The myth of the 'prepared' traveller
There is a comfortable lie many of us tell ourselves before a big trip: that enough research, enough experience, and enough local contacts will insulate us from the usual stumbles. One writer who had spent ten years travelling the world solo — and who arrived in New Zealand with Hawaiian roots, a local friend in Auckland, and solid research behind her — still managed to rack up a list of genuine mistakes over six weeks on the road.
Her honest account is a useful mirror, not just for anyone dreaming of New Zealand, but for anyone who has ever over-planned a holiday and still found things unravelling in small, avoidable ways.
The mistakes that cost real time and money
Some slip-ups were logistical. She hired a camper van for the freedom of the open road, then left it parked at a music festival for most of the rental period — a costly way to have a vehicle you barely drove. A day trip to Waiheke Island, famous for its vineyards, ended without a single glass of wine because she arrived too late and shops closed around 5 p.m. She booked a round-trip ticket on the celebrated TranzAlpine train route through the Southern Alps, only to realise later that getting off at Greymouth and continuing by bus down the West Coast to Queenstown would have been a far richer journey. And she never thought to check which side of the bus offered the best scenery on each route — a tiny detail that costs nothing to research but is easy to overlook.
Then there were the weather-dependent bookings. She planned stays near Lake Tekapo and Te Anau specifically to catch the aurora australis, and cancelled both when cloud cover made stargazing impossible. One stargazing experience had been booked as non-refundable, so the cancellation meant losing that money outright. The quiet irony: the aurora eventually appeared over Queenstown, a city she had assumed would be too light-polluted for it, and she captured it on camera there.
The bigger structural problem was overcommitment. She ended up rescheduling or cancelling stays in multiple cities, a coastal train journey, and a whale-watching flight. In hindsight, she felt she would have been better served by choosing fewer things and leaving genuine room for spontaneity.
Why this matters for a solo travel audience in India
These mistakes map almost perfectly onto patterns that Indian solo travellers run into, whether on a trip to a hill station, a Northeast India circuit, or an international adventure.
The camper van lesson translates directly to renting a self-drive car in Rajasthan or Spiti and not building in enough drive days to justify the cost. The Waiheke Island timing problem is something anyone who has shown up at a Goa beach shack in off-season hours, or reached a Meghalaya living root bridge at dusk with nothing open nearby, will recognise immediately. The overcommitment trap is especially common on Indian itineraries, where distances between destinations are long and transport delays are routine — packing six locations into a ten-day trip is a recipe for exhaustion and constant cancellations.
The non-refundable booking lesson is worth flagging clearly. Weather-dependent activities — a Himalayan helicopter flight, a wildlife safari, a Kerala houseboat — should ideally be booked in a way that allows for rescheduling. If non-refundable rates are the only option, factor the potential loss into your budget upfront rather than treating it as a guaranteed experience.
Perhaps the most transferable insight is also the simplest: identify the two or three things you genuinely cannot leave without doing, protect those, and hold the rest loosely. That approach is not laziness — it is the kind of flexibility that allows for the unexpected aurora moment, wherever yours happens to be.
One last thing
The writer's own conclusion is generous and honest. She is grateful she gave herself permission to cancel plans that no longer felt right, without guilt. That is a mindset worth packing on any trip, long before you worry about which side of the bus to sit on.