Author name: Andrew

There is a moment that happens to every traveller, usually somewhere unglamorous — a bus stop, a courtyard, a queue for bread — when the postcard version of a place falls away and something more ordinary, more alive, takes its place. You stop seeing the destination and start feeling the location: the particular weight of the air, the rhythm of a language you don’t speak, the way locals cross a square that was never built with you in mind.

We do not fly business class to buy a sandwich, and we still queue at the gate for Ryanair like everyone else. But a big long-haul trip is a different thing, and planning our 2026 run to Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong took us a long way down a rabbit hole. Here is what we learned, what we nearly did, and what we did in the end.

Planning a long trip takes time — a surprising amount of it — and we have come to think that is part of the pleasure, not a tax on it. This is how the two of us actually go about it. It is a method, not a rulebook; take what is useful and leave the rest.