THE BEST METHOD TO PLAN ANY TRIP (4 STEPS)
If you just want to download my Excel planning template, click here.
Assuming you now know the region you want to travel in (if not, see this post) it is time to plan your actual trip! The planning of your trip consists of the following steps:
- Step 1: Identify Locations
- Step 2: Marking Locations in Google Maps
- Step 3: Create a Route with Excel
- Step 4: Estimate Travel Time
Step 1: Identify Locations
The easiest way to find a route is to go from big to small. That means, find out what in the region is of any interest to you! Scroll through blogs, read travel guides, listen for suggestions from other people that been there.
Step 2: Marking Locations in Google Maps
As soon as you find a place that interests you, mark it in Google Maps. That is literally the easiest way to picture the geographical reality of your trip. My Google Maps is full of yellow stars (for places I’ve been to) and green flags (for places I want to go to):
This task will take quite a while if it’s a bigger trip you are planning for, but it is worth it! If you don’t know how to mark places in Google Maps, check out this page. As for my South America trip, my initial idea was to travel Overland from Quito in Ecuador to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. I was thinking 3 months is enough for that (Spoiler: It’s not). So, I marked all the places I want to go to with my green flags (not all of them appear on the screenshot)
Step 3: Create a Route with Excel
Now you need to connect the dots! In my opinion it is the easiest to do that by using excel. You can download the excel sheet I used here. You have a certain budget of days, that you want to fill up with places and activities but keep in my mind that this is a just a plan. It’s not reality. Expecting to stick to your plan precisely will mean no flexibility and high risk of small disruptions wrecking your plan completely. What you want to achieve is a guideline for your trip that is adaptable during your travels. By reading blogs, travel guides etc. you will be able to determine an estimate of how long you will need / want to spend in each place. Always round up your estimate if you’re unsure and type the place in the respective days of your spreadsheet, just like this:
It’s important to also consider buffer days. After you’ve done this plan, randomly add a few buffer days here and there into your spreadsheet. That gives you the flexibility not to freak out when your bus journey takes 17 h instead of 8 h (happened in Colombia). There will be places that are underwhelming, and you leave earlier (Ecuadorian Coast for me) as well as places or people that blow your mind and make you stay longer than expected. This is another reason why you need those buffer days!
Step 4: Estimate Travel Time
As you see in the spreadsheet above you need to estimate your travel time between places as well! This is due to two reasons: Firstly, you can tell whether you will need to travel at nighttime or daytime and you can decide your mode of transport. E.g., in South America bus journeys are pretty much always the best mode of transportation. If your bus journey is shorter than 6 h a night bus makes no real sense, thus up to half your day will be swallowed by travel time. If it’s between 6 h – 10 h a night bus makes perfect sense, and you might not loose any of your daylight time. If its longer than 10 h you will need the night and part of the day, meaning you have a loss in your daylight time again. Secondly, the travel time will be useful to estimate your transportation budget! But more on that in my budgeting post. To find out the necessary travel time you can use rome2rio.com or just look up on Google Maps and multiply the displayed time by 1.5, which is a conservative estimate that shall include potential bus changes and the necessary time to get to and from the bus station to your hostel or whatever (usually you’ll be a little bit faster).
Conclusion
After I’ve done all this, I realized I would need around 29 days for Ecuador, 39 days for Peru and 22 days for Bolivia, which in total is already 90 days. I would be able to stretch my stay by a few days for sure, but definitely not enough to reach Rio de Janeiro. That means I dodged everything beyond Bolivia. Eventually, the spreadsheet is also a reality check whether what you want is actually doable! As you might have noticed I’ve travelled 100 days because I added 10 days in Colombia. Why I did that, you will find out in my budgeting post.
Now all that is left is to plan your financials (click here) and your packing list (click here)!
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