Planning
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Itinerary This Week Travel is romantic but also hard work. We will have some planned hotels stays and booked flights. The grind of having to find a place to sleep and table to eat at is tiring. Patience with the travel industry and each other will be essential. Many places won’t have available seats on the day we want to travel. We will need to slow down and accept what comes. Planning This TripMany people ask us “how do you prepare for a trip like this?” I’m sure that we would all approach the preparation differently. We were lucky to have somewhat of an itinerary before we started planning. Celebrating the holidays in Australia (OZ) with our friends, Linda & Ivor Claydon, Bronwyn & Ted Orme, Michael Inman and Andrew Carnegie was going to be essential. This will be the first holiday that AD & I will have not spent with family (DW’s siblings all live away). Familiar faces will help us, should any holiday blues surface. With an arrival in OZ about December 15th, we knew that we couldn’t start our travels in Europe, not enough time. Traveling to South America before OZ seemed the right place to start our RTW travel. An added benefit of going south was the weather. We are packing very lightly and won’t have the clothes for very cold weather. The local library shelves provided us with lots of guidebooks to read cover to cover. There is only about 10 weeks for the continent…one which is bigger than North America, so soon Brazil and all of the east coast was eliminated. We just couldn’t afford the travel time needed to see more than the west coast. (This was one of the first realizations that we will be doing less rather than more) Our “must see” list included Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca & LaPaz, and Torres de Paine. The tour will extend through the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, visit the lake district and navigate the fjords on our way south to Patagonia. There are a limited number of carriers to New Zealand (NZ) from the continent, as most flights to the South Pacific leave from LA. South America has therefore turned out to be an expensive air travel destination for us. The air brokers told us that our routing was not going to be cost efficient or convenient but 3 weeks in NZ sounded like an essential part of any RTW trip. It’s probably the most frequently mentioned “favorite” country on earth. The easiest way to see NZ to rent a car. So that’s what we will do. NZ should be quite relaxing after the pace taken to travel most of the length of South America. Every visitor to OZ should go to the Great Barrier Reef. It's a long way from Sydney. Most people don't realize how huge the continent is. It made sense to fly directly from Auckland to Cairns before Christmas in Sydney (SYD). I can't wait to take AD out to snorkel on the reef so he can see the beauty of an underwater world. School gets out for the summer holiday break just before we arrive in SYD. Our hosts, Linda & Ivor, have two boys who are a little older than AD, a mother-in-laws apartment and a pool! Sounds like a dream hotel, we're not sure about the maid service. (on top of it all...Ivor is a gourmet cook) Our other SYD friends, Bronwyn & Ted, have invited us for a weekend at there holiday house before Christmas. The two weeks in SYD will give us a chance to feel at home somewhere after the rigors of over 3 months travel. An Australian "road trip" sounded like fun. We are renting a car and driving via Canberra to spend New Years Eve with Michael Inman and his family in Mansfield, Victoria. Michael has been a friend for more than 20 years and has visited many times in Maumee. Their holiday house is on a lake a few hours north of his home in Melbourne. We'll stay with them for a few weeks and take a trip along the Great Ocean Road. OZ will be the easiest part of this RTW trip. Really hot weather isn't our favorite. We'd actually rather have freezing temperatures than blistering heat. Getting across South East Asia and out of India before April was critical to our plans. After a lot of reading, looking at travel brochures and websites, we decided to fly to Bali, then Thailand, Nepal and India. Our air tickets aren't a "worldpass" which offer so many segments of travel. We have set departure dates. The dates can be changed but at what hassle and cost? This did force us to decide on 2 weeks in Bali, 3 weeks for Thailand, 2 weeks Nepal, and a month in India (WOW). Actually India is so big that you could spend 6 months there. This segment of the journey will be the most challenging. Everything will be so foreign for AD. We want him to see and experience how different the world and her peoples are. Asia is the place to see this. Sometimes we will book a hotel ahead of time other places we will arrive by plane or train and find that roof for our heads. India is the country that we will have to take it easy in. When you are completing with a billion people for limited spaces...I know we will go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, Varanasi, and Kerala on the southwest coast. We would really like to spend a week doing volunteer work somewhere while there. Most of the programs are for a much longer period. The downtime in OZ will allow for travel planning in Asia. An article in Frommers Budget Travel about last minute overland adventures from Cape Town helped us decide on the next destination. DW & I loved South Africa and are excited about returning. We'll rest up in Cape Town from the time in Asia and the long flight via the Emirates (UAE). The overland we selected travels up the west coast into Namibia, across Botswana to the Okavango Delta, and then Victoria Falls. I'm sure we will need a few days to relax at the Falls after that truck ride! This overland will give DW & AD a chance to experience some of the best animal viewing in Africa. We fly back to Johannesburg for a flight to Europe and a few months before the end of our RTW trip. DW's sister, Debbie and her family are suppose to meet us so we can travel together for a month. We have hoped that other family and friends would find their way to join our path, but no one has decided yet. So to answer the question "how do you plan a trip like this?" I have to ask "what do YOU want to see and do?" My best category in Trivial Pursuit was geography, if that tells you anything. There's so many places in this world I want to visit. We did decide that it's important to try and take as many "hard" roads as we can stand now. The older we get the less willing, we will be to visit on our own, places like India. Already we acknowledge the need for good beds and no bugs (of course that's not possible in lots of places). Itinerary This Week |
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