Planning your own trip? Here are some links to websites I’ve found particularly helpful.
Logistics & Planning
- Travel Independent: An immensely valuable set of guides offering a remarkable depth of knowledge about various countries in South America, Africa and Asia. In addition to its well-written overviews of tourist sites, Travel Independent also has loads of useful information about budgeting, visas and transportation options for all of its covered regions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently offer any information about Europe.
- Wikitravel: Quickly supplanting traditional guidebooks with instant user-generated guides, wikitravel’s breadth of coverage vastly outstrips almost any source. While it gives excellent insight into many local cultures and some places have write-ups that are easily superior to many professional guides, coverage in some areas is spotty and many articles do little more than list local attractions by name. The entire text of the site is also available as an iOS app, making it about as portable as the slimmest guidebook.
- Wikipedia: While very little of the information is specifically targeted at travelers, the online encyclopedia has the advantage of a universally high level of quality, and is particularly good at offering overviews of any given historical site, national park or city. It also has a few surprising gems, like an entire category of pages listing the visa requirements for various nationalities at every country in the world.
- The Man in Seat 61: Very thorough overview of the rail lines of the world, with useful information about the available routes, where sleeping cars are available, ballpark price figures and even some actual timetables. Also covers ferries and some bus lines. It does offer a lot about Asia and some of Africa, but is heavily geared towards Europe – particularly connections with London.
- One Bag: A strong manifesto for light packing, with an extensive overview of why it’s worth it and how to manage it. Also includes a huge list of potentially useful items to bring on long trips.
Useful Electronics
- CafeKlysm: a (free) suite of portable applications, including Firefox, an instant messenger program and an image editor, as well as some awesome security features (like antivirus, an on-screen keyboard option and a quick way to wipe your history off a public computer).
Booking Sites
- Tripeedo: By far the best flight aggregater I’ve found, Tripeedo lets you search the other flight aggregators, and operates off a simple and extremely user-friendly single-line interface. (You can type in “BKK to SIN aug 2″, for example. No messing around with those damn dropdown menus all the airline sites are so in love with.) It also has no airport restrictions and will gamely search flights in Iran, Pakistan and other places some travel sites don’t index.
- Kayak: A similar setup to Tripeedo, but a little less user-friendly and focusing mostly on North America.