Before I can travel the world tomorrow with a free mind, I had to organize a lot of things at home… In this post I want to share with you what you need to know before you leave your city for good.
After I decided to travel on my own, I had to check my bank account. How much money is there? Then I had to make a choice of how I would like to travel. As I prefer to meet local people, I am very happy to use couchsurfing.com or work in little projects to get accommodation or food for free. Therefore, I decided I will need about 40,00 Euros per day including everything (accommodation, food, transportation, activities, etc.). In case you prefer to stay in a hotel or you want to eat in every nice restaurant, you should easily consider about 80,00 Euros per day. After that decision, it is just mathematics for how long you could travel. Of course you should always have some “emergency money” in case something unexpected happens and it costs more than you thought.
I hope I can travel about 6 months. Afterwards I had to decide where I want to go and book flights. As I want to travel independent, I decided to book just a one-way ticket to Bali, Indonesia with no flight back. First of all, because I don’t know for sure when and second of all because I don’t know yet from which country I am flying back to Germany.
The next step was to find out if I need to apply for a visa for Indonesia. As a German, I don’t need to apply for a visa in advance but in order to get a “Visa free visit” for 30 days in Indonesia, I already need a flight out of the country. So I searched for the cheapest flights out of Bali and surrounding via Skyscanner.com and found the flight from Lombok, an island next to Bali, to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for 80,00 Euros.
Thank god, I already had a valid passport so I didn’t have to get a new one (with the Berlin citizen center, it would have been a big problem to get a valid one on time…). In case you don’t have a valid one, you have to apply for a new passport! The same for your driver’s license!
Afterwards I was thinking about accommodation in Bali and what I want to do there. I used my Facebook network and asked people for advices where to stay and great places to go surfing, do yoga or meditate in Bali. I got a great response.
However, I decided to use couchsurfing.com and stay with local people instead of concentrating on doing activities I could do nearly everywhere in the world. I was lucky enough and got the first ten nights covered by three different local couchsurfers from Bali. I am already very excited to meet them in person!
That is the reason why I’ll also bring my laptop with me on my trip… In case you will do the same, you should back up all your data on an external hard drive or the cloud before leaving for your journey.
As I know, sometimes people lose their documents somehow, I made scans (to keep in my computer) and copies of all important ones such as my passport, my driver’s license and my vaccination card. For some countries you need proof of certain vaccinations in order to get a visa. As I still haven’t planned my whole trip, I want to have all my documents ready. I also bring a couple of passport photographs for visa applications or anything like that.
I still have to finish packing my backpack for those 6 months… and I also still need to clean my room.
At the end, I will have a farewell party to see all my friends and family again before leaving Berlin for such a long time… I will miss you guys so much!
You have ideas what else you should do? Just comment below!