Planning guides

These are not destination write-ups — the country and destination pages do that. These are the planning questions that decide whether a multi-country trip works: what is open, what it costs in days, and what to file before you fly. Where a guide states a rule, it carries the date we last checked it and the source it came from.

Someone who has decided to come to Southeast Asia, has a rough idea of the countries, and now has to make the awkward decisions: which month, how many places, whether the border works, how long the flight legs really take. If you are still choosing between this region and somewhere else entirely, these pages will not help much. If you have dates in your hand and four countries on a list, they are exactly the pages to read first — and the one to start with is the border table, because it rules more routes in or out than anything else on this site.

Rules in this region change faster than travel content is updated. In the last eighteen months alone: the Thailand – Cambodia land border closed entirely, Thailand shortened its visa exemption from sixty days to thirty, Vietnam made a pre-arrival declaration compulsory at every airport, and Laos published a nine-port list that quietly invalidated the e-visa at every Vietnamese crossing. Each of those changed itineraries that were already booked.