Let's dive into the nitty-gritty
There are a LOT of details to plan for a 138-day RTW trip. Yikes! Look at this binder – it contains all the flight details, where we are staying, car rental reservations, train tickets, tours and excursions, and a few special restaurant reservations. Each yellow tab is one of our destinations.
I like to leave some things to serendipity, but not where we are going to stay. And we don’t want to stay in a Westin Hotel or a Ramada Inn. Why travel around the world to stay in a big impersonal hotel or a resort insulated from the area? I looked for small places with a local feel as much as possible. Also, we wanted to limit the number of restaurant meals we eat. So, in some places, where we will be staying for several days, we reserved an Airbnb with a kitchen. For shorter stays, I looked for small hotels or hostels -- most of them offering free breakfast in the morning.
As I did the research about places to stay, links to sites about the destinations popped up. So, I started researching sights to see and things to do as well. Such tantalizing possibilities! I didn’t want to overschedule us but I also wanted to make the best use of our time.
We had learned the value of going on a walking tour in 2008 when we had a three-day layover in London. Our first day, we did some sight-seeing on our own and thought that the streets were boringly like any other concrete city. The second day, a walking tour with a local history buff revealed intriguing alleys and historic buildings that we would not have found on our own. We even walked by some of those alleys the day before and thought they were private entryways. So, I was delighted to find a site called With Locals, where we could arrange for such tours in some of the big cities we would be visiting such as Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Athens. In addition to history, we are very interested in local cuisine, so some of the tours are food tours – yum!
Now, when I sign on to the With Locals site, I can see all our bookings at once. This shows a few of them.
In general, we will not be spending a lot of time in cities though. We want to see the countryside too. That means that I also had to research about how to get around in various countries. For example, in New Zealand – we fly in and out of Aukland, on the northern tip, and we have ten days in between. The country consists of two islands and we want to see some of each, as we have heard they have distinct characters and fantastic scenery. On the north island, my older sister recommended we see Te Puia, a Maori cultural center where they put on a traditional show and feast for tourists, and the Waitomo glow worm caves. My son said we HAD to make the pilgrimage to Hobbiton, the movie set.
Isn’t it adorable?
The Maori center, the caves, and Hobbiton are all on the north island a couple of hours from Aukland within fairly close proximity to each other. I was able to book an Airbnb in the area but we would need a car to get around so I reserved a car to be picked up at the airport. This means, we will have to learn to drive on the left side of the road. Yikes!
Before reserving the car, I had to figure out where we would be dropping it off. We had heard that Dunedin, on the south end of the south island, is an interesting city, so I thought maybe we would drop the car there and fly back to Aukland. But when I added up the miles (or kilometers), we would be driving all day every day just about. Halfway down the south island is Christchurch – maybe we would stop there. The more I looked at it, the more sense that made. In fact, the more I looked into it, the more other possibilities presented themselves. One has to take a ferry from Wellington on the north island to Picton on the south island. When I looked into the ferry schedule, lo and behold, there is a train that goes down the coast from Picton to Christchurch. I love trains. So, let’s leave the car in Wellington, take the train to Christchurch, and fly back to Aukland. In fact, the train allows you to stop overnight on the way, so let’s spend a night in Kaikoura, a small town on the coast where there is good marine life viewing. And the flight from Christchurch to Aukland is perfectly timed to connect to our flight to Singapore.
Of course, after I had done hours and hours of my own research I found out there are sites that would have been great resources. One is Inspirock.com where you can plug in your country or city destination, your dates of travel and your interests and it will come up with a suggested itinerary and links to find places to stay and things to do. If you want more personalized help, the kimkim team (kimkim.com) will connect you with a local travel planner in the country of your choice who will arrange an itinerary and guide for your trip. We found them when I was having a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to get around Peru. Once I connected with Kristy, our personal travel planner, everything smoothed out and she arranged the details for me. If I had known about kimkim sooner, I might have used their services in some other countries as well.
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