Jon Evans's 10 Tips for Travel to Exotic Countries

Want a taste of adventure on your next vacation? Then look past Europe and the USA, and go to where tourists are few, prices are low, people are wonderfully friendly, and the sights and activities are gorgeous and glorious. Think unforgettable, extraordinary destinations like Belize, Bolivia, Goa, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Oman, Peru or Zanzibar. Travel to developing countries like these isn’t nearly as tough or intimidating as it might seem, and the rewards are amazing. Here are some tips on how to travel in exotic countries:

1. Travel light. Everyone will tell you this. For once, everyone is right. Before packing, put all the things you want to take in one pile, and all the money you think you’ll need in another—then halve the first pile and double the second. Don’t buy specialty travel gear unless you have a specific need. Why bring a water bottle when you can just buy and reuse plastic bottles once you get there? And nowadays, anything you forget you can probably buy cheap at your destination. But do be sure to bring sturdy luggage and broken-in footwear. Nothing ruins a holiday like blisters.

2. Plan, but don’t overplan. Get your vaccinations, stock up on medications and buy travel insurance. Buy a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide guidebook but don’t be enslaved by it. Plan for one central activity—viewing wildlife in the Serengeti, sailing by dhow from Zanzibar to Pemba, trekking to Mount Everest, scuba diving on the Belize reefs, spending a week in an Amazon jungle resort, exploring Angkor Wat—but leave plenty of room for on-the-spot decisions. If you’re going for an extended period, be sure to build “relax days” into your schedule; travel can be exhausting, and it’s far better to do less and have fun than to do more and stress yourself out. As a rule of thumb, make sure you spend at least two nights in every new bed, unless you’re trekking or on a road trip.

3. Cut the costs. It’s worth spending a few hours hunting for the best airfares. If you have a complicated or round-the-world itinerary, I recommend AirTreks.com. If tickets seem exorbitantly priced, try routing your journey through hubs like Bangkok or London—this can cut prices considerably. And bear in mind that activities and group tours are generally far cheaper if booked at your destination. Consider the Inca Trail: tours booked from abroad can cost more than $4000 US per person, plus airfare; I booked in Peru and trekked to Machu Picchu with one of the most experienced and highly rated tour companies for a mere $400. Advance booking is sometimes necessary due to scarcity or peace of mind—but shop around.

4. Stay cool on day one. The moment of arrival can be overwhelming. After months of planning and dreaming, you step off the airplane and suddenly you’re actually there, in a strange land far away from everyone and everything you know, with no real idea of where you are or how things fit together, only a vague notion of what to do if you get in trouble and no grasp of the language. Most airports in the developing world greet you with a sea of would-be touts, guides, taxi drivers and luggage porters, some of them aggressive, all of them eager to rip you off. Rule number one is to stay cool. If possible, find a guide, or friends, or friends-of-friends to meet you. If not, don’t worry; just smile, be patient, wave them off and, once the crowd has moved on to other prey, then start looking for a taxi. Negotiate a price before you get in, don’t believe the driver if he tells you your hotel is closed but he knows another, and just accept that everyone spends too much money in the first couple days in a new country. Think of it as an entry tax.

5. Prepare to be appalled. Developing countries are, by definition, poor, and this poverty is likely to be in-your-face from the word go. You have two alternatives. One is to spend all your time in the hermetically sealed world of four-star hotels and gated resorts and pretend poverty doesn’t exist. Don’t do this. If you’re going all the way to Africa or India, you owe it to yourself to experience your destination as it really is. Yes, you’ll see children and cripples begging for money, vast slums of rickety tin-roofed shacks, gaunt men and women with dead eyes. But no, despite what your television tells you, the developing world is not an endless sea of grinding misery; most people live normal, recognizable lives. Give, by all means, but I don’t recommend giving to beggars on the street. Give money to Doctors Without Borders, Transparency International or Amnesty International instead—and remember that you’ll do a lot of good just by going to the country and spending your money at locally owned companies, rather than foreign-owned hotel chains or tour agencies.

6. Dangers and annoyances. Statistics confirm that the most dangerous threat you face in developing countries, by an enormous margin, is traffic, not violence or disease. So buckle up and hire a driver who knows the roads, and if he starts acting crazy, don’t hesitate to shout. The number two threat is heart attacks, so please just relax. Otherwise, use common sense. Keep your street senses on high alert, especially at dark, but don’t be paranoid; if you see lone women and/or children walking around, it’s probably a safe neighbourhood. Pickpockets are far more rare than anecdotes suggest, but keep your money and passport in a money belt and keep the belt on you—a friend of mine once took his out to make a payment and promptly lost it to a snatcher on a motorcycle. Make photocopies of your ID, bring one copy and leave another with friends back home. Most scammers, touts and hustlers will go away if you ignore them, but be prepared to drop your courtesy and say “No” rudely, loudly and repeatedly, and follow it up with “Go away!” if necessary. Take mild stomach upsets in stride, but if you get seriously sick, go to expat clinics rather than local hospitals. Don’t call the police unless you have to; and if you have a big problem, call your embassy first. Above all, don’t worry so much. People have better and less risky things to do than waylay you and steal your money. Most of your fear is simply fear of the unknown.

7. Money, money, money. Wherever you go, bring a small stash of US dollars, a credit card and an ATM card. Store a spare credit card separately, just in case. Traveller’s cheques are hardly worth the hassle nowadays; their major advantage is that they’re refundable in case of theft. Internationally networked ATMs are available in an amazing number of countries around the world, and even when they don’t exist, you can go to major local banks and get a cash advance on your credit card. But bear in mind these tricks only work in major cities. Otherwise, cash is king. Touts on the street will offer you ridiculously great black-market rates for your US dollars. Do not take them up on this. Their scams are legion and brilliant, and nowadays only a few countries have worthwhile currency black markets. If you do need to change money on the street, take theirs, give them yours and walk away immediately. But be much nicer when bargaining for souvenirs and taxis—and you are going to bargain, right? It’s often insulting not to. Smile, use humour; sigh, shake your head and warn them that they’re not going to be happy with what you’re about to offer them; look shocked and tell your would-be driver, “No, we just want a ride in your car, we don’t want to buy it.” Bargaining, when done right, is fun for both sides.

8. Where to stay. The developing world is full of amazing places to stay. Amazing in all senses of the word: the aptly named Freak Street in Kathmandu has hotel rooms that cost literally $1 US a night. Uganda’s stunning Mweya Lodge, nestled in the heart of a national park teeming with elephants and lions, is a five-star safari lodge that costs less than $100 a night. Whatever your budget, take advantage of these kinds of options. By all means, spend the first couple of nights in a comfortable, modern place; and even if you’re travelling on a shoestring, stop into a four-star hotel for a sanity check every now and again. But otherwise, go for character—sprawling colonial-era mansions-turned-hotels in the former British Empire, treehouse lodges in Namibia, jungle camps in the Amazon, surfer resorts in Indonesia. You’ll meet more interesting people, locals and tourists both, and you’ll find yourself far more plugged in to the local scene than you would at a dull, overpriced Holiday Inn or Novotel.

9. Go in a gang. This doesn’t necessarily mean spend your whole vacation on a group tour—although that’s not necessarily a bad idea, especially on your first venture to exotic climes. I prefer to travel solo, myself, but I once spent months trucking across West Africa with twenty-three perfect strangers and had a blast. Of course, travelling solo doesn’t mean travelling alone. Meeting people is half the fun. Instant communities spring up in hotels and bus stations around the world, little groups who decide they all want to hike the local mountain together tomorrow. Sometimes these groups go their separate ways the next day; sometimes they travel together for weeks. If you’re at loose ends, go to your hotel desk, or find a local travel agent and ask what kind of group tours are going out—they’ll usually be happy for you to tag along. And if you need a guide and/or driver, don’t hesitate to hire one—but shop around and be picky. A bad guide is invariably worse than no guide at all.

10. Keep in touch. The whole world is plugged in nowadays. Take advantage. Buy an unlocked GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) phone before you go that you can get a cheap SIM card for when you arrive. It makes a huge difference being able to call your hotel, favourite taxi driver, tour company, etc., on a whim. If you’re not going to North Korea or Myanmar, you can count on having Internet access. By all means bring your digital camera: you can go to Net cafés to upload your shots immediately to websites like Flickr and/or burn them to CD. Most also provide cheap international phone calls. Pick up snail mail care of poste restante at major post offices, and go to business hotels to pick up the International Herald Tribune and catch up with what’s going on in the world. You’ll marvel at how small and interconnected today’s world has become—but also at how vast, exotic and wondrous it remains.

Jon Evans is the award-winning author of several international thrillers, most recently Invisible Armies. He has travelled to more than sixty countries across six continents, researching exotic locations for his novels. Between journeys he lives in Montreal. Check out his website at www.jonevans.ca for more about his writing and travels.