Guides
The practical companion to the journals — how to plan a long trip, what to bring, and the small daily skills that make a year on the road easier.
The journals are about places. The guides are about the work behind them — the visa runs and weather windows that decide an itinerary, the bag that survives nine months of buses and ferries, the fifteen words of Thai or Japanese that buy a smile in a market. Most of what follows was learned by getting it wrong first. The aim here is to save you the same lessons.
Table of Contents
Trip Planning
The work that happens before the first flight — deciding pace, sequencing countries by climate, building a budget that survives contact with reality, and booking the kind of ticket that fits a long, open-ended trip rather than a two-week holiday.
- Itinerary Building — pace, slack, weather windows, and visa runs.
- Budgeting — realistic per-day costs across Asia, the Pacific, and Europe.
- Booking Flights — awards vs. cash, open-jaw tickets, and the alliances that matter for the Pacific.
- Accommodations — guesthouses, ryokan, homestays, and reading reviews properly.
Packing
One bag, the right bag, packed for the climate you’re actually walking into. Carry-on first as a discipline, redundancy where it matters, and an honest reckoning with what tropical humidity does to electronics and what Patagonian wind does to a cheap rain shell.
- Carry-On Only — the 7kg playbook and the bag that makes it work.
- Tropical Climates — Bali, the Vietnamese coast, and the Thai islands.
- Cold-Weather — Hokkaido powder, Patagonian wind, Iceland sideways rain.
- Tech Setup — laptop or no laptop, eSIMs, power banks, and the one-bag-of-cords rule.
On The Road
The small daily skills that compound. How to read a busy food stall, which taxis are metered and which are theatre, the fifteen words that buy goodwill in any country, and how to stay connected without letting the phone run the trip.
- Local Transport — trains, scooters, ferries, and reading a meter.
- Food & Water Safety — the peeled-cooked-or-bottled rule, and what to do when it fails.
- Language Tips — the fifteen words, the polite gesture, and Google Translate’s camera mode.
- Staying Connected — eSIMs, pocket WiFi, and when to deliberately go offline.
The guides are written from the road and revised when something stops being true. If a recommendation here has gone stale — a SIM provider that no longer works, a budget that no longer reflects reality — the journals usually catch it first.