continued from the previous blog...

Sleeping around and getting around

Acquainting ourselves with each of the cities was via a mix of speaking to people, Googling "where to stay in...", Googling "what to do in...", using a copy of The Lonely Planet, and reading lots of travel blogs (though time consuming, usually the best for an honest opinion and often provides a laugh). The accommodation booking process has also been reduced down to an art: open booking (.com); find the city/suburb; change date and price range; choose some well rated places (usually 7.5 at least); cross check ratings/reviews/pictures/prices on TripAdvisor; choose with/without breakfast; choose with/without free cancellation (we slowed on this as we got closer to leaving); book. We generally booked on either booking (.com), Expedia or direct with the hotel. We also used HostelWorld once or twice for places that weren't listed elsewhere. We didn't venture into the other service providers as these were generally the cheapest. We tried Hotwire but didn't find it to be effective. I'm sure there are other effective ways of booking but we found this system to work for us and stuck with it in the end.

As for flights, this process started with a visit to SkyScanner to get an idea of available times and airlines, they have very good coverage but do miss some airlines in smaller countries. From here, we'd choose our flights, go to the actual airlines website and book through the airline itself. We researched some of the online travel agents (ebookers etc) but the comments weren't great and so we decided against using them. Some of them just seemed too good to be true and others got you back to the actual airlines price through fees and taxes and things. We did use one of our local SA online agents though, TravelStart, as they're actually reliable, they were cheaper than SAA, they let us book on American Airlines from SA (we couldn't book on their site) and once we had booked, we got our airliners ticket code so we could make changes on the actual airline site. For our SAA flight, we took TravelStart up on their R99 offer for liquidity insurance in case our operator didn't survive until we needed to come home.

Visas

Luckily, we don't need visas for the countries we'll be visiting in South America - which is one of the few South African 'green mamba' passport friendly parts of the world.

Hilit had to get a US visa. The application for this visa was tedious with a long long form and no real guidance of what documents you need to bring with you to the interview. On the positive side, it is all online and you book, and pay for, your appointment online too. In the end, we went taking the same documents as needed for a Schengen visa. Obviously, none of these were even considered or looked at at the appointment but at least they were on hand. Note, there's no parking at the embassy in Sandton and you need to walk from Sandton City across the road.

Shopping and packing

The last bit of admin was getting some backpacks and buying anything we needed.

For America, we didn't go heavy on the backpacker type stuff and have only taken a quick dry towel and a sleeping bag liner each. We've tried to pack as light as possible but need to be prepared equally for the beaches of Miami, the streets of New York in fall and the clubs of Vegas. Didn't need to worry too much as we can get anything we might need or have left behind when there.

South America, being more off the beaten track and hostel heavy, will require warmer clothes, rain coats, hiking boots, some camping gear, and possibly a sleeping bag too.

So a bit of shopping for backpacks, meds, toiletries, some camping stuff and the odd extra thing or two, we were ready to hit the road, ready to hit the skies, ready to get on with the show, ready for the USA and try to break free.

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Stay in tune

Hil and Brett