Round The World Tickets
Going east or west - There are some differences worth considering
If you have planned your RTW route already then this might just be an interesting phenomenon that you’ll encounter, but if you are still considering your route you might want to consider this when you do. Traveling around the world in one direction does have some significant timing differences to doing it the other direction. If you are going for, say, a year or more, this is all pretty meaningless, but if you are going for perhaps 6 months or less you’ll definitely notice the difference.
Specifically what I’m referring to here is the time-zone change thing. It’s probably not something you’d think of before you leave, but it will affect you on many of your travel days. If you are a “morning person” it will affect your differently than if you are a night owl. Okay, time to get specific.
If you go west to east then you’ll be losing an hour for each timeline you cross. Of course, you get that all back in the form of a whole extra day when you cross the International Date Line, but that’s a day you’ll never notice aside from the novelty value of repeating the same calendar day like in Groundhog Day. Let’s say you fly from Brazil to Portugal. Your flight might leave in the morning and arrive in Lisbon late in the evening, but thanks to the time zone thing you’ve also lost 3 more hours. So landing at 9pm really means landing at midnight. You’ll have time to go to a restaurant or bar if you land at 9pm, but not if you land at midnight.
Then a week later you go from Portugal to Spain and you lose another hour. Your bus left at 11am and it arrives at a Spanish city at 5pm, except now it’s really 6pm. That one won’t be too tough, but it will happen to you over and over again, and many times it will probably nearly wreck your day. You’ll be wide-awake while others are going to sleep and you’ll be sleepy the next morning when it’s time to get up. If you are sensitive to this sort of thing it will be worse.
If you go east to west you obviously lose that whole day crossing the IDL, which is less of a novelty, but you’ll also be getting back that time in extra hours on your travel days. Flying from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro still takes around 9 hours, but now only 6 hours have elapsed. Your body will be tired, but at least things will be open when you arrive.
The above examples don’t really do a good job at illustrating this strange phenomenon, but you’ll notice it yourself, especially if you are going at a fairly good pace at times. Which direction is better is up to you, but whichever direction you choose will be noticeable on many of your travel days. I’m not sure it’s worth going the other direction from your original plan, but it’s an interesting thing to think about and it will impact you in some ways for sure.
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