(Originally posted 13 February 2016) In Hanoi, there were ATMs around every corner. This gave us the impression that we would be able to draw cash more easily than originally anticipated. In general, we also have enough cash on hand to get by as we draw the maximum daily allowance each time withdraw, but when you are on an isolated island, you could be caught in a tricky situation.

The only thing on Nam Cat island is Nam Cat Resort. You need to pay 300 000 VND to get off the island (a 40-minute boat trip) and while on the island you are limited to the food and drink available at the resort prices. Normally this would be fine as you would simply settle your bill using your credit card at the end of the stay. But when the island has poor cell reception and no Wi-Fi, credit cards are not an option.

In an attempt to solve this problem, we caught a boat into Catba Town to draw some cash only to find that all the ATMs were out of order. Together with a handful of Dollars and Euros, we have stashed away, we may be able just to cover our bill. As a plan B, we already considering which electronics we have to use for bartering. We will let you know how it turned out.

Update on 19 Feb 2016: The staff from the resort accompanied us to Catba Town on our last day, and the ATMs were back online. So the good news is that we did not need to sell any of our possessions and have travelled on to our next stop in Vietnam.

(Originally posted 1 January 2016) We learnt a few fun and a few tough lessons while preparing for our 2016 round-the-world trip. We’re sure the lessons will keep coming but here are six important lessons we recently learned.

1. Admin never goes away

A long-term vacation is a dream for most. You unrealistically also tend to think that it will be a vacation from the soul-destroying admin that comes with life. But before you can go to most countries, especially as a South African, you need valid visas to legally enter. No matter how organised you are with your documentation, this is always a hassle.

Be sure to draw up checklists to help you submit all the right paperwork, and always make a few more copies of documents than you think you’ll need.

2. Never underestimate the power of the pencil pushers

Linked to the above lesson, you will need to work with many administrators who have the power to make your life difficult and unnecessarily complex when sorting out all the paperwork – from selling your house, moving your money to offshore accounts, providing the personal documentation you need for visas and processing the visas.

Try your best not to take out your frustrations with all the bureaucracy on them when things go wrong and progress at a snail’s pace. If you can keep your cool, be super friendly and win them over, you are likely to achieve so much more because they are on your side.

3. Save more than think you will need

You have a plan. But no matter how well you plan, things change. The currency devaluation of the South African Rand is a massive problem as it fluctuated a lot before we left on our trip.

Whatever goes wrong, you are likely to need more savings than you think you may need. So squirrel away as much extra cash as possible or you may need to be more flexible with your plan to keep costs down – here’s hoping we don’t have to chop a whole country from our itinerary.

4. It is harder to say goodbye than you think it will be

It can be an emotional rollercoaster, bouncing between the massive excitement of planning your dream trip and saying goodbye to loved ones. Although technology allows you to stay and touch, and for most travellers, a vacation is not forever, our end destination is a new country and new home making it particularly difficult.

Just take it one day at a time, focus on the exciting adventure ahead and know that the people meant to be in your life will stay close to you – even if only in spirit.

5. You can do it better and cheaper than a travel agent

We keep doubting our abilities regarding making the bookings and planning our holidays. We, therefore, still ask different travel agents for quotes or advice. Unfortunately, many of the travel agents have far less travel experience than we do. Also, the agents sometimes only work with providers that give kickbacks pushing up the costs far higher than what you would ordinarily pay by booking directly.

Remember that a part of the fun of travelling can be planning it yourself and doing all the research on the places to visit and things to see. The online resources available make this easy for any traveller.

6. You can’t control the pace

You put your house on the market because the sale could take a few months, only for it to be sold quickly requiring you to move out in two weeks. On the other hand, you apply for a visa that should only take five working days, it arrives late and then it has been issued for completely the wrong dates requiring you to begin the process from scratch (this happened to us this week).

Keep calm and learn to adapt. Things will happen but perhaps not quite according to your timelines.

All in all, we are learning a lot through this planning process, and unfortunately, we still have a lot of work to do on ourselves regarding being patient and not getting agitated with jumping through red tape hoops.

Featured image source: https://pixabay.com/photos/learn-word-scrabble-letters-wooden-1820039/

(Originally posted 22 December 2015) When escaping from normal life to become a traveller, you are excited to move away from the day-to-day drudge and are now entering a care-free existence. Then reality strikes in the form of visa applications.

It can be enough to dampen any travel plans, especially for South African passport holders – the places you can travel to without a visa are very limited.

It is really complicated.

We are already welcome in some countries, but this is not straightforward. We have a visa for the US, but the visa appears in old passports that we will have to carry with us (as well as our marriage certificate as it was issued in Lauren’s maiden name). Then we have a visa for Australia, but it does not appear in our passport – we simply have a letter from the Australian government. Another difficult one to explain to a customs official who wants to see a visa for your end destination.

You usually need to prove that you have no intention of staying permanently in a country when applying for a visa. This includes a flight ticket back to your home country and a permanent residential address and job. But with an extended vacation that will shape itself along the way, you don’t want to buy that ticket home yet, and you have let go of most of the things tying you down to one home. The authorities don’t seem to like that and don’t embrace the lack of commitment and conformity that you aspire to achieve.

Why so nervous?

Another strange thing is that we are simple travellers wanting to see and learn as much as possible from other cultures. We’re not some international criminal masterminds avoiding the authorities and living a double life. In fact, we can be considered law-abiding and boringly uninteresting rule-following individuals. Yet, we get so nervous when dealing with the embassies – ensuring all the paperwork is correct, nothing has been overlooked, and all the information submitted is aligned and giving the exact truth.

All this admin causes sleepless nights, hours of pouring over the same paperwork, checking and re-checking. Just when you think you are getting this process nailed, the following application requires something completely different with a different version of your passport photo. No matter how prepared or how many times you have done it before, you always feel like you are running the visa application gauntlet.

Is penance due?

Perhaps the admin hell of visa applications is the penance you have to pay to live an extraordinary life filled with travel. When life becomes a vacation, maybe visa applications will remind you of the real world.