Freedom Tour Travel
We love planning our own travel and we hope that our website can help show you how easy it is to do and how you can do it yourself too.
Not only can you save money over the organized tours and trips, you can build the perfect itinerary for yourself! Don’t like museums, well, don’t include them! Want to see nature, go off the beaten track, then go for it! You can see exactly the things that you want to see. Get up early and beat the crowd, or sleep in and have a leisurely breakfast after the tour buses have left.
A few experiences of being rushed through important sites because the tour bus is waiting, or having to wait for chronically late guests or put up with loud and rude ones has been enough to convince us that after spending all that time and money to arrive at a destination, we don’t need to compromise on how we spend our time there!
If you’ve ever been in a popular destination when cruise ships are in port, you have likely experienced firsthand how different a site looks when swarming with tours as compared to when the streets are quiet and serene (much better pictures too!).
Watching the hoard of tourist come running through the site snapping photos as they barely slow down trying to keep up with their guide, makes us kinda feel sorry for the bunch to be honest.
They’ll tell you they’ve been there and even show you a lopsided picture to prove it, but they have not really experienced the sites at all. Tour guides take them to a select, two or three, locations at a site and spend a few minutes talking about the highlights through a wireless audio system. Then there’s a bathroom break for 30 and back to the bus!
For sure, if you just have a day in town and you want to see 5 things, you can’t expect to see them in depth but even then, would you not want to pick and choose yourself?
We much prefer getting there early when it’s quiet, roaming around and perhaps even getting a little lost, stumbling onto a local pastry shop and trying it out. You know, just doing it our way at our own pace. The freedom to travel your way!
While planning an itinerary in a remote and exotic foreign place can seem overwhelming at first, we live in the information age with just about everything at our fingertips. Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Hotels.com, and many others are just a sampling of all the information available. On top of that, consulates and tourisms boards of most countries usually have their own informative sites to welcome tourists with local information.
A few tips on how to proceed and what to look for and you will see that it’s not that hard, and can really be both rewarding and very satisfying. Once you get started and once you’ve done it a few times we are convinced that you won’t want to go back to the traditional organized tours. That has been our experience.
You don’t have to start with anything complicated, try planning a weekend day trip, or a trip to a resort. We will show you how to get up-to-date travelers’ reviews, information on important sites and how to plan your days, and even what to pack and how!
It may not be for everyone, and perhaps you feel you won’t have the time to research and plan everything or don’t know where to begin. Well, we hope that our site and our experience can give you a running start.
We’ll share the itineraries we did, and you should feel free to mirror these. Things do change over time, and places may close, management may change, but generally speaking the ancient ruins and sites to visit will remain the key attractions.
We will tell you what we liked and didn’t like, and how we might do it again given the chance. Write to us with questions and we will gladly help. Even if you give up and opt for a tour, perhaps you’ll have gained more insight into how to compare the various tour itineraries. Again, you can take it or leave it!
We hope you will find our site useful and we would very much appreciate hearing from you. Feel free to write to me with any questions about the sites we’ve covered or even about destinations, which you may not find here. I’m still writing up many of our travels and have not gotten through all of the places we’ve visited yet. If you have tips or experience you would like to share with our readers, please send those also—I’d love to hear from you.
Happy and safe travels!
Nathalie and Jaan
See our Travel Planning Guide:
Planning Your Dream Trip… On Your Own
- All photographs (except for a few borrowed with permission from family and friends) videos and stories are our own and may not be reproduced in any way without our permission.
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