How To Decide On An Itinerary

Having traveled a few times, I know what a big mistake it is not to research an area before visiting. I also know that if you plan a trip too specifically you might miss opportunities along the way.

Once my brother and I decided that we were going to Vietnam, the first things I started researching were the geography of the country, the location of the major cities/international airports and then I looked very specifically at transportation. This is key when you are exploring a new country. How are you going to get around? How long will it take to get from point A to point B? What modes of transportation are available? Plane? Train? Bus? Hired car? Mop head?

After familiarizing myself with the layout of the country, I looked at how many days I actually had in the country. 15. Vietnam is an incredibly long country. You don't quite realize it until you have to look at it on a map and 15 days goes by quickly. There is a lot of space to cover between the two major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We want to see as much as we can while there and I've heard that North and South Vietnam are very different so it's important that we go to both areas. That's why we came to the conclusion of flying into Hanoi and out of Saigon.

SIDE NOTE: You don't have to go through a travel agent to do this. All you need to do is go on Kayak.com and click "Multi-cities" at the top.

That gave us our initial outline. Definite dates. Looking closer at the map, we realize that we will be spending a lot of our time en route from one destination to the next. Time is tight so our next decision is to cut out some of the travel time in between by taking a domestic flight.

My brother and I actually had a lot of trouble booking our original flight to Vietnam. I bought my ticket first. However, after my flight had been purchased, Kenny realized he was going to have to travel to Vietnam from Taiwan during the Chinese New Year, which is very difficult and expensive.

I made the executive decision and bought us plane tickets from Hanoi to Nha Trang. I wasn't originally interested in Nha Trang because it's a big tourist destination due to the beaches but looking at the map I realize that it will save us a lot of travel time and anxiety. Nothing is worse than realizing that you're not going to make your flight out of the country.

That gives us 7 days on both ends of the country. Next, the fun part where Kenny and I get to start putting together options for us for both parts of our journey. I say options because again if you decide everything down to the day, hour, etc. you will not leave a lot of room for flexibility. I'm calling it piecemeal planning. Many different things can change how you want to approach your travels. Weather. Holidays. You realize that a cool festival is happening on a certain day. So you want to be able to take advantage of these opportunities at any point during your trip.

I will explain piecemeal planning in my next post.