There are seemingly millions of things to consider when planning your route. You already know that buying a RTW ticket or buying as you go will be one major contributor to your itinerary. Choosing your pillars and must-sees helps narrow down where you’re going to go. But there’s tons of other things you need to keep in mind when planning your RTW trip, and this guide will give you all the tools you need to make your decisions and get ready to hit the road.
What To Consider About Seasons
Four Season Regions – Mixing warm and hot destinations as you skip around the globe is ideal from a packing standpoint. Since you’ll be carrying as little as possible from the very beginning, and it’s no fun having to buy a heavy jacket to use one week and then leave behind, you should do your best to avoid extreme cold. Extreme heat can also be a drag, but at least sunscreen and a sunhat won’t double the size and weight of your pack. This part is obvious and something you’ve probably already considered.
But there are more subtle considerations. Everyone knows that summers and winters are reversed from the northern to southern hemispheres, but what goes on in the middle isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. If you’ve lived most of your life in, say, Toronto or Melbourne, it would be perfectly understandable to think that the seasons all just switch, and the closer you get to the equator the more constant it becomes. And for the most part, it does work like that, but it’s not always so simple.
Two Season Regions – If you’ve previously visited a tropical region, you are probably aware that instead of four seasons there tends to be two – the dry season and the wet season. But part of the dry season is usually warmer than the other part. The tricky part is that you can’t just look at a map and figure it out for yourself. Things get a bit mixed up, even in places that are relatively close to each other.
For example, the hottest month of the year in Bangkok is April, whereas just a bit south of the equator in Jakarta the hottest month is October. Yes, both places have pretty consistent year-round averages, but when you multiply them by their respective wet and dry seasons there can be glorious months and miserable months that take a bit of research to uncover. Dry seasons are almost always best, as some places suffer not only from stifling humidity but also near-constant downpours. Other wet seasons might consist only of some extra mugginess punctuated by a half hour of rain each afternoon.
The point of all this is that it is a good idea to research these things before you’re committed to your timetable. Most guidebooks have helpful charts in them. BootsnAll’s WhyGo sites are also good sources for information on which seasons are better or worse in a particular destination.
High and Low Seasons – The other thing that makes this even a bit more complicated is that busy (and expensive) seasons in many tropical places often correspond more to the seasons where most visitors are coming from rather than going to.
For example, the beach resorts of Goa, India are packed with Western Europeans and Israelis from December through March because they are escaping their winter, but there are great weather months in Goa before and after that. Prices and crowd levels go down outside of that period, but if you are looking for a party you might want to be there in high season anyway.
Bali has a pretty consistent climate, but it gets packed around Christmas and from June through August as Americans and Europeans take advantage of their breaks, and Australians also do in the opposite way. Yet Bali has great weather and lower prices in between these times, so for a RTW traveler those might be the best times to visit.
Again, the point is that some of these things aren’t as obvious as they might seem, so thirty minutes doing research before you confirm your route might be the difference between a perfectly timed visit and a disastrously timed one.
When To Go To The Expensive Countries On Your Itinerary
There are a couple of things to consider here. The first has to do with your budget. The expensive countries tend to be in a few bunches around the globe so you want to consider when you’ll be running these gauntlets in terms of your overall budget. If you go over-budget in one region you might have to really cut back in a region you were actually looking forward to even more.
Some people might want to save their expensive countries for last and other people might want to get them out of the way early to take the pressure off. There is no right or wrong way, but before you lock in which direction you’ll be going in, you should give this a bit of thought.
When To Go To The Difficult-To-Travel-To Countries On Your Itinerary
If you’ve never traveled long term before and you have limited international travel experience, common sense might tell you to save those difficult to travel in countries for last. Places like India and Egypt can be maddening, with touts in your face at all times and someone asking you for something around every corner. It can be frustrating and exhausting, so saving places like these for last, after you get some much needed experience, sound like the logical thing to do.
In many cases, this is a bad idea. If this is your first extended trip, you have most likely never experienced travel burnout before. You will suffer from it at some point during your trip, most likely several times. Like with anything you do on a daily basis, at some point you get sick of it, even traveling. By the end of a long trip, you will be exhausted, and you may just be ready for home and normalcy. Throwing yourself into the middle of a chaotic country like India may not be what your weary travel body needs at the end, so placing countries like these in the middle, when you’re firmly in your travel groove, makes more sense.
Over-Planning vs. Being Spontaneous
There is a famous quote from a 19th Century German field marshall that says, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Fortunately this isn’t quite that bad, but the point is basically the same. You’ll never be able to plan for all the possibilities, and you will very likely make plans for things you’ll later change your mind about. And if you did manage to plan every detail of a long-term trip you’d likely suck almost all the fun out of it.
But at the same time, the planning, researching, discussing, and rearranging is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the trip for many of us, and there is nothing wrong with that. You’ll meet people who literally figure out a first stop, buy a ticket to get there, and then just wing it, letting the wind carry them in whichever direction it chooses. That might be the right approach for some people, but for many that will rob us of the pleasures involved in research and planning. How can you daydream about your trip if you only have the first stop picked out?
The fact that you are reading this probably means you are someone who enjoys the planning and researching part. The important thing to realize is you’ll be far better off if you remain flexible throughout your trip. Plan all you want, but be prepared to change the plan at a moments’ notice. For example, you might think you want to travel all the way down Central America by bus, but after a week or so you have decided it sucks. Just because you imagined you’d spend 3 weeks on this part of your trip and you told everyone you were going to do it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to keep going.
There will be places you like more than you thought you would and places you like much less than you thought you would. Some places will be more expensive than you realized and some other places might actually really seem like bargains when you get there. Weather is always unpredictable, so flights might be grounded due to snow and another area might be on the verge of a blistering heat wave.
If you map out your every move in advance and rigidly try to keep to it, you’ll be putting yourself through some needless hardship. For many of us, half the fun of a trip like this is the planning part, but the other half is just being out there slipping through the world and making things up as you go.
Visas
You’ll need a valid passport to enter pretty much every country on earth, and in quite a few you’ll also need a separate visa. In case you’ve never needed to go through this before, a visa is permission from a foreign government to enter their country, usually in the form of a paper stamp or sticker in your passport.
And it gets even more complicated. In some cases you might have to apply in person at their consulate office in another country long in advance, go through an application process, pay a fee that could range from small to surprisingly large, provide two passport-size photos, and then wait for an answer. In other cases you can literally walk off a plane in that country, hand them your passport and a very small fee, and instantly be on your way with a new visa sticker in your passport as a souvenir.
The point is you should take a bit of time to research each country you might consider entering and then make some notes. Of course, if you are from the US, Canada, EU, or Australia, you can move about pretty freely in these areas, but some of the places you’ll need a visa can be surprising.
For example, if you are a US resident you can enter Argentina and Peru with just a passport and a smile, but for Brazil and Bolivia you’ll also need a visa and there is a bizarrely high price tag attached to each. You can enter Thailand with just a passport, but India requires a pricey visa as well.
In some cases you can apply for a visa from your home country long before you leave, but in other cases you have to enter within a certain window of time after it’s been issued or it becomes invalid. These rules do have a tendency to change, and this is not something to be taken lightly. You might even choose to cross some countries off your list due to strict requirements or expensive visas.
Here are some sites that will cover pretty much everything you’ll need to know.
For US passport holders
For UK passport holders
For Australian passport holders
For Canadian passport holders
Volunteering And Working
If your trip plans involve volunteering or working, then you at least need to research it before leaving if not sorting it out all together. Like most anything concerning planning a trip like this, everything depends on each person’s unique situation. If you plan on doing something like teaching English while on the road, you may want to start looking for work before you leave, especially if you plan on getting a legit job as opposed to working under the table. You’ll need to prove that you have a university degree, and in some cases, a certificate to teach ESL (English as a Second Language), so make sure you’ll have access to those. The same goes for volunteering. Some companies require you to get everything set up before leaving, but some allow you to turn up and start.
Learning Other Languages
Without a doubt, English is the lingua franca of the traveling world, and it’s getting a bit more widespread all the time. But if you haven’t been to many exotic places yet, some of this isn’t quite so obvious. As a rule of thumb, the more useless a country’s language is outside of its borders the more motivated they are to speak English. Does that sound confusing? Yeah, you are right, it does.
Just consider that Icelandic is basically useless everywhere off their island, so almost all of them speak virtually flawless English. But for native Spanish speakers there are about 20 other countries they’ll be understood in outside of their own. So as a result, surprisingly few native Spanish speakers master English.
The tricky parts are Spanish and former Russian-speaking countries, and to a lesser degree, French-speaking countries. People in Kuala Lumpur, particularly those you are most likely to encounter, speak better English than those in Guatemala City. Most people in the former French colonies are bilingual, but neither of those languages is English, although many do speak English as well.
Some people really have an aptitude for learning foreign languages (or at least key phrases) in a short period of time, and they really enjoy it. But most of us really struggle with this. Even learning enough of a local language to be able to ask how late a place stays open doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to understand the answer.
Try to learn at least things like: hello, goodbye, thank you, excuse me, and how much does this cost. People from all over the world will instantly recognize you as an English speaker and will do their best to answer you right back in English. You’ll get an appreciative smile and much more cooperation than you would if you just assume they speak English.
If you are planning on touring much of Latin America, and particularly if you have some background with the Spanish language, you might consider taking a short language course in your first country. These courses can be cheap and interesting and will make the rest of your time in the region far more enriching.
Guidebooks
While some people love buying, studying, and even collecting guidebooks, others feel most guidebooks offer little more than a direct path to the most cliche and worn-out places. Regardless of how you feel about guidebooks, the fact remains that they are heavy. Even one or two guidebooks can significantly increase the weight of your pack.
If you are a guidebook lover, consider tearing out only the pages you need from each one and then tossing the rest of the book. Or bring guidebooks for your first destination, then swap them out as you go along. At most hostels, there will be a book exchange that has various guidebooks you can swap out.
Of course, with the wealth of information on the internet, you can find most of the information you would get from a guidebook online. You won’t have the ease of grabbing your guidebook and going – rather, you will need to spend a few hours doing research at an internet cafe – but you may receive more up-to-date information, and you will have less to carry with you. If you own a Kindle or other e-reader machine, you can simply download the relevant guidebooks and access them on the go. You’ll be able to bring as many guidebooks as you wish, with no additional weight to carry, and many times you can buy chapters out of the guidebook instead of the whole thing.
Once you start planning your route, things are firmly under way. You’ve thought and planned nearly all you can, but there are a few more steps you need to think about before taking off on this trip of a lifetime. You will need to think about certain on the road things like laundry, travel burnout, and homesickness.
Planning Your Route Checklist
You can use all this information regardless of which flight option you choose. Just keep in mind that if you choose to purchase a RTW ticket, you will have to plan more by default. If you choose buy as you go, you can theoretically just buy a ticket and go.
- Consider if you want to travel in summer, fall, spring, or winter in each region you plan to visit
- Consider high, low, and shoulder seasons when planning your itinerary
- Consider hot and dry season and the rainy and monsoon seasons for tropical regions
- Develop a tactic for visiting the more expensive regions on your itinerary
- Develop a tactic for visiting the more difficult to travel in regions on your itinerary
- Develop a tactic for planning vs. being spontaneous, keeping an open mind that this will most likely change once you’re on the road (many times)
- Sort out visas that you are able to before you leave
- Be aware of what you need for visas you have to get on the road (bring plenty of passport sized photos)
- If you plan on working or volunteering, research what you need to make it happen
- If you’re a guidebook person, develop a plan for what you will do about guidebooks
