Planning My Trip
Sunday, 13th July 2003
Planning my trip began in earnest about a year ago. Around late summer 2002 I slowly came to the conclusion that I should leave my job sooner or later, as it wasn’t really for me. Making that decision firmly was quite difficult, as there were lots of incentives to stay on in the job an extra six months or an extra couple of years. Often in life there are lots of good options that present themselves to you and say “do this and in x years you’ll have this!” What was very hard for me was looking at the different options and trying to discover what I actually wanted.
There came a point when I realised I simply had to go travelling soon, otherwise I would always be disappointed with myself. This wasn’t an easy realisation. I worked hard through school to try and get good grades (a teacher once commented “Daniel is making the best of limited resources”), worked hard throughout my three years at University to get a good degree and make myself stand out to employers. So when I got my first real “graduate” job, it was a great feeling. I remember thinking: I have made a plan for my life and it is going well. To turn that all aside and become a jobless backpacker was kind of tricky for my self image and for my plans of a stellar career.
Opposing the desire to be a city boy my whole life was the feeling that I was about to become 25, an age which for some reason I have always associated with being one’s prime year, and the idea of spending it working in an office typing away was quite appalling.
Choosing where to go
Once I made the general decision to go travelling, deciding on the actual details was maybe even harder. I was possessed by a dozen or more different plans – leave in July ’03 and travel through America then onwards towards South America, or leave in July, go to the USA then on to Asia, or leave in September and fly to Sri Lanka, or leave in August/ September and travel by train across Europe to China via the Trans-Mongolian railway…
I was a chronic bore to some of my friends, enthusiastically detailing minor changes in my route one day then discarding it entirely the next. I had a couple of nights where I literally couldn’t sleep at all: lying in bed until the morning puzzling over how many days I should spend travelling by train through Lithuania and Estonia….
Deciding on flights was equally torturous. I began my research into flights with high hopes of spending around £900 for the whole RTW ticket. Quickly I was exposed to the harsher reality: I wanted to be away for longer than a year, so could not buy a RTW that would cover my whole trip. When I tried to get a cheap RTW ticket or a one way to Australia, the mileage of my itinerary (I insisted on visiting Vancouver and Costa Rica) eliminated some tickets and made all the others very expensive. Each travel agent I spoke to (and they were many) could not find anything that suited what I wanted that was cheaper than buying a series of one way tickets. With real doubts in my mind about the sense of the choice, and the gnawing suspicion that I had missed something obvious, I decided to just buy tickets as I went. By the time I arrive in Mexico I have nothing booked, no deadlines or schedule, except that my visa for Australia expires in May 2004.
I eventually chose my route (USA/Canada, Central America, South America, NZ/Australia, SE Asia…?) because I was going to a friend’s wedding in Detroit in July, and realised I would have saved up enough money to meet my targets by then, and wanted to get out of the UK while I was still early in my year of being 25. Also, SE Asia and India are places I have just always wanted to explore, and I felt if I left them to last I would be motivated to keep going, whereas if I went there first, some of my drive might go.
Saving Up
My key to saving up was:
1. Move back home with the parents, and
2. Set up a standing order/direct debit to go into my saving account every month the day after payday. I made sure I didn’t touch that saving account, even though I was getting overdrawn at the end of each month and getting charged two or three pounds by my bank. Perhaps it was silly to pay about £40 in total on interest charges in a year when I had thousands of pounds in savings, but I was too afraid that I would just consume anything I moved back into my current account.
I decided on a pretty arbitrary savings goal of £8,000 – just because someone had once mentioned this was “the figure” you needed to go travelling for a year. However, while I’ve saved more than my target, now I just think of all the wine, beer and cocktail fuelled nights out I went on with friends while I was saving up, and suspect I could have saved more if I had been really disciplined.
Fears
Fears at the moment: safety is probably the biggest. I’m not at all sure how dangerous Central and South America really are, and worry I’m going to get in to a situation that I can’t handle, or even be able to spot developing. I console myself with the thought that living in London is reasonably dangerous to begin with. I have some of the standard fears that I guess every traveller has: getting ill, having stuff stolen, finding out I actually hate being on the road for months on end, not being able to deal with the heat/humidity and so on.
A real fear for the trip is banality. I’m not concerned about originality here, I’m happy to accept that every place I go to has seen a gringo before, I’ve no desire to discover lost Aztec cities. But I worry that I’ll end up spending most of my time with other backpackers, staying in traveller destinations and hostels, that I won’t make connections with the people living in the countries I visit. I worry that I will drift through these countries always the rich westerner, just a tourist that smells a bit. I also worry about becoming jaded, about having seen so many places that nothing is interesting anymore: like the backpacker I met in the capital of Morocco who said “Yeah, Morocco’s alright I suppose. Bit of a poor man’s India though.” I’m trying to combat that tendency by planning to travel reasonably slowly, and make breaks from the journeying by studying Spanish, taking courses in things like cooking or martial arts, by working, teaching or volunteering when an opportunity comes up.
I’ve never done a trip of this magnitude before, so to a large extent, despite all the researching, I have no idea of what I am about to undertake. We will see. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been packing up or giving away my possessions and saying goodbye to my friends. Preparation is almost over – I leave in only a few days time.
