Travel Research: Studying Your Destination
For the vacation traveler who just wants to get away from the daily grind for a week or two, the research needed for a vacation is minimal. Perhaps all that is required is to find the right beach for a particular time of the year and how to get the best deal at a resort.
Long term travel of 3 months, 6 months, a year or longer, however, is a serious undertaking. It takes time, money, more effort than most people realize and sacrifice. Like any serious undertaking, a bit of directed research, in this case of the countries or regions of intended travel, will help the traveler have a more enjoyable and worthwhile experience.
Research as meant here does not mean just buying a travel guide. At best, travel guides (like the Lonely Planet) are a tool to be used in trip or destination planning. Travel guides usually contain only a few cursory pages of hard information on the intended place of travel. For the most part, they'll tell you about where to stay, eat, give advice on visas, transportation, and suggest activities or who to hire for that trek you may undertake. Travel planning takes its own type of research and will be touched on in a future article in this series.
Real research can make the difference between rewarding travel and a boring or non-fulfilling time. Some knowledge of a society and its culture, its government, political structure, economic system, and its salient issues, gives the traveler context and understanding of what is happening in the places of travel. If you don't already have a fairly good knowledge of the country you intend to travel, I recommend that you do what I call a "Country Study".
For me a Country Study is quick, broad-based, comprehensive and easy to do. With the one I recommend, a traveler can start with no knowledge at all of a country, except perhaps its location on a map, and have a basic feel for it in a few hours.
Here are the components of the Country Study, not necessarily to be done in this order:
- CIA Factbook Country Profile. Can be found by Googling "Country Profile name of country" (say, Guatemala).
The CIA Country Profile is a concise overview of the key points of a country. It starts with a paragraph length introduction to the country. Separate short sections then give brief descriptions, with a lot of important statistics, of the government structure and type, the geography of the country, its population and composition, the military, the country's infrastructure, the economy including an overview of key areas, industries and aspects of the economy and economic measures, and other salient items like what geopolitical issues the country faces, which international government organizations the country belongs and to which treaties it is a signatory.
It can be read and digested in 15 to 20 minutes.
- BBC Country Profile. Again, can be found by Googling "Country Profile", which turns up both the CIA Factbook and the BBC Country Profile.
This gets you a one page overview of the country. Included is a very brief description of the country's government with brief profiles of the top leaders. The end of the report states the names of the various media in the country—newspapers, broadcast television and radio networks and other major news publications and whether they are government or private owned.
The best part of this BBC Country Profile page though are the links to a number of news articles published on the BBC internet service for the past 6 years or so. There are usually 8 to 14 articles listed, each of which can be read in about 3 minutes or so. Reading these news articles from the past few years will give you a great introduction to the main issues of the day in the target country of travel.
The entire BBC research time should be less than an hour.
- Wikipedia report on the country (Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia). Gives a much more detailed overview of a country, covering a country's history, geography, people, culture, government, politics and current events of importance. The history, economy, culture and political sections usually have a link for a separate much longer and more in-depth article on each of these issues. The end of the Wikipedia report usually has many links for further research.
This takes 1/4 to 1 hour to read and digest.
- Follow up on links found in the above, and on key issues uncovered. For example, if researching Guatemala, one learns that the country has a horrific violence and murder rate. A chunk of this violence is related to extrajudicial violent and criminal illegal and clandestine security organizations. So much so that the government in 2006 called in the UN to set up an independent "Special Investigatory and Prosecutor Body" called The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala ("CICIG"). To complete the Country Study, some reading and a short bit of research can be done regarding the CICIG. Similarly, other salient issues and items of interest identified can be followed up online or by other means.
Time needed for this step: 1 to 2 hours or so.
And there you have it. In a few hours a good introductory knowledge is obtained of a country you intend to visit. Conveniently, this type of Country Study can be done while on the road when basic internet access is available. Of course, the Country Study is only a quick introduction. After completing it, one should then know what additional research is needed and what aspects of the country are of interest for further study.
I strongly recommend, if possible, reading at least two or more well-reviewed books on your subject. This is not so hard to do, even when traveling. One can carry along the desired books on a small laptop, smartphone or electronic book, such as Kindle. These can then be read on those long bus or train stretches or while waiting at the airport. And for the long term budget traveler, an advantage of books in electronic form besides ease of carrying, is that they cost half or less of the physical edition!
Back to Part 1: Designing, Planning and Researching a Worthwhile Travel Experience: An Introduction