NOMAD

User Guide

1. What Nomad is

Nomad is a long-haul travel planner for Southeast Asia. It brings together, in one tool, the three questions that shape any months-long route through the region: which visa you need for your nationality and how many days it allows, what the weather will be in each country each month (the monsoon rules everything), and where you cross from one country to the next — real land borders, seaports and airports.

Use it either way, or both: let the route finder propose an itinerary optimised for the time of year and turn it into a travel plan with one click, or build your trip stop by stop in the planner while the app watches visas and seasons for you.

2. The home page: countries, maps and destinations

The front page shows the main countries of the region. Click any card to open its full-screen map, with three layers you can toggle from the side panel:

• Destinations (green): cities and places of interest with coordinates.
• Airports (blue): with their IATA code.
• Railway lines (red): the country's rail network, where it has one.

The side panel lists every destination: click one to centre the map on it, and the arrow opens its destination page. You can also reach it by clicking the destination's name in the map popup. Each destination page carries the full description, a photo, a location map and shortcuts to the country map and the planner.

3. The itinerary planner

The heart of the application, under Itinerary in the menu. It simulates your trip day by day: where you are, which visa covers you and how much of it is left.

Configuring the trip

The configuration dialog opens on first visit (and from the gear ):

1. Passport number. The key your trips are saved and recovered under. If itineraries already exist for that passport, a list appears so you can choose which one to load — or start a fresh one.
2. Nationality. Decides which visas you can request and how many days they grant.
3. Companion's nationality (optional). Travelling with someone on a different passport? Set it and the app watches out for them too: picking a visa shows whether your companion qualifies or needs a different one, the generator warns when they cannot enter a planned country or their visa is shorter, and the itinerary rules are checked for both nationalities. Leave it on travelling alone and everything works exactly as before. Both flags show together in the status bar.
4. Starting country and city, and the trip's start date.

Moving around

• Change city within the country: pick a destination and travel the same day. Picking the city you are already in adds one day to the stay.
• Advance time with +1 day / +1 week: the stay accumulates where you are.
• When the two cities are linked by the railway network, the leg is marked as train 🚆 automatically — in the itinerary, the PDF and the calendar. The automatic generator takes it into account too.
• Cross the border: pick a destination country and a real crossing (land, sea or air). You need a valid visa for the destination in your passport — the crossing is blocked without one. If the destination is in monsoon season, the app warns you before crossing and lets you decide.
• Where no crossing is on record for a country you hold a visa for, you can fly: you land at the country's airport city.

The map and the calendar

The compact map draws your route with one numbered marker per stop — the same number shown on each row of the itinerary log, ordered from 1 (the origin, at the top) onwards. Click any row of the log and the map flies to that stop with a brief pulse, so you can follow the route in order. Its layers (route, destinations, airports, railways, borders) toggle under the map itself. Map opens the full-screen version and Calendar shows the trip month by month.

The trip in progress

When the real date falls inside your plan, a prompt offers live trip mode. From then on the app stops simulating: your device's clock sets the date (in your own timezone), visas and the day counter run on real time, and the banner tells you where you should be today: "Day 47 of your trip · the plan says you are in Hoi An · day 3 of 5".

• I'm here confirms your position and changes nothing.
• Not exactly… reconciles plan and reality: I'm still at the previous stop (the delay is computed for you and the rest of the trip shifts — or tick keep the end date to take the days from the longest remaining stays), I already moved on, or I'm in a different city.
• If a shift pushes future countries out of their good season, the app says so immediately 🌧.
• Stops already lived lock (they dim, and today's row highlights): they are your record, the one a border control counts. Editing them requires confirming "fix the record".
• Past the last date the trip is marked finished and you can open the summary: days, countries, stops, kilometres, the final score and days per country. Back to planning leaves live mode whenever you want.

4. The visa passport

The Passport panel lists the visas you hold. To get a new one, pick a country under Request visa: you will see the options available to your nationality with duration, cost, single or multiple entry, and whether it is issued online or on arrival (VOA). Each visa shows its state:

• Active: the one covering you in the current country.
• In passport: valid, not yet used.
• Expiring (yellow): 7 days or fewer left.
• Expired / Used (struck through): a single-entry visa is consumed when you leave the country.

The Hide expired checkbox keeps the list readable on long trips.

5. The visa day counter

The Visa day counter panel rebuilds your trip day by day and answers the key question: how many days have I spent in each country, and how many do I have left?

• Total days and number of entries per country, plus the current stay.
• For visas with a rolling-window cumulative limit (90/180-style): a progress bar with the days used inside the window, the days left, the last date you could stay if you remain put, and when allowance frees up again.
• Entries used, where the visa caps entries per year.

Above the bars sit the alerts, most severe first: visa expired, window exhausted, few days remaining, entry quota used up… The rule engine also validates the whole itinerary — e.g. “a single stay cannot run longer than N months on the visas available to you” — and adds its findings to the same panel.

6. Editing the itinerary

The itinerary log lists every stop with its number, dates, days of stay and photo. Each row has its own controls:

• +1d / −1d lengthen or shorten that stay (everything after it shifts).
• removes the stop and recovers its days.
• The menu holds the bulk edits, made for reshaping a generated itinerary:
  • Move earlier / later: swaps the stop with its neighbour, within the same country.
  • Change destination…: swaps the city, keeping position and days (same-country cities only).
  • Take / give a day to the next stop: moves days between neighbours without changing the trip's total length.
  • Remove the whole country leg: deletes every consecutive stop in that country at once.

The button puts the log in full screen (Esc to leave).

7. Annual plans: Round Routes, Chase The Sun and Route Search

Three tools compute itineraries that respect the monsoon and visa limits, each with its own angle:

• Round Routes: precomputed 12-month routes over every country, one tile per month with the country for that month and its climate report.
• Chase The Sun: you choose which countries make up the year ( Change countries) and can pin a country to a specific month by clicking its tile; the rest is recomputed around your pins. Browse the variants with Previous / Next.
• Route Search: itineraries for a range of months (up to 6), say May–July. Ideal for planning one summer or one winter rather than a whole year.

All three have a button to transfer the route to the planner. The plan then appears as a reference strip — one tile per month — above the itinerary.

8. Generating an itinerary automatically

With a plan transferred and a configured trip with no stops yet, the Generate itinerary button turns the plan into a full journey:

• Each country is visited in its planned month; consecutive months in the same country merge into one stay.
• The trip starts in the plan's first month — a May-to-July plan starts on 1 May; only full annual routes start on 1 January. A winter plan (December–February) rolls into the next year in its natural order.
• The first stop is the country's main airport city — the likeliest port of entry.
• Roughly one tourism destination per week, chained by proximity and finishing near the exit towards the next country.
• It enters through real border crossings where they exist; otherwise by plane.
• It requests the right visas for your nationality before each entry.
• When a stay exceeds the best available visa and a crossing into an enterable neighbour exists, it plans visa runs: one day out across the border and back on a fresh visa. They appear in the itinerary marked Visa run and summarised in the report; only when no neighbour is viable does the visa-too-short warning remain.

When it finishes it shows a report with the generated legs and everything that does not add up: stays longer than the best available visa, off-season months, countries with no visa for your nationality. The result is an ordinary itinerary: reshape it with the controls from section 6.

9. Monsoon by month and by country

• Monsoon by Month: pick a month and see every country's rating — where it is high season and where it is not.
• Monsoon by Country: one country's full year, month by month, with its climate description and tourist season.

This is the same data the route finder, the generator and the planner's warnings run on.

10. Your account: saving, managing and exporting

Browsing and planning require no account. With a free one (Register) you can also:

• Save itineraries with Save: you name the itinerary and can keep several at once — saving again updates the same one, or tick save as new to keep the original.
• Manage them under My itineraries (user menu): open, rename, duplicate and delete. The one currently loaded is marked.
• Share them with a link: from My itineraries, the button mints a public read-only address with the map, the numbered stops and the day summary — perfect for travel companions without an account. Stop sharing disables the link instantly, and your passport number never appears on the page.
• Export to PDF: a printable dossier with a cover, one page per stop, the calendar and the climate.
• Every saved itinerary carries a 0–100 score condensing what the app already knows about it: right season (40%), visa slack (40%) and travel pace in km/day (20%). Tick two itineraries under My itineraries to compare them side by side — score breakdown, dates, countries, stops and distance — and decide which one to keep.

Calendar export (ICS) needs no account: the ICS button downloads a file you can import into Google Calendar, Outlook or your phone, with one event per stay and per travel day, and visa-expiry reminders a week ahead.

11. Language

The whole application is available in English and Spanish: switch with the Language menu. Destination, visa and climate descriptions appear in your language wherever the translation exists.