Our Biggest Mistakes Travelling Long-Term

Travelling for a year teaches you a lot, and most of it comes from getting things wrong first.

Looking back, there are a handful of things we'd genuinely do differently if we were setting off again. None of these ruined the trip, but they're the kind of lessons that would have made a real difference if we'd known them from the start.

1. Moving Too Quickly

Early on, we tried to see as much as possible, which meant constantly moving. New town every few days, bags packed and unpacked on repeat, always somewhere to be next.

What we didn't factor in was rest. Slow travel days and the occasional stretch of doing genuinely nothing turned out to be some of the best parts of the trip, but we only really built those in later on. If we did it again, we'd plan for rest days from the start rather than treating them as a luxury we'd earned.

2. Doing Admin Constantly on the Move

For a long stretch, we were booking things as we went. Next hostel, next bus, next activity, all figured out a few days ahead at most.

It sounds flexible in theory, but in practice it meant we were doing small bits of admin almost every day. Booking a few weeks out at a time, when it made sense to, turned out to be far less mentally tiring than the constant low-level planning of booking everything last minute.

3. Booking Too Far in Advance

On the flip side, we also made the opposite mistake in places. Booking too much too far ahead left us locked into plans that no longer suited us once we actually arrived somewhere.

The best approach we found was somewhere in the middle: book far enough ahead that you're not doing daily admin, but not so far that you lose the flexibility to change plans if a place turns out to be worth staying longer, or worth leaving early.

4. Not Keeping a Paper Journal

We documented almost everything online, photos, notes, the odd blog post. What we didn't do was keep a physical journal.

It's a small thing, but looking back, having something physical, something you can actually hold, would have been a nice keepsake from a year that otherwise lives mostly on phones and hard drives.

5. Not Having Proper Insurance Cover Sooner

We did have travel insurance for the trip, and it genuinely gave us peace of mind. We ended up using it for a medical episode in Guatemala, and having that cover made a stressful situation significantly less stressful.

Where we went wrong was elsewhere. My phone screen broke and I had to pay for the repair out of pocket, because we hadn't sorted proper phone cover before leaving. It's worth checking what your policy actually covers before you go, not just whether you have one.

One practical tip: check the excess levels on your policy closely. When we claimed, the excess was high enough that we only ended up saving around £10 compared to just paying for it ourselves. It's worth understanding exactly what a claim will actually get you back before you rely on it.

6. Feeling the Need to Tick Off Places

This is probably the biggest one. Somewhere along the way, it's easy to start following the same route every other blog and guide tells you to follow, hitting the same viewpoints, the same "must-see" spots, ticking things off a list rather than actually experiencing them.

We met a fellow traveller in South America who was doing exactly that. Every stop was somewhere they'd read about online, every day was about getting to the next thing on the list. They didn't seem to be enjoying it so much as completing it.

Some of our best memories came from places we stumbled on rather than planned for, and moments that had nothing to do with any list. If we could tell other long-term travellers one thing, it would be this: it's your trip, not a checklist someone else wrote. The blogs and guides are a starting point, not a script.

Looking back, most of these mistakes came from either moving too fast or planning too rigidly, in one direction or the other. The trip got better once we found a rhythm somewhere in between: booked enough to stay sane, flexible enough to stay open to what we found along the way.