How do you prepare a year-long round-the-world trip? What stuff did you take with you? How much money did you spend?... Here are some answers to the most frequent questions we came across before, during and after our trip. If you still have other questions, contact us and ask!

1 How did you travel around the world? 2 But then you already had a fixed route before leaving? 3 How did you manage to get the required visas during the trip? 4 How much money did you spend totally? 5 How did you carry the money for a whole year? 6 What stuff did you take in your backpack? 7 You probably had a few vaccine shots, right? 8 How did you manage for taking pictures during such a long time?

1 How did you travel around the world? One of the first choices related to planning a round the world trip is if you will buy all the plane tickets beforehand or just start travelling and buy them on the move. Both options are possible, and we finally chose an airfare that gave us all the plane tickets for the whole trip at a reasonable cost, with the flexibility of being able to change the travel dates easily. Even the route could be changed for a small fee. "Round the world" ticket: "World Discovery Fare" from British Airways, Qantas and Cathay Pacific. Sold by "Bridge the World" company, based in London (http://www.bridgetheworld.com). We bought the ticket through the internet. Price per person: £ 972 = 1550 €, leaving after the 15th of January (a bit more expensive before that date). Maximum distance covered: 29000 miles (including straight line distance between airports, if doing any overland leg). Maximum 7 flights. Valid for one year. Date changes possible (sometimes small fee). Rerouting possible (small supplement).   <<

2 But then you already had a fixed route before leaving? Not completely! Of course we already had an idea of which areas of the World we wanted to visit, before buying the plane tickets. But we didn't have a fixed itinerary. One of the best things about such kind of trip is precisely the liberty of choosing your next destination as you go. For example, the SARS outbreak in China made us change our plans and stay longer in South America than we initially thought. When we started planning the trip, we made a list of countries that we would like to visit. But then we counted how many months we had available and soon realized that we had to drop some areas right from the beginning! The world is a really big place for "only" a year trip...   <<

3 How did you manage to get the required visas during the trip? Most of the countries we visited don't require an entry visa for a short stay for Spanish citicens. That's the case of South America (in general three months of stay without visa), New Zeland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. For Australia, it's enough with an Electronic Travel Authorisation, which can be obtained for free from their embassy. Therefore, all our problems got reduced to getting the China-Mainland visa in Hong Kong and the Cambodian visa in Bangkok. In both cases, it was an easy administrative procedure.   <<

4 How much money did you spend totally? Including the plane tickets, all the year expenses, a travel insurance, vaccinations and other pre-trip expenses, we spent close to 11000 euros each. This means around 32 euro per person per day. This might sounds to some people like a big amount of money, but it's actually a bit cheaper that our expenses while living in Finland for one year... You can add to this amount around 900 euro per person that accounts for the cost of the digital camera and some other material we bought for the trip (backpack, sleeping bag, tent,...) but that actually survived it.   <<

5 How did you carry the money for a whole year? We left Spain with around 300US$ each and two Visa credit cards. We also brought around 3000€ in traveller's cheques (in US$). But finally, most of the time we got some local money from ATM machines with our cards, so we spent quite less traveller's cheques than expected. We managed ourselves our bank accounts and the availability of credit on our visa cards through the internet, a quite convenient option.   <<

6 What stuff did you take in your backpack? As a general rule for a long trip, your luggage shouldn't be more than what you would take for a short trip: you can't pretend to take with you all you will need for a year, right from the beginning. You will end up buying some things along the trip. Our problem was that in the areas we wanted to visit we were constantly changing from winter to summer, or cold areas and tropical areas... From the chilling Patagonian "summer", the tropical heat of Brazil, the freezing nights of the Altiplano, winter in New Zealand, the Australian desert, Autumn in China, the monsoon in South East Asia... So we were carrying quite a lot of warm clothes (mountain underwear, trekking light boots, etc) from the start of the trip. We also chose to bring a small tent of about 3kg. Our first idea was to get rid of it when we didn't need it anymore, but it end up doing the whole trip with us! So our backpack was quite heavy, but then again we didn't really spend the day carrying it around, but only used it basically when moving from one place to another. The following link opens a new window where you can see a complete list of the stuff we had in our backpack when we left Spain: CHECKLIST We finally chose a backpack with a long zip that allows to open it almost completely, instead of the classic mountain backpack design which is loaded from the top, without any zip. Both have good points and drawbacks... so at the end it's just a personal selection.   <<

7 You probably had a few vaccine shots, right? Indeed! Here is the complete list: Tetanus-Diphteria (although everybody should have this one!) Hepatitis A (Havrix) and B Yellow fever Typhoid fever (Vivotif) Japanese Encephalitis Rabies You have to add the feared malaria pills. We used "Lariam" (mefloquine). You have to take one pill per week, starting one week before entering the risk area and lasting until four weeks after leaving this area. The pills are not a vaccine, and they are actually far from being 100% effective... But the real problem is its side effects, that can be quite serious and strong. Fortunately we were very lucky and we didn't feel anything specially bad except the occasional night of bad sleeping, even if we finally took them for 13 weeks in South America and 10 in Asia!   <<

8 How did you manage for taking pictures during such a long time? There are several possibilities. We met quite a lot of people that used normal cameras and sent the films back home for developing. In our case, we bought a digital camera just before the trip and we are quite satisfied with the experience. It's an OLYMPUS C-730 UZ, with an equivalent focal lenght of 38-380mm (10x optical zoom). It's a little bit bigger than the average digital camera but the big lens was a must for us, to get pictures from animals in the wild. We had several xD memory cards, totally 272Mb (plus 128Mb more we bought in Hong Kong). With this amount of memory available, we can say we have taken "as many pictures as we wanted", but obviously with some compromise of picture quality: except for some particular pictures, we used 1024x768 pixels size, around 1megapixel. We also carried with us a USB cable for PC connection and we were burning CDs with our pictures on the way at internet cafes, which can be found nowadays in any city of all the countries we have visited, sometimes even in small villages. We usually sent a copy of the CD home and kept another one with us as a backup. So we managed without major problems.   <<