The Simple Travel
Hi, I’m Hasan
Most travel writing online is either a brochure or a brag. I wanted somewhere to put the plain version.
Travel was never meant to become a blog. It started as a habit of taking too many notes. Ferry times. Which side of the bus to sit on. The guesthouse that looked fine online and was not.
Friends kept asking me the same questions before their own trips, and I kept sending the same long messages. Eventually it made more sense to write it down once, properly, where anyone could find it. That is all this site is. The long message I used to send, tidied up.
How this started
The trip I still think about
When I started out, I was in the dark about almost everything. Which countries needed a visa and how long one takes to come through. What the food would be. When the weather turns. Which month quietly doubles the price of a flight. I booked things because they were available, not because they were right.
New Zealand is the one that still stings. I hired a sedan for the North Island, which felt like the sensible choice and was not. A camper van would have cost me less once I added up every night of accommodation, and it would have let me stop wherever the day ended instead of driving on to reach a booking. Then I split my time badly and gave the South Island almost nothing. I was in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, checking my watch.
Nobody had told me any of that, because most travel writing does not bother with it. Many trips later I plan the other way round. Season first, route second, booking last. Everything I know about timing a trip, spotting a real deal and choosing the right way to move around a country, I learned by getting it wrong first. This site is where I put it so you do not have to.
What you will find here
Three kinds of writing, and not much else.
01
Malaysia, up close
Cameron Highlands, Langkawi, Melaka, Kuala Lumpur, Pahang, and the beaches around Kota Kinabalu and Sabah. Places I keep going back to, written the way I would explain them to a friend landing next week.
02
Further out
Southeast Asia past the obvious stops, Japan, and slower routes through Europe. Longer guides, fewer lists of ten things you must do before you die.
03
The boring useful stuff
Visas, budgets, what to book early and what to leave open. The parts nobody photographs and everybody needs at two in the morning.
Next on the list
Antarctica
Sailing out of Ushuaia in January, which is the expensive window and also the only one that makes sense for what I want to see. I have been planning it for a long time, and I will write the whole thing up honestly when it happens, including what it actually cost. Almost nobody does that, and it is the first thing I want to know before I book anything.
Why it is called The Simple Travel
Simple does not mean cheap, and it does not mean easy. It means stripping a trip down to the parts that genuinely matter to you, and refusing to feel guilty about everything you skip. You do not have to see it all. You only have to see some of it properly.
FILL IN, optional: one sentence on where the name came from, if there is a story behind it. If there is not, delete this paragraph and the page reads fine without it.
Say hello
If something here saved you a headache, I would like to know. And if I have got something wrong about a place you know better than I do, tell me. I will fix it and credit you.