My September Travel Dilemma - Part 3: Why the Long-Haul List Never Shrinks

It's not distance, it's recovery days and cost-per-day maths. Why every long-haul trip on my bucket list needs three-plus weeks.

GENERAL

7/23/20263 min read

So I've picked Morocco for September. Casablanca, Essouira, Marrakech, a proper coastal road trip. That's Part 2 settled.

But here's what's still sitting there, untouched: Zanzibar, Costa Rica, Raja Ampat, Thailand, Cape Verde, Belize, Panama, Java, Sulawesi, the Cook Islands. Ten-plus places I actually want to go, and not one of them fits into a week. I promised in Part 1 I'd explain why. So here's the maths.

It's Not About Distance. It's About Recovery Days.

A short-haul trip to Morocco costs me maybe half a day of travel each way. A long-haul trip to somewhere like Raja Ampat costs three. Flight to Jakarta, connection to Sorong, then a boat to wherever you're actually staying. That's not a travel day—that's a travel stage. You need to build in a buffer, because if any leg runs late, the whole chain collapses.

Zanzibar is an eight-to-nine-hour flight, usually with a connection through the Gulf. Land exhausted, and you've lost your first full day just recovering enough to function. Costa Rica is nine hours to San José, then another few if you're heading to the Pacific coast rather than staying near the capital. None of these let you land and start the holiday on day one.

The Real Constraint: Cost-Per-Day Economics

Here's the bit people don't talk about. A long-haul flight to somewhere like Thailand can run £700-£900 return in low season. If you're there for five days, that's £140-£180 a day just on the flight, before accommodation, food, or anything else. Stretch the same trip to three weeks and that cost drops to £35-£45 a day. The flight is a fixed cost—the only way to make it worth it is to stay longer.

That's the actual reason these trips need three-plus weeks. It's not romantic wanderlust talking. It's that anything shorter makes the money and the jet lag not add up.

What Each One Actually Needs

Thailand needs three weeks minimum if you want the north and south—Chiang Mai and the mountains, then Koh Lanta or Koh Yao Noi for the coast. Two weeks means picking one region and skipping the other, which defeats the point of going that far.

Costa Rica needs two weeks at an absolute minimum for both coasts, and three if you want the cloud forest in between. Raja Ampat needs ten days just for the diving and island-hopping, plus the two-to-three days of travel each way—call it two weeks total, and that's without adding anywhere else in Indonesia. Zanzibar is more forgiving at ten to twelve days, but pair it with mainland Tanzania (which most people do, because you're already halfway there) and you're back to three weeks.

The Multi-Stop Trap

This is where it gets genuinely difficult to plan, not just expensive. Long-haul trips almost always end up multi-stop, because if you're flying twelve hours, you want to see more than one place while you're there. But multi-stop long-haul is where itineraries fall apart: too many internal flights, not enough buffer between them, one delay and the whole back half of the trip shifts.

The rule I've landed on, after watching enough trips nearly implode: no more than one internal flight every three days, and never book a long-haul departure the same day as an internal connection. Build a full buffer day before any flight longer than six hours. It costs you a day of "seeing things," but it's the difference between arriving somewhere ready to enjoy it and arriving somewhere needing a nap.

So Where Does That Leave Me?

Realistically, none of this happens in September. What it means is I'm already looking at 2027 for a proper three-week block—probably stacking annual leave either side of Christmas, which is the only way I get anywhere close to three weeks without it costing me every other trip that year.

My bucket list stays full because these trips are worth doing properly, not squeezed into whatever week I happen to have free. If you're planning something similar—a long-haul trip that actually needs the time it needs—I've put together a proper walkthrough of multi-stop planning over on the Travel Log guides page, covering how to sequence flights, where to build buffer days, and how to avoid the itinerary collapsing on day nine.

Subscribe to the newsletter if you want to see how the 2027 trip actually comes together—and if you've got a long-haul list of your own that never seems to shrink, you're in good company.