Trip Planning

Planning a trip to anywhere involves a level of commitment to research

I have just finished planning a 2 week adventure in Borneo... And the planning has taken me longer than the trip itself!! Any trip requires planning, especially when you are planning a journey to a destination that you are unfamiliar with, but when you are trying to plan on a budget, there are some careful considerations that need to be made...

You will always have your own reasons as to why you are traveling to a destination, and for me these were to see Orangutans in the wild and to Scuba Dive in the Sipadan Islands Marine Park (one of the top 10 diving sites in the world). These two specifications for our 2 week Borneo trip may well have resulted in a total bill which exceeded $3000AUD for 2 people which, after living in Thailand for a few months, seemed completely outrageous! But where there is a will, there is a way and with a lot of research, I managed to get that figure down to $2000AUD for our trip. So how did I do it, you ask? Here's how...

RESEARCH

I have spent almost 3 full weeks pouring over my Lonely Planet guide to Borneo, looking for alternative destinations where we can combine our 2 requirements and on an island where it is part Malaysia, part Indonesia and part Brunei I can officially tell you, it was a logistical nightmare! I have read about a million blogs on personal accounts of travels to Borneo and I have been a permanent resident of the TripAdvisor website. I have visited forums, both old and new, I have researched a number of different tour operators and I have almost memorized the Sabah tourism website! In short, I have completely immersed myself in the task of building us an extraordinary yet affordable travel experience. This people who said that you only get out what you put in were 100% correct when it comes to travel - especially travel to a country where half the websites you come across are not available in English! 

Independent travel is always our preferred option, so logistics become a major part of most of my research. The tours that I have participated in have always been less-than-inspiring to us and we always seem to find so much more on our own. But I guess this comes down to the simple fact that no one can know better than you, what kind of experience you are seeking. You need to pick through all of the reviews of a place and be able to read between the lines, you need to know yourself well enough to be able to choose options that you will enjoy and if you are traveling with another person (or people), as the trip planner - you need to know them too! I know that visiting an Orangutan 'Rehabilitation Centre' in Asia is not going to live up to the nice name they have given it. I know that while I am Scuba Diving every day, that reading a book over the water is not going to be enough for Dave. So, with many questions to resorts, local tour guides and anyone else who would answer, I think I have done it. I have designed exactly the kind of experience we were seeking... And now we get to go out and live it!