All my life, trips were planned by my father. From the hotel bookings to activities on the trip to everything else. All I had to do was make myself present. When I went on my first ever trip alone, and planned the whole thing myself, it felt very intimidating. The trip was to Vietnam and I did not plan anything except booking flights and hotels in Hanoi and my plan was to stay there for a week. Yes, one entire week only in Hanoi. I did not look into other cities within Vietnam. I did not look into the things that I would do there. But you learn as you go. But I didn’t fully learn my lesson until my second trip back to Vietnam the following year, to Ho Chi Minh City. I will detail those travels separately. But here, I want to talk more about why lack of planning is detrimental to a trip and in most cases it’s better to err on the side of over-planning.
One of the problems in going with the flow is that you’ve to compensate your lack of planning with money. And I like to keep my spending as close to the minimum as possible. If there are events or activities that would require prior bookings (for a better rate) or events that would just not be available impromptu, I’d miss out on them. But this usually isn’t that big of a deal in many touristy areas.
If you don’t plan your trip, you can end up spending too much time in a place, which has happened to me on more than one occasion. The first time was in Hanoi, my first ever solo trip. There just wasn’t enough things to do for me to spend a week in the place. By the fourth day I started to get bored. I had done the touristy portions of visting Ha Long Bay and Ninh Binh. I walked across the entire Old Quarter, visiting all the pagodas and parks. I can’t count the number of museums I visited. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy walking through the streets and soaking in the culture (with the sun beating down mercilessly!). After the fourth day I felt like I had seen it all. But you learn from mistakes and not commit them again. I made the same mistake in the same country a year later on my visit to HCM City. I only stayed in HCM City and Vung Tau for 8 days, which is way too long. I did not add Danang or other places in my list (which I should’ve).
Another trip where I had not done enough planning was on my trip to Aizawl. It was a group trip and we barely did anything (just cozying in the room) and enjoying the weather. We were sort of lucky that the views were very pretty because of the rains. We felt like we were living inside the clouds. But if we had planned the trip properly, we’d have spent only a day in Aizawl and the other day in Guwahati, possibly visiting Kaziranga National Park.
It’s useful to be able to budget your trip correctly and carry a surplus amount on top of your budgeting. But you’d never be able to budget anything if you don’t map out your entire trip. You’d just be relying on how much other people spent and rely on their estimates, which is fine to do, and which I’ve done but it’s not your own estimate and your itinerary.
By far, the biggest mistake I’ve made was visiting Vietnam right before the Tet holidays started. I got robbed (story for another post) . Apparently, robbing is at an increased frequency during this season, which I’d have known if I had done any form of basic research. When I thought about good times to visit a place, I’d usually only check the weather forecasts for rains and the like. But the lesson learned is that different places can have their quirks and it’s best to know what the good times to visit and not visit a place and hear it from the horse’s mouth on the internet.
This happened during my first visit to Vietnam. I had read bits and pieces about vegetarian food being available (I’m a vegetarian). But did not know that the easiest way is to just go on Google Maps and check for restaurants near your hotel (sounds pretty straightfoward?). But I didn’t do it and fed with travel anxiety. Lesson learned for next time. Book my hotels around places that offer vegetarian options for peace of mind.
There’s probably pieces of information that I’m missing, which will be accumulated with more travel experience under my belt. But this text was written to serve as help for future me, in case I go down the nincompoop route of going on a trip without over-planning. If you overplan, you can cut out bits of your plans. But if you underplan, well, you are just stuck in the place, with no clue what to do and that isn’t a good idea for a vacation where you’re supposed to enjoy (from experience of committing the same mistake twice).