Moving abroad for fieldwork

As anyone who has gone overseas to do fieldwork knows, moving is a big hassle with many small and annoying details. This should not discourage you from doing it, but you should know that it is important to start preparing for things well in advance of the actual move time. Although I went off to prep school in Hong Kong before undergrad with little more than my two overpacked suitcases, doing PhD fieldwork means that you need to hit the ground running. Here are some helpful tips.

Here are some important details to consider and tips for handling the hassles:

1. Visas
   You might have to worry about both entry visas and research visas for some countries (eg. India), which have different approval processes and timescales. Even if you don't need two different types of visas, you might have to think about the visa categories if you are doing academic research. For example, with a UK visitor visa, as a US citizen I can go over for up to 6 months as long as I am not doing paid work, but if I were going to be paid as a research assistant, I would have to apply under a different category. (This info is current as of 2009.)
   
   Best advice: use an expediting service if there is anything available; it is money well spent. If not, look in online forums for application tips and apply as far in advance as you possibly can. You can also see my other post about visa hassles here, but the situtation varies widely by country and at the time I applied, they had just put through a number of bureaucratic changes that probably slowed everything down.
   
   
2. Clothing and other things
   I'll edit this post later. There are so many details to think about. But do a calculation- if it is a cheap country, it's probably cheaper to take less and buy more there. If it is an expensive country, or if you have weak currency, like the dollar vs. the pound when I went in early 2008, you are probably better off taking more clothing and paying for excess baggage. Be sure to think about the seasons when you do this.
   
   
3. Books and papers
   When I went to London, I took one suitcase full of papers, and that was after weeks of scanning things into PDF. (Yes, I am pretty paper-based, but getting better over time.) Coming back, I had way too much material to fit into this bag, so I was in a bind. Should I pay for excess baggage? But then, I worried, I'd either have to take a super-expensive car service to Heathrow, truck 4 bags through customs at JFK, recheck them to transfer to my connecting flight, and then what would I do if my partner couldn't come pick me up from the airport? I thought about mailing them, but surface mail takes 3 months and regular airmail was actually pretty expensive, plus someone in my PhD cohort had a bad experience with mailing his books from Germany. My solution: I mailed two bags using First Luggage, a baggage shipping service. They picked them up the day before I left, and dropped them off a few days after I arrived. No hassle and minimal interruption of my workflow.
   
   Caveat: the rate is only cheaper than airmail if you actually pack your bags quite full of books, which I did. Apparently they also mail wardrobes and trunks, if you happen to have this older luggage technology.
   
   
4. Mail
   While moving between houses in the US is pretty easy, because you can get your mail forwarded, going abroad is a big hassle. In my case, my parents let their own mail pile up for weeks, so it wasn't like I wanted to forward things to them. Also, I didn't want to impose on my friends, and my partner was already in London. But, there is a great solution, and that is mail forwarding. There are a few companies that do this, but I went with Earth Class Mail, which will not only collect your mail, but they will also scan selected pieces to PDF for you within a day or two, which is great for when you're abroad. Now, I know people might have privacy concerns about this, but apparently the company uses a clean room environment (no pencils or pens) for people doing the scanning, and hey, I figure someone could always steal my mail out of the mailbox anyway for ID theft. This way, at least I know the first place to look for a culprit? (I'm so happy with the service that I'm still using it, especially since I will need a stable address when I send out job applications.)
   
   
5. Phones
   Yet another hassle, but it doesn't have to be. The easiest thing to do is to go and purchase an unlocked phone and SIM card once you're there. I ordered a phone and sim prior to my travel, but let's just say that the US companies that cater to this need are getting a pretty high premium for a crappy phone. A better idea is to buy an unlocked phone from eBay or Amazon. You might also be able to order a phone and sim from a major company there, prior to leaving. (For London, I have a Virgin mobile UK SIM which I purchased there, but you might be able to pre-order while still in the US.) The great thing is that rates for calling back to the US are low- about the same as calling locally, and unless you're on the phone all the time, this option is probably much cheaper than a monthly plan, not to mention easier to set up. Also, in Europe they have this wonderful invention called pay as you go data plans, so that you could either do a monthly plan or get a set number of MB data access for a given price. (Why I can't get this here, I do not know.)
   

Anyway, start thinking about these things well before you go, and it will make the travel so much easier.