I’m a big old shy scaredy-cat but I’ve managed to go on at least one overseas trip every year for the last few years and gone to around 30 countries. I’m much more confident if I’m with somebody, unfortunately I don’t have a somebody. The suggestions below help me.
- Use a (good) travel agent. It’s their job to make sure everything you need is booked correctly, right days, any needed visas, no gaps etc
- Go on organised tours like Contiki, Topdeck, Trafalgar, Globus, Insight, Intrepid, G Adventures etc. What really reduces the anxiety for me is knowing all I have to do is get to the tour and then I’ll be amongst other travellers with a tour manager to handle stuff and everything will be fine
- If going overseas and doing one of those tours is a bit scary, do what I did and see if they have tours in your own country and do one of those to start with. The first Contiki I did was Christchurch (where I live) to Christchurch. I was never outside of driving distance to home so that eased by nerves quite a bit.
- Book airport transfers ahead of time. Private transfers, although expensive if just for yourself, are great as you get somebody waiting for you outside of arrivals with a sign with your name on it and they take you right to your accomodation. Simple.
- Having a phone with data that works everywhere. I do this using a KnowRoaming SIM sticker. But there’s other options like using roaming from your home provider if affordable, buy a local SIM in the destination, buying a local and/or roaming SIM from the likes of Holidayphone, or roaming MiFis, or in Europe there’s pretty good roaming deals available from European providers.
- With data you have access to Google Maps which is great for finding things, finding your way back to accomodation etc. In lots of places around the world it even has public transit information.
- These days the likes of Uber is available in lots of places around the world all from the same app.
- If you don’t have data then Google Maps allows some amount of downloading mapping information when you have WiFi (eg at your hostel/hotel/McDonalds etc), or apps like Maps.Me (available for both iOS and Android) allow you to download whole countries for offline navigation (with various levels of success).
- I’m fairly basic food wise. I’m fine with fast-food, pizza, simple sandwiches etc. This makes food fairly easy as the likes of McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Subway etc are all over the world and they all take card and have the more or less the same menus world wide. Nice and simple. They are also usually staffed by younger people that speak english, enough for ordering purposes anyway. McDonald’s also has the big touch screens you can order at that are generally multilingual. In some countries KFC and Burger King do too.
- Google Translate. Enough said. Very useful.