Round the World ticket

(Or taking the plunge..........)

How and where it all began......

There we were at least 3 years ago walking down the high street of Bromley just going past the Sony shop. I happened to glance in the window and couldn't believe my eyes. There was a large TV with an incredible price tag, Ł4999.99. I just couldn't imagine anyone spending that sort of money on a television.

"We could travel around the world for that" I said to Caroline. "On Ł499.99, I don't think that we would get very far" she replied. "No, look, Ł4999.99!"

She too was amazed that anyone could consider spending that sort of money just on a television. For us Ł500 was already a lot. The programs don't get any better or any more interesting just because you pay Ł5000! What sort of couch potato would pay five big ones apart from some Jabba the Hutt character. You would have to be completely crazy to do such a thing. We both knew that Ł5000 would get us around the world but probably not for that long and it was probably not worth flying all those kilometres for a short stay. We had heard about Round the World tickets (RTW) but knew very little about them. Wheels and thoughts had been set in motion.

Caroline had already been to Brazil twice before and was now ready and very keen to discover more of South America. Her first trip to Brazil had been for a month with a friend and the second for ten weeks on her own before coming to work in the UK. Travelling to South America for longer was never completely out of her mind. I on the other hand had been to places like Jamaica, New Zealand and Canada but more often than not I had stayed with friends and had not been out of the country for more than three weeks at a time. At least Caroline had travelled for ten weeks in Brazil by bus and on her own. That qualified her to go but certainly not me. Many might say that we were the crazy ones and not the potato head safely ensconced on his or her sofa.

A little background.....

Caroline was working as a biologist at the Royal Hospital Liverpool in a post doc research position, which would finish late in 1998 so we wouldn't be able to go before then. I had worked for the same City of London company for 11 years at this point and the decision to travel was going to lead to a dramatic change in my lifestyle. One that perhaps I did not fully appreciate all the consequences of. We were talking about the future, a couple of years away. My job was interesting and technically challenging, a data and voice technician, but as far as a career was concerned I hadn't even bothered to see if I could join the wannabes and start the climb up the managerial ladder. I liked being a techie and hated being a suit. From now it was just a question of saving up for the huge change to our lives and to carry out some serious reading and thinking.

What happened next.....

We told all our friends about the trip. Most seemed to believe us; some thought it a fantastic idea and others were at least polite enough to listen to these two crazy people. At first we talked loosely about where we might go but we didn't exactly spend a lot of time on research. I knew that I would like to go back to New Zealand and Caroline had the same feeling for Brazil. The first inklings that we would spend some time on the South American continent were beginning to take shape.

Problems.....

There were several problems. Firstly me. Caroline being Swiss was a native French speaker; her English was not perfect but very good for a second language. It didn't stop there; she could speak Portuguese, the language spoken in Brazil plus understand German and Italian. I on the other hand had been struggling to learn French again since I met her. I had given it up at school, something I regretted now. When I met Caroline I was seeing a lot of a Peruvian doctor friend of mine. In exchange for me supposedly improving his English he was trying to teach me Spanish. When I met Caroline I started to learn French and trying to learn Spanish just became too difficult. "I am English after all" was my excuse and we as a nation have a poor if not deserved reputation for our understanding of other languages. I forgot everything I learned about the Spanish language. The second problem with me was my rather picky eating habit. Caroline quickly understood that I was a difficult if not the worst case she had ever come across. I had a diet of no red meat, only white fish fillets and the occasional piece of boneless and skinless chicken. I was a semi vegetarian, mildly keen on veg stuck in no man's land. Travelling with me was going to be difficult.

Over the years I have known a few people that had gone to work abroad. They usually said when they went that they would be happy to have guests come and stay. I never needed a second invitation; at sometime I would visit. Usually out of a particular circle of friends I was the only one to do so. It's one of those things that people say in that situation along with the "of course we will keep in touch". It just doesn't happen. So whether I am really welcome when I or we now turn up on these friend's doorsteps I cannot really say. Currently, I have another friend who has pulled up his roots and moved to Canada, married a local girl and had two children. Is that invitation still open Dave? All this meant of course was that I had no experience of being a backpacker, just a man who liked his home comforts. A sure recipe for disaster.

Time passes.....

Our first serious attempt at putting a plan together came when we went to a travel show in the Docklands Arena around January 98. We visited many stands with a variety of offers. We were fairly certain at this time that we just wanted a RTW ticket and not an organised package of some kind. Trailfinders had always been very good and we again looked at their stand here. However, the stand from which we got the most enthusiastic help was Bridge the World, a smaller independent travel company. Odette, the consultant spent considerable time with us telling us about the conditions of using a RTW. The limitations being that it was open for a year at most and you must either travel west or east but always in the same direction. She suggested that if we wanted anymore information then we could come into the premises in Camden at anytime. This is what we did.

We created a list of the countries that we would both like to go to and the result gave us all of South America, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia and India. We both chose China but it wasn't very practical due to time and financial constraints. Oh well next time! Our plan was beginning to take shape; we were frequent visitors to the Bridge the World office at that time. We were now looking at a BA/Qantas ticket with five stops. One option went to Bombay, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland and Mexico City before returning to London. By now we had the idea of spending a large amount of time in South America but not going as far north as Central America or Mexico in particular. We asked for a quote for the above option but changing Mexico City for Buenos Aires and doing it the other way around.

By this time we had a time frame as well. If we were to leave in March and fly to Buenos Aires we would arrive in the late summer. We had formulated the idea of trying to follow the sun for the whole year, a difficult if not impossible challenge. Easy if you have plenty of money but the limitations of a RTW ticket meant that we had to compromise. The "follow the sun" idea was one of the main reasons for wanting to travel west rather than east. At first we wanted to visit Patagonia but at the rate we were going we would have to spend the whole year in South America rather than the projected eight to eight and a half months. Of course South America is large to say the least and many travellers spend a year or more there. A year away and still not enough time!

From Buenos Aires we could use the bus to head north and by the time the southern hemisphere was in winter we would be near the equator. The next part of the plan would involve moving south down the west of the Andes as the southern hemisphere moved into spring. The RTW ticket means that you either have to fly out of the same airport as you fly into or at least from another in the direction that you are travelling in. The actual route through South America then would be to go to Uruguay after Buenos Aires, then into Brazil crossing into Venezuela. Taking a bus across Colombia was a daunting prospect after seeing the continuous news reports of a country in crisis. I flagged Colombia as a country that we might fly over if I got too scarred when travelling through Venezuela. After all they shoot people, don't they?

Once we returned to Buenos Aires we would fly onto New Zealand spending a month there and hopefully being able to spend Christmas and New Year with my friends in Auckland. This would be the second stop. After having been away for nine months at this time we thought it would be nice to spend Christmas and New Year with people that at least I knew. I had met Tina and Melvyn in London during the eighties and had first visited them in November/December 1996. Being in New Zealand in the late spring we hoped for favourable weather therefore keeping up with the "follow the sun" idea. Like we said earlier, the ticket is only valid for a year and if you want to balance seeing many different countries, cultures and have good weather then you have to fiddle a little and also hope for some stable weather, plus some luck. Our third stop would be Australia where we earmarked three weeks. Why so long in South America and so little time in Australia. We were hearing mixed reports as to how cheap or expensive Australia was but we did know that travelling in many of the South American countries would be very cheap. The three weeks in Australia would give us just a taste of it but some people fly there for a three-week holiday anyway.

From Australia we would fly to Singapore towards the third week of January. Already without looking at times or being entirely realistic I was looking at train journeys that could take us from Singapore, through Malaysia and onto Thailand. One guidebook I found in a local library quoted the journey as costing the same as a famous chain's beefburger! It nearly sounded like South East Asia would be even cheaper than South America.

For the last stop we were considering flying to India in mid February and spending the last month there. If we hadn't suffered culture shock before now we would more than likely experience it here! Then we would return to the UK mid March 2000. It seemed crazy that we were making decisions about where we would be so far in the future. After several visits to Bridge the World we went away to think about it probably much to the relief of Odette who would now be free of our endless questions and every second Saturday visit to the shop.

More time passes.....

We started thinking about what we would need to take with us, what sort of accommodation we would stay in, whether to camp or not and how we would get around. There were a host of questions to be answered.

Getting serious.....

The time had come to take the plunge. We went back to Bridge the World and told Odette that we wanted to go. Perhaps by this time she thought that she was never going to get a sale out of us. This was in September 1998. We were now making visits to shops in Liverpool, Manchester and London looking at all the sorts of footwear, sleeping bags, backpacks and other equipment that we were going to need.

The really big day for me was on December the 1st, by now I had been working just under thirteen years with the company and the same manager. Handing in my notice was a big deal. I phoned him at home that evening after a long weekend visiting Caroline in Liverpool. He had flu and I felt awful about it. I don't know why. I was a fairly well paid network and voice technician but the huge corporation would continue whether I was there or not. I guess I felt sorry more for my boss because he had one of those middle management jobs where you just can't win.

A few days later we went back to Bridge the World to book the flight from Argentina, December the 3rd 1999 which would take us to New Zealand. It was important to book the flights around the end of the year because of the end of the millennium and the ensuing confusion of everyone wanting to go home or get away from home. In certain circles there was anxiety as to whether the airline industry would be thrown into turmoil by the Y2K bug.

Christmas and New Year of 1998 was spent in Lausanne, Switzerland with Caroline's parents. For Christmas we received the Lonely Planet "South America on a shoestring" guide that would be very useful for the first part of our journey. I read about Argentina and Brazil over Christmas but forgot it all and made no notes what so ever over the next couple of months. The closer the departure date got the less I was prepared.

January 1999 meant another trip to Bridge the World to book the flight to Australia and then to Singapore. Venezuela was the only country in South America we needed a visa for, so I went to the embassy in London to apply for them. Our plan by this time was fairly certain, to go to Buenos Aires, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia (I still wasn't so keen), Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay. We would leave the rest of Argentina until the end and see how much time we had left. We both had friends in Buenos Aires but also would have to visit Santa Fe the home of another doctor friend of mine. I had always promised to visit Argentina and he was beginning not to believe me anymore. We didn't include Chile, as the Pinochet affair didn't make it a very popular destination for a while especially for the British. Even with eight and a half months in South America it didn't look as if we were going to see it all and the beautiful but desolate Patagonia was going to have to be missed out.

By this time Caroline's boss had come up with some extra money that would extend her contract until the end of February. This would be the same time that I would finish at the corporation and we would then have a couple of weeks to get things sorted out before we left.

On one of our frequent visits to Covent Garden and the outdoor equipment shops we joined the YHA, as we knew that it would be useful in some parts of the world. In February we visited Bridge the World again and booked the flight to India and also the flight home although because of the booking system we would have to change that on route as we were scheduled to fly out of India a few hours after landing. From what I had heard about India I wasn't sure if perhaps that this was not the best prospect anyway. At least for me.

I phoned up and found out that for the Australian visa we would have to ask for it in New Zealand. At the Indian embassy the story was that we would have to apply for this visa from Australia, because it was only valid for six months from the date of issue. All was coming together.

We were visiting our doctors and getting all sorts of injections. A friend working with snakes at the Liverpool Institute of Tropical Medicine put us in touch with a colleague who worked on malaria. There were problems with this because some of the places that we were going to visit had multi drug resistance leaving us with only one choice, the incredibly strong and sometimes not without side effects, Lariam.

We were running out of time. I was being asked to work as long as possible as the company still hadn't found a replacement. Caroline's project was progressing but too slowly and it could be that we would be going away just as she was going to get some exciting results.

Most of the equipment was coming together after much research and visits to the specialist shops. It was interesting as well as frustrating because in some shops some of the staff were really knowledgeable whilst others could only tell you the colour options if you asked them technical questions. We of course had many of those. After all we would have to live out of the backpacks and their contents for the whole twelve months. We didn't want to carry extra weight but also could not afford to forget something crucial, everything had to be right.

Despite all the crazy hours at work we were putting in to finish off our jobs somehow we managed to get organised. As a matter of professional pride I wanted to make sure that when I left the corporation all the equipment that I was responsible for was Y2K compliant. At the beginning of March I was supposed to stop working but it just didn't happen. I took a few days off though so that we could fly to Switzerland to say goodbye to Caroline's parents and friends. It was getting crazy.

The last few days were just bedlam but much of it was self-inflicted. We were leaving at 21:25 on Monday the 15th of March no matter what happened at work. I finally got out of work at about 14:30 on Friday the 12th of March. I was free but I didn't have much time to think about it as I rushed to catch the 15:05 train from Euston to Liverpool. We were to have a last meal with Caroline's boss who was also going to store some of her belongings in his loft while we were away. We spent a last enjoyable evening with him and two other colleagues. On Saturday the 13th we cleared the rest of Caroline's worldly goods out of her shared house. A few last items were given to a charity shop and then we headed back down to London.

A couple more crazy days and there we were. On a Monday evening after just buying some additional slide films from Vic Oddens at London Bridge we were standing on the platform with our backpacks and air tickets waiting for a train to Gatwick while all the normal suits were on the way home after just another day in the office. Something they would do tomorrow and the next day and that I might never do again.