Air Tanzania Grounded

We've had numerous problems with our holiday plans to Zanzibar, but we are still being positive and looking forward to it a LOT :)

About 1 month before we were supposed to depart from SA, we got the news that out flight on the 25th Dec '08 was canceled (thanks Air Tanzania). They also told us that the only other flight we could get was on the 27th. This cut our plans short by 2 days (not even mentioning our accommodation plans). We finally got a flight (through them) on the 24th. We changed our Kulula flights from CTN to JHB for the 24th, made extra accomodation plans and paid a deposit.

Monday the 15th Dec '08 we got the breaking news that it has been confirmed - Air Tanzania has been grounded and they can't book us any other flights. Read more here. We finally got flights through Kenya Air and will now depart on the 25th of Dec again. Only thing is we will now only be returning the 7th Jan '09... thus we had to change our return flights again :)

All is fine again now - thanks God! And I trust it will all be worth it in the end for some holiday fun in the Zanzi-sun....

Zanzibar

Well, I still get some interesting information on traveling.

It's really cool to see some people actually DO get back to you on forums. In the meantime - while waiting for this event (travel for 6 months in south east Asia) we decided to go to Zanzibar in December.

We will leave the 25th of December (our Christmas gifts to ourselves) and return on the 5th of January. It looks like a beautiful place. If you have any inputs about the place - lemme know. We still are looking into living in the north of Zanzibar as well - but for now we are only going to stay in the west.

Travel Forums

Hi there

Still very excited about our trip... currently just reading up in a lot of forums. Some people actually do get back to you and you find lots of cool tips. I will post some good forums here sometime soon - as soon as I know how the response is :)

I also found some sites on Visas and Country info... will add it here

Cheers

Budgeting

HI there.

Last night I started to work out the budget for our little trip of 6 months to the Far East. Once you start adding up you realize that you will have to safe up a LOT of money.

I realized that there will be:
1) Fixed once off amounts. (eg. Return flights, Visas, backpacks...)
2) Monthly expenses (eg. Life insurance, Bonds, other running costs remaining while we're gone)
3) Daily expenses (eg. Food, Accommodation, Travel... while we are there)

SO we put it all in a spreadsheet and realized it will take about 2.5 years to safe up for all the above mentioned expenses. :) Only problem - we can only start saving up next year August. Well - at least we estimate that in 3 years' time we will be able to travel the Far East for half a year.

I thought that we will need to become more travel wise - so I want to become part of some backpackers forums... any ideas?

Far East here we come

My wife and I decided Saturday night to travel the Far East for six months.

We want to do this in about 3 years' time. We first need to save up some money and work in our current jobs long enough for us to ask for a 6 months holiday :) We will also need to work out how we will be travelling and where we will be staying.

The idea is to backpack through as many countries in the far east as possible. We will be doing some research though into how others before us have done it. So if you have any tips or want to give some input - please do. I will keep this site to blog how our plans are going.