PREPARE FOR A LONG ROUND THE WORLD TRIP (PART 1: ABSTRACT)
By: Sergey Lovchev
Tags: Travel, Dreams, World

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. Henry Miller

Introduction

We all hear from time to time about a year-long-trips or, even more exciting, round the world (RtW) trips. For years I had been curious about that. What is the point to going away for so long? How does it feel? What and where would I visit? After all, how to manage everything?

Luckily, my wife and I had a chance to make it real. During the preparation period I tried to search practical advice on the Internet. Sadly, not much was able to be found (most probably due to lack of time, see below). Though some of the tasks are far from obvious, and yet are really important at the same time. That is why I decided to put our thoughts and practical experience on paper for those who travel by themselves. This article is about preparations, not our travel impressions. You will have your own!

An unexpected journey

To June 2019 a number of events lead to understanding that we have that unique chance to go! Initially, I was going to take several months for preparations and start our journey near Christmas 2019. However, when my wife and I drew a timeline with important personal milestones, we realised that the best time to start is in a month… May be we could delay for a few months, however there is no point in doing that.

Needless to say this finding shocked us. I am a kind of an experienced traveller; this is the map of countries where I spent at least one night prior the current trip:

I know how much time it normally takes to prepare to visit just one country. A month for a virtually any country in the world?! We decided to investigate the experience of other RtW travellers, and to build a mind map based on their advice and our own experience.

This is a rotated over-downsized initial mind map. I made it unreadable because it includes many personal items. Don’t worry, I am going to share a trimmed down high quality public version. The main thing here is that there are not many critical (red) tasks. These are the tasks that must be done prior to departure. Yellow ones are highly desirable but not showstoppers and may be done after leaving home. The good news is that planning for an RtW is simpler than you might think.

Legend

There are two key words that will be used for some points.

Severity

Critical — do not go unless done;

High — should be done to reduce negative consequences, but will have no fatal impact if delayed;

Normal — would be great to do to improve something, however can be skipped completely.

Dates

This is to arrange preparation tasks on a timeline. Starting earlier is as bad as starting late.

Of course, concrete dates cannot be used, therefore ranges are encoded using the following special markers:

T — Today, time to begin practical steps;

R — Ready to buy tickets (at least a draft route has been created and the departure date is almost fixed as certain points depend on where or when you go);

D — Departure.

Date ranges are represented as “<start date>, <finish date>”. When applicable, gaps are indicated as “<date> + <gap>” (date is equal <gap> days after <date>) or “<date> — <gap>” (date is equal to <gap> days before <date>).

Example: “Dates: R, D — 7”. This means start on R, and finish not later than 7 days before D.

Our planning assumption is that ideally preparations must be finished by one week before the departure.