I’m visiting Sri Lanka in January, and already getting really excited.
Save for a few European countries (which may sound impressive if you’re American, but is about as cool as having been to Minnesota), my travel experience has been limited to ping-ponging around the UK and US, two differently similar nations which conveniently speak my language.
While I may moan at length about the wrong type of chocolate, or driving on the wrong side of the road, or private healthcare, the truth is I’ve played it far too safe.
Which is why I’m excited to be heading to a very different country, which will be the first stop on what looks to be a year of new places and travels. (Google is sending me on a round-the-world trip in the middle of the year sometime, and I’ve a potential Singapore trip on the cards too). Hurrah for 2011!
Funnily, despite researching opportunities in the travel startup area, I’m resorting to some very old-fashioned ways of planning my journey. I booked some of my flights directly with the airline (gasp!), have a paper guidebook that I’m reading through, and plan to get most of my information on the ground from my uncle and soon-to-be aunt — their wedding being the reason I’m going out there.
Here are a couple of things I’ve run into so far.
Planning flights was tough. I had a ton of options and the flight search sites were all too inflexible. I couldn’t find one that would, for example, take into account a desired stopover in a specific city and ended up searching for two halves of the journey separately (not a huge problem, but annoying).
Regional weirdness. Once I’d broken the journey in half with a stop in the UK, I was looking at $2000 for a direct flight from Heathrow until I — completely by chance, as I had time to kill — checked on my phone. Which always throws me to the UK version of sites (not sure why; I got it in America, but my locale is UK). Suddenly, the flight search engines started searching a different set of airlines and got me a $1200 saving on exactly the same flight (via a codeshare with a UK-based airline).
Difficult discovery of travel resources. It’s easy enough to find guides and sites for popular destinations but searching for information about Sri Lanka is pretty tough. I have to say this is part of the fun bit of travelling — but I simply can’t remember any of the travel startups or information sites I’ve seen to consult them, and they aren’t coming up in searches for Sri Lanka specifically. In contrast, when I visited New York last week I found a ton of apps and sites — the difficulty there was filtering out the crap.
Similarly, I’m surprised at the lack of online sources to learn tourist’s Sinhala — I always like being embarrassingly awful at the local language (well, it works in America). I saw a startup where people recorded phrases by video, but of course, it’s unfindable again now. A symptom of a wider destination-discovery problem which deserves writing about separately, of course.
Finally, while I am excited about TripIt which manages to store my entire plans in one place, it erroneously told Facebook I was going to London (since I forwarded one flight confirmation before the other), which was sad. I also want a way to annotate all that information, and am looking at using paper notes for the most part.
I’m very much looking forward to the wedding and the trip, and hope I’ll get to see some beautiful places (the fact that there is a temple with Buddha’s actual tooth dumbfounds me!). Plus, I get to hang out with my baby brother for more than just a Christmas, which will prove interesting…