Do you have your objective now? Let’s use mine as an example throughout this few articles.
My objective: To visit a place where I could relax and eat nice food..Taipei..within my budget of SGD 2000, with my girl friend.
The next step of planning, requires you to do more work than Step 1.
Step 2, is Research the place you want to go
Research is the most important thing you need to do before you start your travel.
You have to know at least the following before you go,
1) weather at your destination
2) currency exchange.
3) place to stay (you need time to evaluate)
4) place to visit (there are places where you could just forgo although it’s famous)
5) what to be careful of
and the list continues……
Where to start
That’s a big question right?
In my opinion, The Best Place to start is the official tourism website of that particular place. Just GOOGLE words like ” Taiwan tourism board” or ” Malaysia Tourism board”
then you could get the official website. You can almost always get the above info that I stated above from these websites
Second best place, is travel blog sites. In this internet age, there are many people relating their experience through travel blog sites or their own blog. The earlier one would be more easy to find. Examples would be, VirtualTourist.com,TripAdvisor.com.
The problem with this is… you need to browse a lot to find related information. People share a lot, thus you need to do much more reading. Sometimes, by the time you finish reading, you would want to change your destination already due to less appealing comments from fellow backpackers.
Third, go be a bookworm. It’s heavy but as the old words go, “Books hold Treasures within them”. Find a travel book on the place you tend to visit and flip through it. You can get them cheap at budget bookshops, or Second hand bookshops.. again Internet is also a good choice.
Books, are straight to the point but they are cater to the mass..so if you objective is focused then you might not get enough information from books.
Once you do your research, you would be clear of what you could expect from your destination
Then, you have your Objective to Travel and also a Research of the place to make sure your destination meets your needs.
You could visit my blog Backpacking Tips for more backpacking advices.
Yeong Chow is a backpacker. I only travel by backpacking. I have visited Hong Kong, Macau and other places. Would be backpacking in Europe in 2010 and South East-Asia in 2011. As I learn more on backpacking, I would also write them into articles for others to view. My blog on backpacking tips is at Backpacking tips.