Self-hiking trips: The freedom of wandering? Guest Post

4th September 2019 0 By Rachael Stray

Marta and Max are sharing their self-hiking trips in this latest guest post. They are avid travellers, professional photographers and videographers who share their adventures on their blog at Connected Horizons.

Self-hiking trips: The freedom of wandering?

Whenever you set off to your next destination, be it a short weekend gateway or a long year-long trip, it’s hard to not think about your budget. Just over a year ago, after an unexpected trip to India, we had plenty of time to figure out that for avid travellers keeping in check their finances, especially on a daily basis, it’s incredibly important.

At the time, we were both taking notes down on the great moleskin notebooks (those things are so versatile!!!) but page after page, the idea of having a “place” where to share those notes increasingly became a reality. So instead of moving all the numbers to an excel page, we simply asked ourselves “Why not have a blog?”.

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It was then that we first created Connected Horizons, a travel blog, a platform, a place to show all travellers that exploring the world on a shoestring budget is not only possible but also much more fun that you’d ever expect!

Well, that was a bit of intro but let’s get back to what we’ll be taking about in this article or in other words, self-hiking trips.

A different connection

Let’s start off that we’re not really the type of travellers that enjoy guides too much. Yes, in certain cases having a guide can be crucial for communication, knowledge and additional insight to the place you’re visiting. But do you ever feel like you’re being taken away the freedom of seeing a place with your own eyes?

Often, when you’re visiting a church, museum, archaeological sites its often normal to pick up a guide at the entrance and give you a tour of the place. And in many other cases, even when heading out for a hiking/trekking trip deciding to have some guide with you is more common than you would imagine.

We absolutely love going on self-guided hikes and for us is literally the best way to enjoy the adventure at your own pace. We self-hiked Rainbow Mountain in Peru, the Nariz del Indio in Guatemala, the dangerous-not-dangerous Cerro de las Nalgas in Honduras and much much more. Overall, we didn’t regret once having opted to go by ourselves instead of paying us a guide to lead the way.

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Just think about it when you rent a car and go explore some far away place you’ve never seen before. If there’s only you and the people you’re travelling with you’ll behave in a way and do things you wouldn’t do if some “stranger” was next to you. And similarly is going on a hike!

But hey, we’re not advising you to avoid taking a guide, just suggesting you to look at the whole hiking alone concept from a different perspective.

The pros and cons

First thing first (how could we not start like this!), self-hiking is a cheaper option than taking a guide. In certain places, having a guide with you all-day-long can be dirty cheap like the one time we hiked the Seven Hills in India and paid 5$/each. Nonetheless, we also gave it a hard pass when we were asked 75$/each for getting a guide for a couple of hours in Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica.

Being by yourself is also a great way to take any hiking trip at your own pace. In most places, hiking with a guide would translate in being with other people too (unless you pay for not-always-available and utterly expensive private guides) meaning that you need to be aware of people around you. If someone is too tired and needs a break, for example, the guide will stop the while group whilst you might still up for going forward.

Probably the most amazing thing of self-hiking is making random chit-chat with locals. Several times on the trails, we happen to strike up a conversation with some people of the area that made our trek simply unique. On top of learning about a different culture, they would often give us great tips on follow-up trails, best places to stay or eat which is nothing but golden information.

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For example, the one time that we were visiting the 5th Highest Waterfall in the World (Yumbilla Falls in Peru) we decided to self-hike the trail and met this local 10-year old kid who told us everything about the place we were at. Not only we had a great time but after the hike we even had a chance to meet his family. It was a wonderful experience that surely would have never happened if we were travelling with a guide.

It has to be said that self-hiking can be potentially dangerous. In some countries, having a guide on your side can really make the difference (especially if you don’t speak the local language) and help you get out of dodgy situations you might end up in. Similarly, having a guide with you can keep some dangerous people at bay even before they try think doing something to you.

Information is the key

In our opinion, the most important factor for choosing whether you should self-hike or not is how willing you’re to do some pre-planning. Along the road, we’ve generally (allow us the generalisation) met the type of traveller that (1) does plenty of research beforehand and (2) does nothing until it gets there.

Obviously, if you fall in the second category, getting a guide would be best suited for you as you’ll be starting out fresh with very little knowledge and you’ll need an expert of the place nearby. You wouldn’t want to go on a hike without knowing directions, possible dangers, trials distance etc… would you?

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Nevertheless, if you fall in the first category then you might be more willing to pick self-hike as your best option. Nowadays, thanks to the huge accessible information on the web, pre-planning a hike and reading previous experiences is often easy. Whether it’s a forum, an official website, a blog or any other web resource, in most cases you’ll be able to organise your hike from the comfort of your couch. Easy peasy. right?

PRO TIP: Download the Maps.me app and it will change the way you see self-hiking! So far in our trips it has never let us down, always showing us the perfect trail for the hike we wanted to do! And the good news? You can use it offline!!!