My September Travel Dilemma - Part 3

Why the Long-Haul List Never Shrinks

GENERAL

7/23/20262 min read

an aerial view of a body of water surrounded by rocks
an aerial view of a body of water surrounded by rocks

If you are new here then you may want to review part 1 and part 2 - to find out where we got to for September. This week we're thinking more about my long haul bucket list and how we plan to whittle that down.

Here's whats currently on my wishlist: Zanzibar, Costa Rica, Raja Ampat, Thailand part 2, Philippines part 2, Belize, Panama, Java, Sulawesi, the Cook Islands. Ten places I actually want to go, and not one of them fits into a week. However with clever planning - this is not 10 separate trips. I promised in Part 1 I'd explain why, so here it is.

The logic isn't really about the flight. It's what happens once you land. My best trips are the ones where day nine looks nothing like day two: different pace, different landscape, different food, because I've actually moved through a place instead of parking myself in a resort for a week. That kind of depth takes time regardless of how far you've flown to get it, which is the real reason everything on this list wants three weeks rather than five days.

And it's also why ten places doesn't mean ten trips. Once you're already flying twelve hours to get somewhere, a second or third stop costs a lot less than the first one did. You've paid for the long-haul leg, so everything after that is a short internal flight or a ferry, not another twelve hours in the air.

We proved this to ourselves with Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore: three weeks, one route, three countries. Did we see the whole thing? No, which is exactly why Thailand part two is still on the wishlist. But we saw more of that part of the world in one trip than three separate short breaks would ever have managed.

What's Actually Next

Java, Sulawesi and Raja Ampat all sit inside Indonesia, which makes them one trip rather than three separate long-haul flights spread across three separate years. That's the multi-stop I keep coming back to. Panama and Costa Rica are the other pairing on my mind and we are having some exciting talks about a travel guide for that region. Whilst not the same country, they are close enough on the same swing through Central America that splitting them would waste the flight. Timing is the only thing undecided on either.

Which brings me to the actual constraint. I still work full time, so a three-week block doesn't happen by accident. It happens by stacking every day of annual leave I've got around a fixed point in the calendar. Right now that gets me one big trip a year, plus the short-haul trips in between. I'm trying to stretch that to two long trips a year by working half days whilst i'm away but not there yet.

If you're weighing up a multi-stop trip of your own, I've written up our free multi-stop checklist to help you navigate. Read it before you start booking internal flights.

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