Trip planning

I don't know if I've mentioned it before on the blog, but I have been
intending for some time now (it's been kind of definite in my mind for
months, and perhaps longer than that) to take another extended holiday.
The basic plan is to go away when my current contract ends (Friday
October 11th) and be back in the UK looking for work by April. I have
been advised that that's probably about the best time to look, and it
also fits in with the tax year and my desire to take these extended
holidays during the UK winter. (Frankly, I might have taken this trip
six months if not for the desire to use the time to avoid winter.
Anyway, there were lots of issues around and I am not going to pretend I
can remember exactly how I felt at the various points, so let's just
leave that be.)

I intend to be back in the UK for Christmas; I do want to spend it with
my family even if it might be a little odd this year with my new niece
existing ;-), and in some ways having this natural split into two
sub-trips is nice, although of course it does reduce flexibility in some
sense. For better or worse the two trips are also therefore less scary,
as I will be back in familiar friendly surroundings at Christmas instead
of being "out there" in the big scary world for five or six months
straight. ;-)

I have to be absolutely honest and say it is very tempting to just spend
all the time in Latin America. There are loads of places - hell, loads
of *countries*, never mind just places - I haven't been there yet and
lots of others it would be cool to revisit. However, while I try not to
take too seriously the occasional "it's a big planet, you should see
something else, you might really like that" whinge/advice/criticism from
friends, I think there is *some* truth in it. So my plan is to spend the
approximately two months before Christmas "somewhere else" and the
approximately three months after Christmas in Latin America. I'm sure
some people would regard this as giving way too much weight to Latin
America, but it's my holiday and I have my own interests and I think
this is reasonable.

I have also flirted with visiting North America, but apart from this not
being an absolutely ideal time of year for it, I somehow feel that if
I'm branching out I might as well try a different landmass altogether.
It would be kind of cool to do some kind of coast to coast thing,
possibly across Canada as well as/instead of the US, and then maybe run
down into Mexico (though I have no idea how safe some of the northern
bits of Mexico are) and perhaps even across Mexico down into Central
America. But what with the time of year not being ideal for North
America anyway, worries about safety trying to cross Mexico north to
south by land (quite possibly this is OK, but I don't know), my desire
to see something a little bit more "exotic" if I'm not going to Latin
America exclusively and the fact that having the Christmas break in the
holiday naturally prevents the "continuity" that would otherwise exist
in an all-American-continent trip (you'd have to cross at least the
Darien Gap by air, but you could potentially go overland almost all the
way from the east coast of the US/Canada down to southern
Chile/Argentina), I'm not going for it this time. Quite possibly in the
future, in one form or another.

I have been extremely lazy/too busy thinking about other things to
really sit down and think heavily about my itinerary until this week,
and really it's only tonight (it's Friday 30th August 23:50 as I write
this) that I've actually done some serious thinking about it and kind of
"committed" to this way of using each of the sub-trips.

Anyway, I did have some vague thoughts of:
- Georgia (somewhat out of the blue, but based on a whim while reading
Laurens Van Der Post's "Journey Into Russia" a month or so ago)
- India
- Australia
- Thailand/Vietnam

Having sat down with Google Maps and the flight pricing tool at
http://matrix.itasoftware.com, I came up with a loose itinerary using
the algorithm:
- pick the nearest place on the list further east
- assign 2-3 weeks there
- turn back when you get to the halfway point of the available time
- fudge the results to try to avoid over long flights and to actually
visit places where you might otherwise have a long stopover
- iterate

(I tried another flight website to start with, which I shan't name just
in case, which completely screwed up the flight times. I didn't twig
until it offered me a direct flight from Singapore to London in under
five hours. I had to start again with the itasoftware site, although
most of the flights I'd picked out using the first website were actually
OKish, even if I'd thought some of them were shorter than they were.)

This has yielded the following approximate itinerary:

Two weeks in Georgia, starting mid October. September would be better
for the climate, but October looks OK. December would definitely be
worse, so it makes sense to do this on the outward leg. (I was otherwise
tempted to get an overnight flight in the Friday I finish work all the
way to Mumbai and do Georgia on the way back, but I'm not sure that is
such a great idea /anyway/ and the climate argument conveniently kills
it completely. Probably better to fly on the Saturday and not be
stressed about somehow getting stuck in the office late on my last day,
unlikely as that is.) I have just bought the Kindle edition of Lonely
Planet's Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan guide having had a flick through
the "look inside" on amazon.co.uk. I haven't studied it beyond that yet,
but I think I will easily be able to occupy myself in the country for
two weeks; there is a suggested two week itinerary of some kind for a
start. I don't think I'm going to see everything, but I will see enough
to know if I want to go back. The region is close enough to the UK that
it would be doable for a week or two's holiday while I'm working. The
F&CO and US State Department advice for Georgia is only slightly
disturbing, and I have blogged before (I think) about how I think I have
to mentally scale back the scariness factor I perceive from this kind of
advice.

(Incidentally, I have been thinking and I should definitely make more of
an effort to take 4, 5 or 6 weeks holiday a year while I am working.
Apart from avoiding "burn out" - puke, but I know what I mean and I
can't be bothered to think of a better phrase - it allows me to spend
more time travelling than I otherwise would, and cuts down on my
earnings at the marginal tax rate. The only possible incentive to be
sparing on time off during a contract is the possibility of wangling
something like my 2x3 week trips in winter 2011/12 if I "save up" my
virtual holiday allowance, but I think I'd probably be better off and
more likely to succeed in taking one 3 week and one or two shorter trips
every year; three weeks off is a bit of a stretch, but not much
especially if it's only once a year. But that is really a consideration
for much further in the future, i.e. April at the earliest. Back to the
itinerary...)

I somewhat arbitrarily picked Mumbai as the Indian destination just to
give me something concrete to work with in this initial plan. I need to
look into India and will probably buy some kinds of guide book for that
tomorrow or Sunday. For now I am arbitrarily allotting three weeks to
India and assuming I fly into and out of Mumbai; there would probably be
some internal flights in this three week period, of course.

The best flight I could find (trying to balance price, flight duration,
no insane stopovers, not departing at 5am or arriving at midnight - if
possible I prefer to travel from the airport to the hotel in daylight,
if that's not possible at least during the evening instead of the wee
hours) from Tbilisi (capital of Georgia) to Mumbai on this initial look
had a seven hour stopover in Istanbul. While I might drop it if it
doesn't fit "nicely" into the flights as the plan comes together, this
makes me think it would be a good opportunity to spend something like
3-5 days in Istanbul en route. This is really a city break, I wouldn't
make any attempt to see anything a significant distance from Istanbul.

Anyway, I then somewhat arbitrarily picked Thailand as the next
destination. As with India I have allotted three weeks and am
provisionally assuming I will fly into and out of Bangkok. I need to get
a guide book or two and read up, obviously I would not just spend three
weeks in Bangkok and depending on what there is to see and perhaps also
how the guide books "group" countries, I might end up using some of this
time for (say) Cambodia or Vietnam. I believe Andy did a three week trip
taking all three countries in; while I think that might be a little too
hurried for my taste and I'd be quite happy to spend three weeks in
Thailand, I will see how it goes with more research.

Looking at the map, it almost seems at this point that there's loads of
tempting possibilities in the vicinity of Thailand (the Philippines,
Australia, Hong Kong, just as some of the more obvious ones) but I'm
kind of running out of time. You could argue this means I should use the
time after Christmas to come back, but Latin America is also very
tempting, and I'm not going to. :-)

I am trying to avoid any ultra-long flights (e.g. flying "direct" from
London to Australia with only a brief stopover somewhere to stretch my
legs for an hour or two) but if I can take a 10h-ish flight overnight
when I'll probably sleep at least a bit of the time I am considering
that OK. I could return to London direct from (say) Bangkok, but it
would be a long flight and I think it's better to break it up a little bit.

Just because it's so close and because it seems like a good candidate
for a "city break", I am thinking from Bangkok I will go on to Singapore
for 3-5 nights before turning back towards home. I looked at direct
flights from there and some other places in the area to London and since
quite a few of them involve a change in the Gulf with quite a nice split
of the flight time (7h-ish for each flight), I am thinking of another
"city break" in somewhere like Dubai for 3-5 nights to break the journey
back.

I think this gets me back into London around 17-20th December, which
just might give me a chance to catch up with some friends before I go up
to Skegness for Christmas, although the weekend falls a touch
inconveniently with regard to Christmas and the fact I tend to see some
of my friends during the week only. It's also possible most/all of them
will be away or occupied, so I don't want to come back a few days
earlier than necessary and then be hanging around in London on my own
when I could have been abroad. I could obviously go up to Skegness
earlier (I don't really want to go up and come back down for a day or
two and then come back again, but I suppose I could) but I will see my
family over the gap between Christmas and the New Year as usual. Also I
will probably spend at least a few days, quite possibly a few weeks
(doubtless broken up by trips down to London to see friends and/or
interview), in Skegness with them in April when I return and need to
start looking for work again. Until I try to come up with a more
"definitive" itinerary I am not getting too worked up about the precise
timing of my return to London before Christmas; I might hope to be
booking some flights in the next week or so, but until then I have
plenty of research to do. Once I have a more definite idea I might even
ask one or two friends if they expect to be around just before Christmas
or not, so I know if it's worth coming back a day or two earlier.