Gone are the days of trying to fold up a map that is bigger than your hostel room and never being able to get it flat again, many travellers now find that everything can be found online to assist them on their adventures.

We found several websites incredibly useful so here are a few, we will add more as we remember more or find new ones them…..

Getting Around

Rome to Rio is probably Jo’s bible for our trips, allowing her to not only see how viable our route is and what forms of transport are available for that route (public transport can be a tricky beast) but also using their links to book incredibly cheap local flights which staved us hundreds across SE Asia.

See what you think:

https://www.rome2rio.com/

The man in Seat 61 might sound a little random but they have some excellent local information as well as train and bus timetables for most countries across the globe, they also provide links to booking sites although sadly in India these didn’t help as we couldn’t pay online without the right card.

https://www.seat61.com/

A Bed for the Night

Sleeping arrangements and what you want can vary from person to person, were not big fans of sharing dormitories but given our small budget when on the road sometimes there has been no choice and to be fair we have had some great hostels, Udaipur and the Harry Potter Hostel was an excellent find with incredible views
https://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/The-Hostelcrawl/Udaipur/280655 . Although the general websites can provide excellent bargains it’s worth checking the accommodation’s actual website as sometimes this can save you money.

Zoe is usually in charge of digs and has found us some brilliant places on Airbnb, as she uses it a lot she now gets discounts on bookings which has saved us quite a few pennies over time.

Like anything you book without seeing there can be problems and issues, Zadar, Crotia showed us that

Booking.com is an old favourite and we like the fact that you’re told how far away you are from everything so we can make judgement, not just on cost but on location, this proved useful in Bangkok where we stayed in 3 different areas to cover different parts of the city.

Although hostels don’t figure highly in our ideal places to stay we have found some good ones on Hostel World

Working on the Road

During our trip through the Balkans and parts of Europe the women choose to help with the costs by doing voluntary work which would provide bed and board for us all, I of course offered my services as there supervisor. This provided us with a mixed bag of experiences from the excellent and wonderful farm in France we ended up staying for 6 months, to the campsite in Albania where the owner just wanted us to stay up all night chatting!

Our most used website and one that we would all recommend was Workaways which made it very easy to find opportunities in the places we wanted to go to and gave us enough information to contact the hosts to see if they could accommodate us…… be proactive on this site as we probably only got responses from a third of those we approached, so spread your net in finding what you want. The range of help asked for is vast from bar work, cleaning and reception desk work through to animal care, building and collecting eggs!

https://www.workaway.info/

Although we didn’t end up using anything on Woofing friends have told us that it worked really well and was a site that we looked at for possibilities, similar to Workaway but you have to register and pay separately for some countries to access their hosts.

https://wwoofinternational.org/

Before you Go

Travelling with women is never easy in my world and at times they seem to make some strange decisions on my behalf, not going to Pakistan being on of them…….

Jo says – Possibly because there was a lot of problems there at our time of travel and thanks to the British Foreign Office we were able to monitor this.

…….. this website has given us lots of valuable advice including local laws, visa requirements and high risk areas and although listed as British I feel it would be useful to anyone in the world or check out your own countries site for their advice.

https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice

Looking after yourself is vital on the road and making sure you aren’t at risk of catching anything nasty is a no brainer. I found IAMAT most helpful in telling me how many times the women needed stabbing in their arms!

https://www.iamat.org/country-health-advice?gclid=CjwKCAjw7_rlBRBaEiwAc23rhoamyO_GYpVB408dKdo_KJMpGS_N2Ze2pBfQrw3X5Fvv4ciLbgi_9hoCzFQQAvD_BwE

If you have used any websites and would like to recommend them please leave a comment or send me a message and we will add it to our list.

Happy Travels