Round The World Ticket

If you travel from one big and modern city to another, and especially if you stay in Europe or North America, chances are you’ll never have to worry about diarrhea. But on a round the world adventure it’s very likely you’ll be spending quite a bit of time in rural areas and in less developed countries, as they say. If you are on the road long enough, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll get at least one case of diarrhea, and it’s not really a huge deal if you are prepared.

How one gets diarrhea while traveling

There are plenty of different ways, but the most common seems to be by eating local foods that contain some microorganisms that the local population is totally used to, but your system is not. This is different from food poisoning, of course, and that truly is something to be feared, or at least you want to take steps to avoid it. Diarrhea is just having a “loose stool” and nearly anyone who has an adventurous palette can fall victim to it once in a while. (more…)

There’s no denying that the United States isn’t the darling of the world community, and in the last decade or two our popularity has probably slipped a bit below usual. We sometimes have American RTW travelers wondering how they’ll be received while on the road, and occasionally people will joke about sewing a maple leaf to their backpack and telling everyone they are Canadian. Well, rest easy because that isn’t necessary and you’ll almost certainly get a warm reception everywhere you go, although it is up to you to do your part.

Very few people “hate Americans”

There might be some of this in parts of the Middle East, but for the most part even the most vocal critic of the USA will enthusiastically tell you how he hates the American government, but also has nothing against American people. Think about it. If you met someone from Iran or North Korea would you assume they were bad people? You might actually be sympathetic that their leaders have stirred things up and that they are victims in this whole mess. It all depends on how the person acts once the conversation has begun, and it’s easy to stay out of trouble if that’s your goal. (more…)

There’s nothing like turning to a new page on the calendar to remind me that time absolutely flies. It’s the ultimate cruel irony that as youngsters we get bored so easily, wishing we could just grow up more quickly - only to spend all our adult years wishing life would slow the heck down again! The good news is that as adults, we can actually take control of the throttle and pull back if we choose to - and a RTW trip is a great opportunity to learn to stop and smell the roses. Having international airline tickets in your hand may make your heart race, but if you play your cards right you could still relax and learn to travel more slowly once you’re on your way.

So, in an effort to help you take the reins and slow life down again, I bring you BootsnAll’s August RTW airfare deals. This month’s deals start in either New York or Los Angeles, and could get you either a tour of the highlights of South America; a continent-hopping itinerary from North America to South America to Africa; or a real RTW trek covering Asia, Africa, and Europe. And even the longest itinerary still comes in at under $3000.

Here are the August RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through August 31, 2008.

• Los Angeles - Lima - Santiago - Buenos Aires - Sao Paulo - Los Angeles from US$1349 (plus taxes)
• New York - Rio de Janeiro - Sao Paulo - Johannesburg - Dakar - New York from US$2249 (plus taxes)
• New York - Beijing - Hong Kong - Singapore - Bangkok - Bombay / Mumbai - Nairobi - Cairo - Athens - Rome - Copenhagen - Berlin - London - New York from US$2999 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

I’ll admit it. I like TV, and that doesn’t always make me popular with other travelers. So many of my fellow road warriors are part of that cult that swears they don’t even own a TV, that I actually believe a few of them. And that’s fine with me. When you are living at home if you choose not to own a TV at least you know what you are missing. But while on the road you might actually consider trying to watch some boob tube in certain locations, for the reasons I’ll describe below.

Television can give you a more honest look at culture than anything else

When you travel to a city and then stay in the historic center you are seeing an idealized view of how life in that country really is. You might spend the afternoon at an art museum and then the evening in the nightlife district, but 99% of the real population isn’t doing that because they are working during the day and then watching a bit of TV at night. Spending a day at the Louvre might help you understand what Paris was like 300 years ago (or maybe it won’t), but it doesn’t tell you a thing about the city today. (more…)

While many people will continue to debate whether or not you should bring a laptop computer with you on your RTW trip, I think it’s pretty clear that everyone should be bringing at least one USB Flash drive, also known as a “thumb drive,” with them. If you aren’t yet aware of what these things do, they are extremely small solid-state storage drives that are very durable and very cheap.

They can hold as much as 32 gigabytes of data, although those are still quite expensive as of this writing. The 2 and 4 GB sizes are the most popular as of now. You just insert this tiny thumb-shaped thing into a USB slot on any computer, and the thing will appear on the desktop as another hard drive. There are no moving parts so they are very durable, and they get their power from the USB connection itself, so you never have to worry about plugs or power converters. (more…)

If you are early in your itinerary planning for your round the world trip, you might be tempted to try your absolute best to string the cities and areas together in a way that gives you the most possible visits during “high season.” That’s understandable, and since you’ll be going to so many places it might not be too difficult, but it also might not be wise for a couple different reasons.

One fairly obvious concern is cost. If you spend summer in Europe and then make your way to South America just in time for its own summer, you’ll be paying peak hotel rates and airfares each step of the way. Since expenses are such a concern for nearly every RTW traveler, you might actually be better off trying to do the exact opposite as the above.

The other part of this issue is that when you travel to a place during its peak season you’ll have the most competition for hostel beds and cheap hotel rooms. Those of us who like to wing it and book places as we go on a RTW can be severely hampered by this situation because it means either booking beds way in advance or sometimes having to stay in undesirable places or neighborhoods. (more…)

With the rising cost of airline tickets on even the simplest of round-trip itineraries, you might just have assumed that around the world tickets would be so astronomically expensive as to make such a trip unthinkable. You might have assumed that you’ll have to postpone your RTW trip indefinitely, or at least until gas prices drop a bit or you’ve managed to save up that extra few thousand to cover airfare. Well, the good news is that although you may have trouble finding things like cheap international airline tickets on simple routes, we’ve got some great deals on RTW tickets for July.

The routes on this month’s special fares list start in either San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles. The first takes in the highlights of Asia for $1799, including Angkor Wat, Bangkok, Xian, and Tokyo. The second gets you from South Africa to Bali to Bangkok, al for under $2300. And even our most expensive RTW trip deal for July is under $2500 - and it’ll let you see two of Europe’s most amazing cities (London and Paris) as well as world-class destinations in South Africa and China as well.

Here are the July RTW ticket deals - these prices are good through July 31, 2008.

• San Francisco - Singapore - Saigon / Ho Chi Minh - surface - Hanoi - Luang Phrabang - Angkor Wat (Siem Reap) - Bangkok - Xian - surface - Beijing - Tokyo - San Francisco from US$1799 (plus taxes)
• New York - Cape Town - Bali (Denpasar) - Singapore - Bangkok - Hong Kong - New York from US$2299 (plus taxes)
• Los Angeles - London - Paris - Cape Town - surface - Johannesburg - Hong Kong - Beijing - Los Angeles from US$2499 (plus taxes)

And if these itineraries don’t tickle your fancy completely, that doesn’t mean you have to twiddle your thumbs until next month’s deals come out - start planning your own customized RTW trip in seconds and hit just the cities you want.

When you are planning your RTW route you might be considering either going to a city when a festival is taking place, or possibly making sure you are visiting a city when there isn’t a festival going on, but you probably aren’t thinking about planning your route partly around random concerts. As someone who’s done the concert thing quite a few times in my travels, I’ll tell you that it can be a blast and probably isn’t as complicated as you might expect.

Finding out who’s playing where and when

Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out where an artist you like (enough) is playing and when. Years ago that was very difficult, but today it’s a snap. Not many people seem to know about the concert trade publication called Pollstar, and they don’t really market themselves to consumers, but still they do a great job keeping track of nearly every tour in the world. Simply go to Pollstar.com and you can check itineraries of artists or schedules for cities for everything up to one year in advance. Most concerts don’t get scheduled until 3 or 4 months before they happen, so you can’t expect the site to predict events that aren’t yet confirmed, but if you keep checking you’ll see everything. (more…)

Since most of us normally take trips that last no longer than two weeks or so, the issue of laundry while on the road doesn’t really come up often. After you make the mistake of packing way too much for a multi-week trip, you catch on to the idea that you can bring, say, 7 or 8 outfits at the most, and then have them washed once a week for as long as you need. But on a RTW trip you hear of people packing only 4 or 5 days worth of clothes, and then doing your laundry in hostel sinks every few nights. As it turns out, this isn’t nearly as cool or as possible as it sounds.

But before we discuss doing laundry on the road, let’s talk about packing and your choice of garments. You really should choose most of your gear based on the idea that you’ll wash it yourself, and more importantly dry it yourself too. Jeans are automatically out because they are hard to wash and even harder to dry. You’ll want as many of your items as possible to be such that they can dry in 8 hours while hanging in a dark (and maybe even damp) room. Do yourself a favor and spend a bit extra on socks and trousers that are meant to dry quickly, and you’ll be glad you did.

So even though you will have clothes that can potentially dry quickly while hanging in a hostel room or other such place, you’ll realize after the first time or two that doing your own laundry in a hostel sink takes way longer than you’d think it would, and also ages your clothes about five times more quickly than having them professionally washed. Go ahead and bring some of those dry packets of Woolite or whatever so you can wash some of your clothes now and then, but don’t assume that this is how you’ll do it each time. (more…)

There are at least two major strategies for people who’ll be going on a round the world trip. Some people plan on starting with enough money to get to the first destination where they can find a decent job, and then regrouping there for the next leg. Other people prefer to save up as much as they possibly can before they leave, and then not have to worry about working at all. But a third hybrid strategy can have some advantages, and it might not be too difficult to pull off if you plan in advance.

With so many jobs being able to be performed remotely these days, it’s not too difficult for many people to pick up some freelance work that they can do on a laptop from anywhere. If you have any talent as a writer, editor, graphic designer, website builder or anything along those lines, you might consider developing that skill in advance so you can do some work while on the road.

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