Rookie Travel Mistakes
This blog post is a long time coming! As you become more proficient at, pretty much anything, you tend to make less mistakes but you still make mistakes. These are our top rookie mistakes we made in the last 2 years (that we can think of right now) but we’ll update if we remember any more.
Overpacking - Riiiight?!?! even after ALL THE RESEARCH - we’re talking hours on YouTube, we still overpacked. It wasn’t that much and we were able to thankfully send some stuff home with friends. Thank you to our friends!!!
Not bringing enough layers for the bus - From Quito to Cuenca we literally froze; like a popsicle, actually a popsicle might’ve been better. It was an overnight bus and definitely the longest and most sleepless night we had. For sure our grey hairs got a little worse after that trip. This trip for sure impacted our essentials, you can read all about them here.
Not having bandaids in your day bag - Wow! this one is a duh! and here’s the thing, b/c we had SO MANY bandaids back at the hotel/hostel we often didn’t buy more (b/c really, we had already overpacked, remember?). Remembering to pack these in your day bag is the challenge. Ultimately, I (Siori) decided to put them in my wallet so that I’d check for bandaids when I checked for money. Not a perfect solution, but it worked.
Forgetting to carry tissues - yep, in some countries they don’t provide complimentary toilet paper, and yes, that toilet paper you use in public restrooms is complimentary. Let’s take moment to be grateful… Back to our mistake, you just always gotta have some kind of tissue or toilet paper that’ll work for when you gotta go. Also, double check you’ve got hand sanitizer while you’re at it.
Arriving late (and not accounting for delays) - In general, arriving late to a destination you don’t know is less advisable than arriving during the day. Yes it might not optimize your time at that location but it’s better to be safe than sorry. There’s been instances where we arrive really early and wait at the airport a few hours until there are more people around and we feel it’s safer. Our story today takes us to Medellin, where we didn’t plan our travels with a lot of buffer and we ended up in a super sketchy neighborhood b/c the plane was late and the bus took forever. Lesson to learn, sacrifice time over safety. Or money, some people sacrifice money for safety, we just had more time than money.
Not charging our external batteries and phones - you know how sometimes you get lazy and just plug in your phone at the office, or in the car… and it really doesn’t matter when you charge, b/c you’ll have so many options? Well, when you are on the road, you might have to be more aware of where your next charging station will be. For example in Bolivia, one of the hostels we stayed at was solar powered and had almost zero power for all the people who wanted to charge their phones. Same was true in Nepal. Sometimes you’ll be at a nice hotel and they’ll have a brown-out, and you can’t charge. Now we prefer to be all topped up, all.the.time.
Assuming public transport runs late-ish - oh! this was a big time rookie mistake. We knew the bus service from the Dead sea town we were visiting back to Jerusalem would be different on Friday (b/c of Shabbat) but we should’ve checked when the last bus was BEFORE we left that day. Turns out we barely made it back and if we hadn’t taken that bus, we would’ve been stranded in that teeny tiny town. Not a terrible fate, but still something VERY preventable.
Running out of local money - we miscalculated how much money we’d use along the way on our hike and at the end of the hike we didn’t have enough local currency to tip our guide. No worries, we still tipped him in US dollars and it turns out that was better than local currency but we should’ve had a better buffer. Also, for those of you thinking, “oh, that’s not a big deal”, think again; it is. We, travelers, should strive to be courteous when we travel and assuming you can pay or tip in your local currency is disrespectful. It is an inconvenience for them to have to exchange your money to their money b/c you didn’t do the math right. In some countries they prefer foreign currency b/c they can get a better exchange rate, but don’t assume that’s the case. We apologized to our super nice guide and that’s when he told us he actually preferred dollars. Now we know we can give them an option, but not because they obviously would want our money.
Not checking the exchange rate - this one is a classic case of thinking the other one took care of this ‘to do’ item. We arrived to Bali and had no idea how much to withdraw. The thing with Indonesian Rupiahs is that the exchange rate is thousands to USD 1, so we had no idea how much $100 was. Thankfully the airport offered free WiFi. In case you need a handy dandy check list check out this post.
We are sure that we made many more mistakes, but these are the ones that stood out as being very preventable. Do you have any rookie mistakes you’d like to share? Our comment section is a no-judging zone. And as always, if you have any questions, leave ‘em in the comment section too.
