Round The World Tickets
RTW Travel Articles from January, 2008
Taxi drivers can be dishonest
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
When you are on a RTW trip there is no way to fully research each place you’ll be landing, so you have to kind of make some things up as you go, and take your chances. If you have the opportunity to do one small piece of research before you get to any destination, particularly if it’s a second or third world country, you should research airport transportation. If you don’t, there is a good chance you will be consistently getting ripped off and/or getting a really bad first impression of that place.
This might be one of the most useful and least obvious tips I’ve been able to write about. The fact is, that taxi drivers and many others who work at airports are constantly on the look out for suckers and people they can take advantage of. Sure, it occasionally happens in New York City or Paris as well, but in many parts of the world it happens all day every day. Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia all have many airports where any foreigner arriving on their own has a big target on their back.
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Bus tours are great once you get used to that one maddening feature
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
When on my RTW trip or when I just travel in general, I tend to go a bit faster than most other people do. When you tell people you are going to Bangkok you’ll hear some people say you should spend at least a month in the area in order to truly appreciate its diversity. I have a short attention span, so I did Bangkok in 4 days, which is a day or two longer than I’ve spent in many other big cities. Anyway, the point is, that bus tours often offer an incredible value as long as you know how they really work.
I’ve been on dozens of these things and you can find similar ones in most places around the world, but I’ll use Bangkok for this example. I booked a half-day bus tour that left Kho San Road early in the morning and went out to the Floating Market, which is about an hour outside the city by bus. I think I paid around US$6 for the tour, which seemed damn cheap for 5 hours driving around the Bangkok area in a van full of other bewildered Westerners, especially since it also included two boat tours once at the market. And it was cheap and a great deal, for a very good reason: Bus tours like this around the world are gimmicks to get tourists into overpriced souvenir shops.
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Planning your route to stretch your RTW funds
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
When we first consider a ‘round the world’ trip it’s definitely exciting to imagine visiting a bit of everything on your lap around the planet. Everyone who spends more than a couple months on their trip, and who actually crosses the International Dateline an odd number of times in the process, will definitely be seeing a lot, but certainly not everything. If you plan your route the right way you can spend twice as long on the same trip as you would have had you planned it a different way. So if your goal is to stretch your money as long as possible, the best idea is to skip most of the expensive parts of the world and save them for another time.
For example, Tokyo is an amazing place that nearly everyone can appreciate, but if you try to spend a week or more in Japan it will drain your travel funds fast. Just save it for another trip when it won’t mean sacrificing so many other things. A week in and around Tokyo will cost as much as two months in rural India. If you look at it this way, Japan becomes a bit less appealing in the context of this trip.
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RTW photography and you
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
If you take a one-week vacation to, say, New York City, then photographing the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building is a perfectly natural thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with this, even though your own photos will almost always be of much lower quality than hundreds or thousands of better photographers with better equipment who’ve taken those photos from the exact same angle in the past. Search the internet when you get home and finding your same photos, except better, is easy. But still, this is what people do on short trips, and again, there is nothing wrong with that.
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Tiny and cheap gadgets worth bringing
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
The best general advice for bringing extra gadgets with you on your RTW trip, is don’t. You’ll be amazed at how little you can get by with when you are leading a simple life of long-term travel. Many things you just won’t need or use, and other things can be easily purchased for even less abroad than at home, and then left behind when you no longer need them. But there are a few small and cheap things that will be far more useful than you might realize.
A tiny flashlight is one common item that is on many people’s lists, and these are a good idea. You can either get a small, high-quality one like a Maglite, that sells for around $10, or you can bring an even cheaper one, like those keychain lights that are designed to help you find the key hole when you come home at night. Those can be found for around $2 or even at a dollar store. They won’t last forever, but they will probably last for your trip.
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