Asia is, put broadly, a massive place. The world’s largest continent, Asia, describes land that houses a huge majority of the Earth’s population, numbering well over four billion across 48 countries. If you’re going ‘to Asia’, you could go anywhere from coastal Karachi to the hostile cold of far-eastern Russia.
Of course, the exciting stuff isn’t found in the thousands of miles of Russian tundra in Asia’s north-easterly reaches. And if you’re travelling Asia, you’ve probably got something of a rough route in mind. You might be looking forward to taking yourself around Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Bhutan as a tour of the Indian subcontinent, or you might be taking yourself off on a journey of discovery through the Southeast Asian nations. Whatever you’re planning on doing, planning is exactly what you’ll need to do, and this short guide can serve as a reference for your next steps in that otherwise exciting process.
Image provided by Richard Masoner
1. Visa Requirements and Regulations
First, it’s important to note that there are some extremely complex geopolitical interrelations at play—interrelations you may not have the time or context to fully understand but which will undeniably impact your travel plans in some way, shape or form. For starters, getting into the first country on your list will invariably involve some form of visa process, which will differ from country to country.
Further, you will need the right visas to pass between countries—something that can be difficult to procure mid-travel, particularly if your existing visas don’t cover longer-term residence in certain scenarios. This is fully down to the relative specifics of your trip, and something only you can figure out the best mode of approach for. Luckily, gov.uk has an extensive foreign travel advice section for figuring exactly these things out!
2. Health and Safety
You’ll also need to think carefully about your own health and safety as you put the specifics of your trip together. Different countries will pose different levels of risk to you, whether innocuous troubles like the infamous ‘Delhi Belly’ or more serious risks relating to remoteness from healthcare. Having the right travel insurance will protect you in most instances, but having your wits about you will do more for you—the same, of course, going for scams that can be enacted in built-up areas popular
with tourists.
View from the train travelling along the Death Railway in Thailand
3. Transportation
Travel is the big one when figuring out your routes around Asia. Public transport routes are many and varied, from slow trains through Siberia to boat rides across the Philippines—but navigating it all as a Westerner who presumably doesn’t speak more than two languages can prove difficult. An easy way around it could be to research pre-planned trips; many brilliant India trips take in the best of each region, which could gamely solve your transportation problems as well. If you’d rather be the master of your own destiny, make sure you know which routes you’d like to take before you leave, so you can have some redundancies in place.
Are you going travelling around Asia? Or perhaps you have already been. If so, what advice do you have for others about to embark of a simple trip?
Did you enjoy this article? Then PIN it for later…
