Tips for the most beautiful trip of your life

I will just tell you, you are going to go completely crazy from me because in the coming weeks I will not stop writing about travel-related matters. I have indeed BOOKED A TICKET TO RIO DE JANEIRO (I can still only talk about it in caps lock) so from now until departure (66 days left) it's high travel and low travel. The Christmas holidays are coming and that's a time when many people flee the cold, and maybe your good resolution will involve wanting to travel more. To spark your travel desire, read and remember this, then every trip will become even more fun.

Go where the locals go

If you have a choice of a few restaurants and you see all other tourists in one while the other is full of locals, then you choose number two. Especially in Asian countries, those little places may not be incredibly impressive in terms of decor, but the food often is, and the prices are much more budget-friendly.

Get advice from a travel agent

Look, if you just book a round trip, you can get quite far by searching on your laptop yourself (check these sites by the way if you're on the ticket hunt) but those who need a more complicated ticket can benefit a lot from a travel agent. When I was making my kind of world trip I spent hours with the people from Kilroy Travel and eventually bought a ticket for €1400,- that took me from Amsterdam to Beijing, then to Mongolia, back to Beijing, then from Hong Kong to New Zealand, via Rarotonga to San Francisco and then back to Amsterdam. If you book that yourself, you will be thousands of euros further. Moreover, those people have much more overview and can also include smaller airlines that you wouldn't quickly find yourself.

Don't be a slave to your guidebook

I love the Lonely Planet as a reference, but once at the destination I want to go to places that are a bit less standard. A Lonely Planet is very handy for general information about the country or city you are going to, but the hotels and restaurants listed are often way too busy and full. Chat with locals, read local sites or browse travel blogs. New in the assortment, Tinder tourism. Indeed, making ‘dates’ with people there and hearing the best insider tips. I am going to do that a lot in Brazil because it seems to me a mega exciting adventure.

Let yourself be surprised

It is very easy to completely lose yourself in the anticipation and figure everything out from A to Z. But the danger is that you will then compare everything with the expectations you had made beforehand and then it can almost only disappoint. So do your homework, know where you want to go, but don't read a hundred reviews of attractions and tours because you need to make those experiences yourself and not depend on others.

Take as little as possible

Very important because nothing is more annoying than getting a hernia during your trip. If you travel with a rolling suitcase, that importance is somewhat less, but anyone going on the road with a backpack must be very strict with themselves because every sock and every skirt is on your back and you have to carry it meter by meter. Especially toiletries are hell because a bottle of shampoo weighs quite a bit. The longer you travel, the more you notice that you actually need very little in life, so all the more reason to go out often and a lot.