By Mitasha Chatterjee
Self-planned foreign trips are definitely cheaper and come with lots of freedom. Nowadays, a massive amount of information is available on the internet, covering almost every corner of the world, written mostly by experienced travellers from Western countries. However, after doing several self-planned international trips, I realised, as an Indian traveller, some of our challenges are very different from those faced while travelling as well as during planning.
Visa Requirements
Even though we Indian Passport holders have some visa-free countries in our kitty, but still for most countries we need Visa. Visa requirements and rules change very frequently, so the best way to check the visa requirements is from the visa application site of that particular country.
When travelling to multiple countries, it’s essential to note that in several countries, crossing the land border is not permitted for Indian passport holders; therefore, we need to plan accordingly.
Among our traveller’s community there is an unofficial concept called strong visa. Valid visas from some of the countries are considered strong visas. Sometimes if we have those valid visas then several other countries become visa free for Indian Passport holders and for some other countries we become eligible for e-Visa instead of stamped Visa. This information in details are available in the visa application sites of the destination countries.
Booking international flight ticket
With innumerable aggregator sites available these days, booking international flight tickets has become easy but also a bit tricky. Most of the international flights have stop overs other than destination country. There are two kinds of flight stop overs.
One is about just changing the flight, where we get all boarding passes from the airport of origin and the tickets bear the same PNR number. In this case we do not need to cross the immigration and the luggage transfer is done by the airlines.
The other stop over option comes with “self transfer”; that is you get single boarding pass from the airport of origin, will have to get down at stop over airport and then have to cross the immigration, pick up luggage and check in to collect boarding pass for next flight. These tickets are normally cheaper but as an Indian passport holder, to cross the immigration for most of the countries we need transit visa and some countries do not even have provision of transit visa, so in that case we may need a normal Visa. In every aggregator site and airlines website this “self transfer” clause in mentioned in small letters in the pages where they show the flight schedule and ticket price. It is important to notice these details while booking tickets.
Weather:
I remember during one of my long solo trips, I met some travellers who just returned from a place which was my next destination and all they were talking about was the extremely hot weather there. I was at the verge of changing my plan but after reaching there I realised for someone like me who is from a summer dominated tropical country ‘extremely hot’ has a very different standard. In our country many of us experience extreme heat and humidity, heavy rain and harsh cold. It is very important to check the weather in advance and pack accordingly but in my experience its does not make sense to get overwhelmed by other traveller’s opinion regarding weather and disrupt our travel plan.
Food
In India there is a large vegetarian population while rest of the world is mostly unfamiliar with this vegetarian food concept. It becomes a huge issue for some Indian travellers. In my experience best way to find vegetarian food is to search for vegan restaurants, which is popular and available in most of the tourist places. Vegan food excludes all kind of animal products and based on mostly fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes.
Safety
In several countries when we are on the road or in the market, locals try to do ‘push sales’, or sometimes taxi drivers will keep pestering you to take their taxi. Most women solo travellers from western countries feel extremely unsafe around this kind of attitude, but as an Indian woman its very familiar and normal to us.
Again, we Indians have a very different kind of safety standard than rest of the world, especially us Indian women. Of course it is important to be careful but again I realised we Indian travellers are anyways much more cautious and careful than the travellers from other countries.
For someone like me, who loves undertaking self planned trips, the trick is to gather all the information I need and then analyse it through the ‘Indian lens’ and then plan and travel accordingly.
