very stop you make takes money. The airfare to get there, a taxi, bus, boat, or parachute into town, a glamorous hotel or simple hostel bed, food – be it a Michelin Star restaurant or chicken-on-a-stick on the roadside, money to shop, see then leave.
If your goal is to see as much of the world as you can, and assuming you don’t have stacks of gold bars in your underwear drawer, how do you prioritize your destinations?
When I was trying to figure this all out it seemed that destinations fell into three buckets:
- The fun cities
- The not-so-fun-cities that are close to the fun cities
- The places that may or may not be fun, but are just far away from everything
It all comes down to Proximity
Create and rank your travel wishlist
The first thing I suggest is to make a list of every place you want to visit. You can use the list of the Travelers Century Club list (all 338 countries and territories), or the UN’s list of 196 countries, or just a list of all the places you ever dreamed of going.
Rate your travel wishlist:
Once you have that list. Next rank them. 1 – 3.
- #1 being the cities you MUST visit,
- #2 you’d like to see it pretty badly and
- #3 – it might be alright if you put the visit off for awhile.
- You can add a #4th for places you don’t really want to see at all, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people may not have a desire to visit Antarctica.
Now you have your personal ranking.
When I started my top 10 rankings looked something like this:
#3 – Third Ranked
- Antarctica
- New Zealand
- Morocco
- Denmark
- Ethiopia
- Kenya
- Colombia
- Costa Rica
- New Orleans
- Russia
Visit in order of favorite or group trips?
If you were to try to travel to your top-ranked cities first, in descending order it would require many individual return flights and a long time to get through them. Even if you were able to take a week off every second month and travel – just to get through the top 20 would take you nearly 4 years.
Instead, I decided to travel by proximity, Find two to three of my favorite places, group them together and then see what other countries are close by and make sense for a longer one month, or two-month itinerary.
For instance, I wanted to visit Paris, Netherlands, Berlin, Norway, and Greece, etc. So a better trip might be:
Manila – Paris – Belgium – Amsterdam – Frankfurt – Copenhagen – Oslo – Lofoten Islands – Stockholm – Tallinn – Riga – Berlin – Venice – Rome – Florence – Athens – Greece – Manila
While only 5 of these were on my top 3 lists, by grouping together I would end getting to see 16 places. You may not see exactly what you want to see at first, but you’re building a portfolio of a kind. A portfolio of places and experiences.
Taking cheap advance ticket trains and buses (in eastern Europe) makes an itinerary like this possible. You don’t get to see all your #1 countries upfront, but you get to cover a lot more ground, economically.
Plotting out the future
Next, you need to plot these out in time; 5yr, 10yr, 15yr, etc.
I used a 10-year spreadsheet. With 338 countries to visit that means, I needed to visit about 30 countries a year. 3 trips a year, 10 countries per trip, 3 days per country = 1 month per trip or 3 months per year.
Of course, the reality is a bit different, I had already visited some countries, and there were some trips where you could easily add in a few more.
I think it helps though to not only have a country goal, and priority goal but a time goal. Just saying you want to visit Morocco isn’t all that helpful. If you have it listed in 2022 then you can begin to plan.
Maybe you have a 20-year plan, and you just want to visit the UN’s 196 countries it’s even easier… That’s less than 10 countries a year. 5 countries twice a year, you can do that in two 15 day trips.
Smaller trips like these:
- Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Burma
- Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein
- Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania
In the end, it’s a bit of a gamble, anything can happen, we aren’t promised the future. Something could happen to your finances or health, you could get hit by a bus and never get to see some of your top rated places.
However, it’s an organized and efficient method of seeing a large number of places that are geographically close to each other, and you get to travel to places that initially may not have seemed exciting but in the end enabled you to experience new / unexpected things.
Often, when you travel – you start down one road and end up on another – or that’s the goal.
The final consideration is visas. For Filipinos, visas can be quite difficult to get ahold of. If you get a visa to the United Kingdom – even if you only really want to see London, it might be best to visit all the UK territories you can: Scotland, Wales, Belfast, and wherever else you can get to – since you have the visa, since you’re close, and opportunity.
