23 Travel Hacks You Need to Know Before You Leave

Travellers- travel hacks

Travel Hacks Before You Leave

Travel hacks- Airbnb
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  1. Instead of a hotel, look into reserving a home if traveling with a family, or a single room if alone. Websites like AirBnB can provide homes and private rooms from home owners who are renting them out, usually offering better accommodations than hotels.
  2. Roll your clothes when packing. Instead of creating a folded pile in your suitcase, rolling allows you to fit more things in. Plus, you can even roll underwear and socks within your clothes for optimal space-saving.
  3. Scan your passport, identification card, and itinerary and email them to yourself. This provides an extra copy of each in the event of loss or theft. As an iPhone user, once I email the documents to myself, I usually open the email on my iPhone and save them onto iBooks. This provides me with an offline record.
  4. It’s important to remember to call your credit or debit card company before you leave to ensure that you have your card authorized for your foreign destination. This prevents them from suspecting suspicious activity.
  5. Mark your baggage as fragile. This is a tip I learned a while ago from a friend who found it to be a great way to ensure that your baggage is handled correctly. Your luggage is kept at the top because of this, which will make it one of the first bags to be released.

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Travel Hacks For the Departure

Bring your own water bottle -travel hacks
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  1. Bring your own water bottle. Depending on the airline’s own policies regarding drink costs, the amount of times water is offered may not be to your liking. Having your own water bottle ensures that you have water when you want it. When they do come around, top off your bottle with what they give you.
  2. Never underestimate the value of a fanny pack. Yes, they can be embarrassing and seemingly out of the mid-to-late 1980s, but trust me—every time I travel, even domestically, it has ensured that my valuables are safe, and it expedites security checks.
  3. Splurge on Internet service if your flight is more than six-and-a-half hours long. You’ll thank me when you find that sparking conversation with your seat partner is harder than pulling teeth. Plus, you can complete work for the last time before you hit your destination.
  4. Ensure that you have a pen before leaving home so you can complete customs forms. Fill the forms out when you get them, and ensure that your family members have theirs filled as well. People will clamour for your pen; flight attendants rarely have them.
  5. 20 minutes before you land, sprint for the bathroom. Usually when the seatbelt light comes on, I’ve found that you still have 15 minutes of leeway until you truly have to be seated. Use this opportunity to relieve yourself to prevent fighting for restrooms when you land.

Travel Hacks When You Arrive

Luggage band-Travel hack
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  1. Dart directly for baggage claim. It is amazing how many people seem to lollygag after landing. Save that for someplace else to save yourself time and to prevent any arguments with fellow travelers.
  2. Use ATMs to get local currency. Using money converters in the airport usually come with their own fees and the exchange rates are a rip-off. ATMs always dispense local currency, of course, so use your debit or credit card and get your money there.
  3. Ensure that you have Yelp downloaded for domestic travel in the US. This is a great city guide for both travelers and locals alike, and is best way to find the most amazing places to eat and sightsee.
  4. Shop for groceries when you arrive. You don’t have to shop for a feast, but getting basics like water and a few snacks in local stores instead of at the hotel can save you a ton.
  5. When in your room, remove only the necessities from your luggage. Trying to make yourself at home by taking out every pair of shoes and all of your toiletries will only make repacking a living hell, and it increases your chances of forgetting something when it’s time to go home.
Exploring Your New Location
Use guidebooks sparingly- travel hack
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  1. Use guidebooks sparingly. I recommended Yelp because it allows you to discover a few places off the beaten path. Guidebooks only presents you with tourist spots; even those that advertised themselves as being off the beaten path.
  2. Use the local language as much as possible. It reflects well not only on you, but also on Americans/your nationality in general. It shows you are willing to make the effort, which can work in your favor in some situations.
  3. Have a souvenir list prepared, and stick to it. This will save you money and prevent you from purchasing something that “you’ll find someone to give to another time”.
  4. Eat locally only. Save McDonald’s, if you have to eat it in any location, for when you’re home. Trying the local cuisine will save you more money and allow you to experience new and flavorful meals.
  5. “When in Rome, do as the Romans” is a general saying that I like to translate it as, “don’t be a stubborn traveler, and get out of your comfort zone”. If a country advises modest dress, for example, follow through. It can even ensure your safety as a foreigner.
Travel Hacks for Returning Home
  1. If you are a frequent traveler, live out of your toiletry bag and keep it packed. This will allow the packing process to be a bit easier and will prevent you from having to make expensive toiletry purchases if you forget something.
  2. Use IFTTT when sharing traveling photos to make it seamless and easy. “Recipes” like sharing automatically to Dropbox or Evernote will allow you automatically to have a copy of your precious photos.
  3. Unpack immediately when you enter the door. You may be tired out of your mind, but you’ll be glad you did it in the morning. Plus, it saves your luggage from smelling like soiled laundry.

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Herta Cuthbertson, former Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operator

5 Wonderful Benefits of Travelling

Hiker backpacker, travelling

With a Centurylink Cable Internet plan, you can browse through a number of online sources (featuring a striking combination of both text and graphics) that detail the many benefits that travelling accrues for the sojourning subject

Human civilization, as a collective conception, has always been comprised of a multitude of races – along with their corresponding cultural codes that provide each denomination with its own distinctive vibrancy (against the backdrop of the whole). But all these races conform to the same species of Homo sapiens; indicating that they (by their natural design) are meant to intermingle with each other, and perhaps even cohabitate to produce interracial offspring. With a centurylink directv and Internet plan, you can surf through many online resources that detail the evolution of the species, and how different communities came to inhabit disparate pieces of land over time.

Travelling as More than Just a ‘Getaway’ Exercise

Travelling, of course, has always constituted the best mechanism available to the species to achieve this socially-charged end of ‘meeting each other’ – and its contemporary variant seems to have much to offer to people (in a seemingly unprecedented number of ways) on this important front.

Travelling by airplane
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Whereas in the older days people had to rely on a combination of camels, horses, cattle and donkeys (and an entire range of livestock animals) to sojourn across large territorial distances, and make do with elongate wooden ships to contend against the sheer violence of the earth’s oceans and seas, modern-day man has many technological advantages at his disposal to alleviate the bulk of these concerns.

These expeditions (as they were usually filled with all manner of unexpected adventures) normally took several weeks and months to accomplish – making people only willing to make them if they wanted to settle in their destination permanently.


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Reaping the Advantages Ushered in by Modernity

People nowadays have the luxury of travelling through incredibly fast airplanes and luxury ocean liners, which allow them to reach their intended earthly locations – no matter how spatially removed they may be from their current habitation spots – roughly in a matter of hours at best. And this drive towards increasing speeds (and lessening timeframes) has reaped in considerable benefits for the tourism industry at large, which intrinsically depends on these new-age transportation amenities for the success of its myriad of constituting commercial ventures.

As a lifelong traveler myself (one whose passport needs to be reapplied – for a fresh copy – after every couple of years), I have benefitted greatly from my journeys across the globe; and am continually left to marvel at how some people can still manage to remain disconnected from their larger earthly collectives.

With the Centurylink promotions (or some other such high-speed Internet provision), you can go through many news stories and articles that give vent to the narrow and myopic mindsets of the individuals who eschew any form of travelling or cross-cultural exchanges. As such, it is quite common for some (but not all) of these people to exhibit xenophobic tendencies against those individuals who hail from different sociocultural settings than theirs; deeming them to be ‘outsiders’.

 

An Experiential List (on the Benefits of Travelling)

In this post, I have tried to list some of these positives (as they have come to be consolidated in my life, since I first booked a plane ticket to Milan more than 15 years ago), in the hope that you – if you don’t much fancy straying a certain distance away from your home town – will become motivated enough to plan a trip of your own.

These pointers, which are both descriptive, and to a lesser degree prescriptive, total five in number.

And if you, by some fortunate stroke of luck, do end up becoming an avid traveler yourself, I hope you’ll get to experience the novelty that going to new places, and meeting a different set of people than the ones you’re used to, brings to your life…my earnest prayer for you!

  1. The first benefit that I normally tend to associate with travelling (and which I make sure to start off my public speeches on the subject with) pertains to its unrivalled potential to open-up minds, and remove ill-conceived prejudices & misconceptions that people seem to have regarding other cultures and nationalities.

In my long series of interactions with all kinds of people (belonging to virtually all ethnic communities, and socioeconomic cadres within their narrow and/or globalized societal spheres), I have come to acknowledge that most people of exclusivist lot are generally immune to the normally mind-altering influence of facts and empirical evidence.

They’d much rather rely on their feelings (and other subjective criteria) to form their opinions; something for which direct & in-person communication with the alleged outsider proves to be a perfect fit or remedy.

I personally see this as the most commendable aspect of travelling.

  1. Travelling is a great way to experience the beauty of nature, and the people who tend to make it more vibrant through their lived contributions. It makes one automatically appreciate (and romanticize) over the grand order of the Creator, or Intelligent Design – depending on their personal convictions.

This mode of sojourning not only opens up ones mindset in an expansive manner, it also tends to endow one with the feeling of actually having ‘lived’ and experienced what the world has to offer.

backpack-bag, travelling, pexels
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  1. When considered from a different angle, travelling also comprises one of the most powerful ways of seeking some creative inspiration. Since time immemorial, nature has been man’s greatest muse; with most artists trying to encapsulate its reflected glory on their respective canvases.

By witnessing the great and variable topographical features that are widespread everywhere one chances to gaze on this beautiful planet that we all call home, it becomes only a matter of projecting our received perceptions through the artsy medium of our choice into something concrete.

And creating a stellar masterpiece, thereafter.

  1. For some people recovering from an illness, or the downright exhaustion that comes with living a mundane existence day after day, travelling to exotic and faraway locations can serve as a great panacea for the soul.

Not only does it usually succeed in soothing tired nerves, it also acts as a potent force for begetting some much-needed rejuvenation for the beleaguered individual – making him/her ready to face the onslaught of life’s inevitable challenges once again.

  1. Lastly, travelling often comes about as a necessary endeavor for some people in search of gaining more lucrative employment opportunities elsewhere.

Nowadays, it is very common to find the local marketplace (and job sphere) saturated by a large number of professional workers looking to occupy some coveted position in a particular working place. In such cases, many qualified individuals choose to travel abroad, where they often end up attaining better employment opportunities than the ones made available in their home countries.

Checking Out Some Travelling Sites

Before setting out to travel, it is often a good idea to conduct some local research on travel-related online platforms like TripAdvisor and Travelocity (among many others) – in order to become cognizant of precisely what you may be in for in your travel chosen travel destinations.

Through the Centurylink Internet Customer Service, and the resulting signing-up of one of the said vendor’s acclaimed Internet plans, this task can be accomplished with considerable ease.


Stephen N. Mills is an entrepreneur, marketer, and writer. As San Francisco resident, he loves reading books and writing on different topics like SEO, Branding, Health and etc. That’s where he finds his inspiration to author in-depth guides that teach E-commerce store owners ways to manage, grow and scale their business. In a former life, Stephen co-founded a custom menswear company which generates 6-figures in annual revenue through its website and retail.

2 Sets of Questions You Must Ask a Travel Agency before Booking Yunnan Birding Tours

Birding tours

Are you really stressed and bogged down because of your disturbed family life and tedious work pressure?

If yes, then I would suggest you go on a birding spree. What? You think that’s a boring idea?

Well, it’s not just you; there are several people who think that bird watching is boring and not a fruitful activity.

But in reality, this is really going to help you break free from all the stress (work or home related) that has been bothering you for months! Wondering where did I come to know about the benefits of bird watching? Well, I came to know about this from a friend of mine, who is a clinical psychiatrist. She said- “Bird watching is an awesome hobby that is beneficial to your health and happiness. It’s much more than just an aesthetic treat.” After she said this to me, I immediately packed my bags and set out for a birding voyage. And trust me, it really helps! So, if you really want to flush all your stress, please go on a birding tour.

White Eared Pheasant, birding tours

Wondering, where should you go on a bird watching tour? Well, that depends on your choice. But, if you want to visit a place that’s not just well-known for being a home to several species of birds but also for its scenic beauty and tranquillity, then please visit Yunnan Province by booking a China birding tour package from a well-known travel company. But before that, there are a couple of questions that you need to ask the travel agency.

Thinking what kinds of questions should you ask them? Well, below I have listed the two sets of questions that you must ask the travel agency that is arranging Yunnan Birding Tours.

Black necked crane, birding tours

Set 1: Questions to Ask About the Company

  • “Are You a Registered Company?”

Before you book a Yunnan bird watching tour package from a travel agency, the first and foremost thing you need to ask them is whether they are registered or not. In case they are not, please find some other company.

Choosing a registered company is a must because after all, you are about to visit a different country and obviously, you wouldn’t want to end up being trapped by a team of frauds.

  • “Can You Provide Testimonials?”

The next question you must ask is if the company can provide client testimonials or not so that you can get a fair idea about what their previous customers have to say about their package, their guides, etc.

However, in case they are unable to provide testimonials, please make sure you ask them to share the link to a website (such as TripAdvisor) where their online reviews and ratings are posted.

Set 2: Questions to Ask about the Package

  • “Is the Package Inclusive of Food, Lodging and Travelling?”

The first package oriented question that you need to ask the travel agency is whether food, lodging and travelling are included in their package or not. If anyone of these three things is not included, then please do not book a birding package from that particular company. Why? Of course, because, these three things are the most important or rather, the staple elements of a tour package! If one is missing, you’ll have to spend double once you reach the destination.

  • “Is the Package Inclusive of the Guide’s Fee?”

If the travel agency from which you are thinking of purchasing Yunnan birding tours packages is charging separate fees for the guide, which you’ll have to hand over to them after reaching Yunnan, then please refrain from hiring that company. Instead, you must always choose a company that has the guide’s fee included in the travel package.

So now, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with a travel agency that you have in mind, ask these above-mentioned questions and then, decide if they are worth choosing or not. And for more articles on birding tours, keep following me!


You may also like to read Jim Corbett National Park


Jim Corbett National Park

Bengal Tiger, Jim Corbett National Park

Jim Corbett National Park is one of the few national parks in India which allows night halts in the heart of the forest. For this, tourist complexes at Dhikala, Gairal and Bijrani are to be booked in advance. Jim Corbett Park, mainland Asia’s first National Park, spans over 1318.54 sq. kms, of which 520 sq. kms is the main area and the remaining is the buffer area. In 1936, the Park was named Hailey National Park but later renamed Corbett National Park (after James Edward Corbett, the famous hunter turned conservationist). Subsequently, the Park came under Project Tiger in 1971 for its population of the Royal Bengal Tiger and has also been declared as an ‘lmportant Bird Area’ (IBA) by Birdlife International for its many bird varieties.

Jim Corbett National Park
Asian Elephant at Corbett National Park
Image credit- Vikram Gupchup

Comprising mainly marshy, riverine belts, grasslands and a large lake, the Park can be viewed in an open wheeler jeep or on elephant back. It shelters a healthy population of tigers, known to kill much larger animals like buffalos and even elephants for food! The call of the sambar is believed to be a good indicator of the presence of the predator! The Park has leopards in the hilly areas and a sizable population of jungle cats, fishing cats and leopard cats.

The Park is also home to rare species of fauna like otters, four to five species of deer, the fish eating crocodile, Indian elephants, the Indian python, local crocodiles and gharials, the Asiatic black bear, hog deer, walking deer, sambar, sloth bear and yellow-throated marten, among many others. It also hosts aqua fauna and birdlife with approximately 650 species including the great pied hornbill, white-backed vulture, Hodgson’s bushchat, orange breasted green pigeon, Pallas fish eagle, golden oriole, tawny fish owl and Indian Pitta.

Adult at Jim Corbett National Park, India

For convenience, Corbett has been divided into different zones – The Bijrani Safari Zone, popular for its abundant natural beauty and open grasslands; the Jhirna Safari Zone, open for tourists round the year; the Dhela Safari Zone, a new ecotourism zone in tiger reserve zone popular for its wealthy flora and fauna; the Dhikala Zone, the largest and most varied zone and is famous for its abundant natural beauty and a night stay here is not to be missed; and the Durga Devi Zone, a bird watchers’ paradise. The Sitabani Buffer Zone, although doesn’t fall under the Corbett Tiger Reserve area, is visited for its serene ambiance.

Rivers are the lifeline of wildlife and Corbett is fed by 3 of them — the Ramganga, the Kosi, and the Sonanadi. The Park remains open from the mid-November to mid-June with some parts like the Jhirna Zone open round the year. Also, the Birjani zone is open from mid-October to mid-June; and the Dhikala Zone from November 15 to mid-June. Interestingly, during monsoons the road of Dhikala and Birjani gets completely washed away. Do visit the Kaladhungi Museum which used to be the house of the legendary Jim Corbett, as also the museum at the Dhangarhi Gate, where you can get to see some of the preserved tiger, leopard and other wild animals. All visitors to Corbett National Park have to obtain permits.

Want to enjoy a game of cricket? A little away but surrounded by deep forest Jim Corbett Park, matches are played on the ‘Turf’ pitch. For this please check on coaching camps who offer a facility of net practice on ‘Turf’ and cemented pitches.