HANOI, VIETNAM – John and I “never” travel with a tour, except for those rare occasions when we do…
Tours tend to hustle you along from point A to point B to point C with a limited amount of time at each one. We, however, might want to spend a little more time at point A, don’t really care about point B, and think point C looks like it should take a whole day.
So when we do take a tour, it’s usually a small local tour to a place we can’t efficiently get to otherwise. But a big tour from start to finish? Absolutely not what we want.
Independent travel is easier than you think
I can’t say that traveling independently is easy, just easier than you might think. And the rewards are great.
Right now I am surfing the Internet to find information about Ho Chi Minh City. We have stopped here in Hanoi for a few months to adjust somewhat to Asian life, but it is cool, often foggy, misty or rainy here lately. We are thinking we want some warmth for awhile, and heading south for a couple weeks seems like a good idea.
So I have been looking up sights we might want to see around Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, how far away they are, how to get there, what the hotels are like, and what people have said on the forums about all of it.
The Internet is a fantastic resource for independent travelers
The Internet is a fantastic travel resource, and it continues to get better all the time. Researching destinations, booking hotel reservations, Googling how to get from one place to another, checking train and bus schedules and routes, walking tours, reviews… All of it has made traveling on your own much easier.
And even if you’re going where the Internet connection is not so great, you still can get information enough to make good decisions before you go, like booking hotels and transportation, and downloading maps on your smartphone ahead of time.
I love it that we can research first and spend our time when we get there doing what we want, be it sitting with a drink watching the world go by or knowing that over there is a mountain covered with ancient temples to see.
OK, I’ll admit it takes hours of work vs. calling a travel agent and telling them, “Take me there,” but we like to have more control of our time while we travel.
For instance, tour advertisers say you can do Vietnam in two weeks, North to South.
Yep, you could do it in two weeks, and I’m sure it would be interesting, but John and I are slow travelers. That two-week trip would show you only the highlights of the highlights of the country; we want to go deeper. We want to walk around, John taking 1,000s of photos (really) while I study the architecture, the flowers, the people, the temple designs and everything all around us.
Check the big tours for inspiration
I often look at what the big tours offer and consider including some of that in our itinerary. And we’ve certainly gone on a few day tours to see things we otherwise might not have been able to get to on our own (we’re not driving anymore, so we rely on walking, buses, trains and taxis to get around).
Last summer we visited the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. We had read about the island’s fabulous Neolithic stone circles, and we really wanted to see as many as possible. It turned out that only one of the circles would have been accessible by public transport, and even that one would have been hard to get to, with only a short window of time to explore the site once we got there.
We arranged a private tour
So we arranged a private tour with a local archaeologist. In four hours we got to see several stone circles and other sites and learned way more than we would have on our own. We had the BEST time!
And when we were in Dublin for two weeks we went on a couple different day tours. One was to a major Neolithic archaeological site. We could have gone by public bus, but we couldn’t get there early enough to guarantee we’d be able to snag a pair of the limited number of entry tickets sold on a first come-first served basis each day.
By booking a tour, we were guaranteed entry to the main site and also got to stop at a handful of other locations we had hoped to see.
Our other tour out of Dublin was to Ireland’s west coast, by way of the Burren, to see the Cliffs of Moher. The only other way for us to make the trip would have been hire a car and driver – at incredible cost! The tour got us to the main sites and more in comfort, with an entertaining guide as a plus.
As we travel, I know we will always miss some great stuff, no matter how much I research. But as independent travelers, we get to create our own itinerary and spend more time seeing the things that are most important to us.
Being almost the only people at a fantastic ancient site is better than I can even express in words. How would you like it? Too quiet?