Round The World Tickets
Archive for the ‘RTW Travel’ Category
Archive for the ‘RTW Travel’ Category
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Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
We’ll file this under the category of Things that may not be obvious until you are actually on the road, so I thought it’s worth discussing for people who are still planning their RTW route. When you are at home with your maps and travel books or Web pages and whatnot, you can come up with an efficient route that will include the shortest jumps possible. This sort of thing works well at first, but what you’ll find after only a short time is that short jumps make places run together pretty quickly.
Let’s take Europe for example. You might fly into Amsterdam and then head into Belgium before entering Germany, which has at least a dozen worthwhile cities to visit. Even if you don’t plan on visiting all of them (and you shouldn’t), you’ll find that journeys of 100 or 150 kilometers will put you in a place that looks oddly similar to the place you just left. Nearly every European city has a huge main church of some kind as its tourism centerpiece, and each of them could be very impressive if you arrived from, say, Turkey. But if you see one church one day and a similar one the next you’ll begin realizing something like, “This is the 9th most impressive church I’ve seen this month.” And the same is true of Roman walls and main town squares. Each of them is impressive if you hadn’t just seen all the others.
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RTW ticket deals for March 2008
Monday, March 3rd, 2008We’ve always got some really interesting deals on RTW tickets, and we are going to share them with you here each month. These are the deals for March 2008, and they are bargains, but they are also just examples of routes and prices. It’s likely you’ll have your own specific idea of where you want to go and in which order, and anything is possible with these tickets.
So have a look at these deals and then click on the links so you can modify these routes for your own purposes or start from scratch getting a custom quote for your own specific itinerary.
This Pacific Rim loop isn’t exactly a RTW, but it’s covers a lot for a small price.
Since so many RTW travelers have done Europe and Asia already, this is a popular route to hit South America and Africa.
This is a typical RTW that is popular right now because it skips expensive Europe that is often better visited separately, and connects the other 5 main continents together in an efficient route.
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Onward-ticket requirements can create a problem for RTW travelers
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
This is something can comes as a surprise to many a RTW traveler, but quite a few countries theoretically won’t let you in unless you already have your onward ticket out of the country. And one of the things that makes it trickier is that enforcement tends to be like enforcement of speeding laws on highways. In other words, you can often get away with ignoring the rule, but in some cases doing so will turn into a huge problem. There are ways around it, but they are a big hassle so most people tend to ignore the rules until they suddenly are being enforced.
The rules exist mainly so countries can easily stop just anyone from arriving with very little money and with the intention of entering the underground labor market as a new illegal alien. Having a blanket rule allows authorities to “profile” people and enforce this selectively, which means that most travelers will not have a problem. But recently we’ve heard that Thailand, and perhaps a few other neighboring countries, are enforcing the rule very strictly as of 2007.
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Radio Nowhere?
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Obviously the common advice of bringing the absolute minimum you can get away with on your RTW is valuable and important. When you’ll be carry every single thing on your back for months or even years, you should carefully consider each and every item before you commit to bringing it with you. Some things are cheap enough (like, say, a Frisbee) that you could just leave them behind if you decide you made a mistake by bringing them. But other items (like, say, iPod speakers) would be a bit harder to ditch part way into your journey.
But having said that, one item that deserves a bit of consideration for some of us is a radio of some kind. You won’t find radios on too many “suggested RTW packing lists,” but you might still think about it. Even if you don’t listen to much radio at home, you might find it fascinating to hear local broadcasts while abroad. I brought one that is about the size of 4 packs of cigarettes taped together, and I’m really glad I did. But there are tiny versions with fewer features you might also look into.
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The RTW ticket versus point-to-point debate, continued
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
This is well-trodden territory for many people, but I wanted to mention one aspect that some people fail to consider when deciding whether or not to buy one ticket ahead of time or separate tickets as you go. The point-to-point style is definitely the best choice for many people, but I’ve seen that some of the folks leaning toward that strategy either don’t realize all of what’s involved, or they don’t want to know because they’ve made up their mind anyway.
We live in an age that, with very few exceptions, no matter where you are there are many cheap flights to be found. And I’ve seen people who notice this phenomenon and then make the assumption that buying individual tickets around the world will be cheap and easy as long as their schedule remains flexible. It does work out that way in most places, but not everywhere, and those exceptions can be budget killers if you aren’t careful.
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Learn some Spanish at some point
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
While it’s definitely true that you can go round the world speaking only English, knowing more than a few words in Spanish can really enhance your trip in quite a few ways. And I’m saying this as someone who didn’t realize this before he left, but really wished someone had told him about this earlier. So I’m telling you now.
I didn’t really even figure this out until it was way too late anyway, but basically, in all countries where Spanish is the first language, very few people speak English. It feels a bit ironic that everyone on the small resort island of Ko Samui in Thailand speaks a reasonable amount of English, but once you get south of Tijuana or other border towns like it, you are mostly in the “no comprende” zone. And this definitely isn’t a complaint because if I tour their country I can’t expect them to learn my language in advance to make it a bit easier. This situation surprised me, but it was my fault, not theirs.
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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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