Advice #1: Transportation
I’ve been planning this trip for a very long time. The route has been changed several times, I’ve had many potential traveling companions and my financial situation has been up and down. But now I have a route, I have Frida who spontaneously decided to come with me and I think I have enough money saved up to finally do this. It’s going to be a budget RTW (“‘round-the-world trip”), which I think is great. I’m used to having no money, since I’ve been putting away more than half of what I’ve earned the last couple of years.
So even though there’s lots of information online about traveling in general, it’s still hard to remember everything you need to plan for before you head off. So I thought I’d give some advice.
- I’d recommend to people, especially students and those under 26, to book IATA tickets with STA Travel. They’re as far as I know, the cheapest travel agency for booking RTW flights and allows you to be flexible when planning the route. Round The World Ticket has helped my planning a lot too. Remember to always plan your flights so that you fly to “hubs”. A hub is a big city where lots of airlines fly to. Our trip only includes hubs - Miami, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Singapore, etc. Buying domestic airline tickets separately is most likely cheaper. Thank you, Wikipedia, for this list of low-cost airlines. And thank you, BravoFly, for allowing me to find dirt-cheap flights from all those airlines by one click. But - if you’re scared of flying, like I am, train is a great way to travel.
- One of the best sites online for traveling by train is The Man In Seat 61. This guy is a genius. He has traveled throughout the world, has great advice based on first-hand knowledge, has all the time tables, has all the links, even knows all the stops in pretty much every single part of the world. And he can explain inter-railing in Europe better than the official InterRail site.
- I love buses, but unfortunately I won’t be traveling by bus all that much this trip. If you disregard the bus trip in Africa, of course. I just don’t see that as a bus, more like a monster-truck-camping-vehicle of some sort. African Trails is really cheap compared to the other over-landing companies I’ve looked up. However, they only have one tour-leader, do not have a chef like GAP do, and they tend to shorten their trips with a day or two unlike Oasis Overland. GAP and Oasis cover pretty much the entire world, but if you’re looking for North American over-land trips TrekAmerica is great. As for regular bus-passes I know Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, North and Central America and Europe have plenty of cheap and good alternatives. Here’s a link.
- Another way to cross an ocean is to hop a boat. Most people aren’t keen on sailing from shore to shore, but there are other ways … Passenger freighter travel has become really popular and differs from regular cruising in the sense that you won’t have pink, buffe-lovers who hardly get off the boat around you. In the shift between winter and summer routes regular cruise ships usually have a couple of transatlantic or transpacific routes. When hurricane season starts on the North American east coast the ships head south through the Panama Canal and then head for Los Angeles. Other ships cross the Atlantic to Europe and the Mediterranean. Some cruise ships go from Sydney to Auckland and a whole lot of them cross the Pacific. (For those of you looking for a ferry from east Indonesia/Timor to Australia, I haven’t found one. However you can ask the crew on UK to OZ Overland how they manage to bring their vehicle the whole way. And tell me what their answer is, please.)
