unstuck.

One can't just go to some city/place/ etc., and expect to immediately get a taste of the experiences described on Travelfish ages, or elsewhere. All too often, the experiences you read about come about BECAUSE the person telling about it spent time in an area and became savvy to learning about the right places to be in at the right time, etc.. This ‘learning’ takes time.

For example, soaking up the sun on a quiet beach in SE Asia is delightful. But, that experience requires being at a place without hordes of others, being there on a nice sunny day (ie. not raining, etc.), being there at the right time of year when the ocean is just oh so perfect, finding a beach that has a nice array of food/beverage options, but not too many.

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect about the relationship between visiting a place and experiencing it is that the flavour of the place lies not within the places travellers often congregate. Explaining this, many travellers spend time in the Guest House, or western café, or internet café (etc.). But these places are merely a convenience for travellers and cater to the wants of the traveller. They rarely contain the flavour of the place. Put this another way, a city is merely a bunch of buildings. Take the people away and its nothing but bricks and concrete. So, the flavour of the place is the local people. And, the flavour of the people are to be found in places like the marketplace, in the side streets away from the western traveller glare (where people are going on with their lives), and very much in the small village communities that surround the cities.

Also, the flavour of the place can sometimes be found in the day trips offered to the traveller. In this regard be careful of the day trips where you sit in a bus all day. Make sure the day trip has you out of the bus and either engaging with local people, or doing fun activities like trekking, rafting, or elephant riding, etc.: (these are the memories that will last long after the travel part of the journey is forgotten).

Experiencing a place is not always as you’d imagined it may be. But, unless you plan to spend time in a place to experience it, you won’t have too many memories.

The compromise.

At some time in your planning process, I suggest you are going to have to face the fact that seeing many places versus experiencing the places will be a major compromise.

As far as compromise goes, only you can choose. But, to my way of thinking, you should be choosing more time experiencing places and less time travelling to/from places.

In case you need to take another ‘angle’ on this, try thinking ONE region per WEEK and at a minimum TWO or THREE regions per country.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

- - - -

ps. to other Travelfish contributors, please don't criticise aspects of what I have written. I am trying to help those seeking to have a great time travelling. If you can make positive suggestions that add to this post, please feel free.

On this post, criticisms merely denigrate the intention.

Thanks