Four Frequently Asked (and Unasked) Questions
Whenever Devi or I mention that we traveled around the world with our children for a year, people generally want to ask us four questions:
Where was the best place you went?
What would you do differently?
How much does it cost to travel around the world for a year?
How do you manage to get along with your spouse twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
Actually, most people are too polite to ask the third question and generally only women ask the fourth … but since everyone wants to know the answers, here they are, more or less.
Where was the best place you went?
It’s difficult to pick just one best place. Practically everywhere we went had its own particular charms, but I’ve managed to narrow the list to twelve contenders:
1. The wildlife safari at Chobe National Park in Botswana—30,000 elephants and all the romance of Africa.
2. The Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan, India—spectacular color, magic, and mystery, but unless you book years in advance, you’ll have to rough it in a tent, like we did.
3. Istanbul at night—simultaneously sublime and funky.
4. Diving the Great Barrier Reef in Australia—a magical world of fish and coral in every color of the rainbow. Even better than we imagined.
5. Driving across the Australian Nullarbor—stark and spiritual, but you must endure days of tedium until the desert reveals its power.
6. The Taj Mahal—once you work your way past the touts and beggars, the leper hospital, and the horrible putrid stream next door, you’ll find one of the world’s greatest architectural achievements.
7. Sipping a cappuccino in Siena, Italy’s shell-shaped piazza—overrun with hordes of tourists, but it still somehow manages to conjure the romance of the Middle Ages.
8. White water rafting on the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe—not for the feint of heart (or sane of mind … or weak of leg), but it’s an adrenaline rush ne plus ultra.
9. The Burgundy canals by houseboat (France)—languorous and serene, et le vin, c’est magnifique!
10. Touring the Angkor ruins in Cambodia—stifling heat, bad accommodations (at least when we were there; it’s better now), and the imminent threat of land mines, revolution, and bandits (again, it’s much better now), but it’s still a wonder of the world on a par with the Taj Mahal or the pyramids.
11. Luang Prabang and a boat ride up the Mekong River to the Pak Ou Buddha caves in Laos—all the charm and mystery of old Indochina, but probably not for long.
12. Ancient Ephesus in Turkey—the best classical ruins in the world with the possible exception of Pompeii and Capadocia. Nowhere else did we get such a feel for the Classical Age.
What would you do differently?
We enjoyed some aspect of nearly every place we went, but there are some things we’d do differently, and here are the top four:
1. We would never go back to Venice, Florence, or anywhere in Tuscany during the tourist season. It was simply too abominably crowded.
2. With a few exceptions we would never book another packaged tour. The markup is too high—especially in Africa—and we didn’t like all the handholding. Booking tours on the spot, once you’ve arrived, is a different story. What I’m talking about is the two-week package tour.
3. We wouldn’t take nearly as much luggage! We didn’t need half the clothes we brought, and many of the problems we encountered while we traveled were somehow connected with our monstrous pile of suitcases. Even though we only had one large suitcase and one backpack each, that still made a dozen bags. If you don’t absolutely need it, leave it at home.
4. And perhaps most importantly, we should have rented out, not sold our house. More on this below.
How much does it cost to go around the world for a year?
This is a very difficult question to answer. It’s like asking, “How much does a house cost … or a car?” With trips, as with cars, there are Kias and Mercedes, and after you cross a certain minimum threshold, you can spend as much or as little as you want. This is especially true if you avoid travel agents, buy guidebooks or use the Internet, and do the research and booking yourself. Devi cut the cost of our South African safari by more than 60 percent this way.
Remember, college kids backpack around the world all the time for five or six thousand dollars apiece, and even though they stay in $25-a-night dives, they see the same Eiffel Tower, the same Taj Mahal, and the same sparkling-white Australian beaches as the swells who sleep in thousand-dollar-a-night suites.
After we’d been on the road for several months and gained some knowledge and confidence, we started to book increasingly modest accommodations with relatively few adverse effects. Even though I was a confirmed Hilton/Hyatt guy before we left, I learned that downscale inns, pensiones, and smaller hotels worked just as well.
Of course, not all our cheap accommodations were charming and picturesque. When we did end up in a bad hotel, we simply spent less time in the room and more time exploring. I can tell you from personal experience that the Acropolis is just as impressive when you’re sleeping in a $45-a-night dump as when you’re staying in a luxury suite. The few times we did go the deluxe route, we usually regretted the expense. We found the amenities weren’t worth all the extra dough, and we just ended up insulating ourselves from the real life of the country. I can also tell you, by the way, that without a mortgage, property tax, utility bills, and two cars to operate, it actually cost us less to travel for a year—about $125,000—than it would have cost to stay at home for the same period of time. Some of that—such as the fancy South African safari camp—was discretionary, so I would say that six people could travel around the world for a year for about $100,000.
There is, however, another important matter to consider when you’re budgeting for a trip like this. It takes much longer than you expect to disengage and re-engage. This came as a real shock to us. Somehow I thought it would take two or three months at the front end to plan the trip and close down the house and business and then another month or two when we returned to plug everything back in again. In fact, we needed five months to prepare and another five or six months to reestablish ourselves. This meant that our thirteen-month trip actually took two years in all.
Of course, a lot of this was due to the fact that we sold our house before we left and bought another home when we returned. There were advantages to this: It made us feel as if we were making a clean break. We used some of the equity in the house to pay for our trip, and we bought a smaller house in a better location when we returned. But, frankly, it took too much time and effort to move. We had to pay large and unnecessary transaction fees, such as real estate commissions, and since the local real estate market took off while we were gone, we took a hit financially. We should have just rented our house out for a year and gotten a home equity loan to help pay for the trip.
How do you get along with your spouse twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
Frankly, it isn’t always easy and a trip like this simply won’t work if you are not on very good terms with your spouse. Neither Devi nor I would have made this journey together if we were not getting along, and even then, there were tense moments—especially at the outset. Believe me, when all of your social interaction takes place within a tiny hermetic group of family members for months on end, little peccadilloes become incredibly irksome, and slights are easily magnified. If anything, we learned that a trip like this accentuates problems rather than solves them. Consequently, it wouldn’t make much sense to travel with your spouse for a year if you’re having difficulties to begin with, and it would be truly suicidal to think a trip like this will resolve any marital problems. Of course, it you do manage to spend twenty-four hours a day with your spouse for a year and live to tell the tale, then I think you can assume that your marriage is on very solid ground.