Round The World Tickets
Schedule contrast into your RTW route
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.
The example above is pretty extreme because not many RTW travelers would plan on spending a month in Germany as part of their trip, but it’s meant to illustrate the concept of contrast on your journey. Even in places like Central America, Europe, or Southeast Asia, crossing borders rarely leads to much change in the look of a place and the way of life of its citizens.
It’s very common for RTW trippers to get burned out on sightseeing at least a few times while on their travels, and scheduling short jumps is one of the major causes. There’s nothing to fear regarding getting burned out, and some of your most fun and most memorable adventures will probably be from times when you completely took a break from sightseeing to do something else altogether for a while. But at the same time, if you schedule in as much contrast as possible you’ll have more flexibility as to when you want to goof off instead of being forced into it after losing the will to carry on with your previous plan.
Ways to get more contrast into your trip
Sometimes this isn’t easy, but along the way you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make a short jump into something completely different. If you’ll be in Spain you can get to Morocco in under and hour by ferry, and it feels like a different world. If you are in the southern United States, a trip south of the border into Mexico will flip everything upside down. If you are touring villages in Thailand, treat yourself to a short trip to one of its many resort islands. Mix bigger cities with small towns. You can keep your sightseeing muscles in good shape if you make a conscious effort to mix things up from the start.
(By the way, the photo at the top is of Tarifa, Spain in the foreground and Tangier, Morocco in the background. )
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