Where to go?

So once you’ve decided you want to spend a year abroad where do you start? Probably the ultimate question is; where to go? America, Europe, Asia? All we knew was that due to family ties there would be a job for Alex in Australia and we had a vague idea that we could spend six to eight months working there to build up some dosh to fund the rest of our travels (more than we could raise in England). What we needed was a travel agent! Still being students we decided to go to STA and see what could be sorted out for us. This was a great decision.

We went into the Birmingham branch and spoke to Matt. Matt is on a par with Thor (demi-god). All we told him was that we vaguely knew we wanted to travel to Australia and New Zealand and some parts of Asia, he then suggested potential routes and destinations we could go to. Before we knew it we had eight countries on our trip (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and India). He told us which countries we’d need to fly between and which we’d need to travel to overland or by sea. He even squeezed in some stop offs on the way over with Dubai, Sri Lanka and Singapore as our port of calls. All eight flights would cost us £1300 each- amazing!

Now to start the preparations...

Rex's Rules of the Road

• Make sure you’ve got a good travel agent (the actual person), they can make or break your travels.

• You don’t need a definitive plan; just go in, have a chat and see what you can afford or what sounds good then go do some research.

• Having said that have a rough idea of when you are going to be travelling and start the planning early enough that you can iron out any problems.

• If all else fails and you find yourself with no paddle on shit creek who do you call? Matt, in the STA Birmingham branch.