8 posts, all free to read
Guides, planning method, packing decisions and the money side. Nothing here is gated, sponsored or written to a keyword. Filter by what you are actually looking for.
Showing all 8 posts
Most short itineraries start with a list of sights and try to connect them. For a city built vertically and stitched together by ferries, that fails immediately. I built this one from the last hour of the trip backwards, and it produced a completely different route to the one I would have written forwards.
There are now three ways to cross from Hong Kong, and the fastest one is the least interesting. A case for the ferry, the border formalities nobody warns you about, and why the old town is a morning destination rather than an afternoon one.
Not a packing list with links. A description of what is genuinely in the bag after six years of removing things, why each of the survivors earned its place, and the three items I keep repacking despite never once using them.
Every visitor who has a disappointing time in Madrid is eating three hours too early. What the city timetable actually looks like, how long it takes to adjust to it, and why the free tapa is an introduction rather than a meal.
The spreadsheet comes before the destinations, not after them. How I set an annual number, split it across the trips on the plan, and use the gap between the estimate and the actual as the only measure of whether the planning was any good.
Between six and eight in the morning the historic centre belongs to delivery drivers and people going to work. The squares are empty, the light is low, and the city is briefly available. Here is the route I walk and what it costs you.
Two things on a New Zealand itinerary genuinely sell out, and everything else can be decided on the morning. How I am planning five weeks with only the ferry and the hut nights fixed, and why the map lies about how long a day takes.
For four years I travelled with a body, three lenses and a tripod. The photographs got better and the trips got worse. On the difference between documenting a place and being in one, and what I carry now instead.