With the end of the adventure just one week away, I thought now might be a good time to try and answer some of the questions we are often asked when people find out what we've been doing for the past twelve months. What we have learnt from this experience is that travelling the world really is very easy, so if we can help or encourage others to do the same, then we're happy to do so.
In short, we didn't. We both left our jobs. We get asked this most often by border officials keen to decide whether we're going to start working illegally. It normally ends in us showing them our bank balance!
Once we were in Australia, however, we picked up our campervan on day one and had forty days to return it. We had a big book of camp sites and a pre-paid telephone, and would decide at the start of a day on the road where we'd be going, call a few campsites in that town to ensure they had space and check them out when we got there. If we liked it, we'd book a few nights, if we didn't we'd move on, or just stay one night and hit the road again the next morning. There are also many free overnight rest areas at the side of the road and in National Parks that offer toilets, showers and barbecue facilities.
America was very much the same, and other than a pre-arranged fortnight in Orlando with my parents, we went wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted. We hired a car (essential) and headed to any place that looked nice. Although there was always a wide variety of motel and hotel options, it was often easier (and in some cases cheaper) to check them out on-line the night before arriving and make a booking. Again, you won't end up with the cockroach infested establishments if you check out the
Trip Advisor reviews and can often find some real gems like the kitsch Route 66 antique,
Earls Motor Court. On the other hand, you can always just roll into any budget motel chain like
Super 8 or
AMBVI and get a room for somewhere between £30 and £50 for a king sized room with free HBO, a mini refrigerator and free breakfast.
What have been your favourite experiences?
Did you miss home?
Home, for me, is Rosie, so as long as we're together, I am home. At times you get nostalgic about certain "homely" things - a snow covered English countryside, a roaring fire in an English pub, etc. but when you think about all the real life stuff that abuts these postcard images - work, miserable journeys in the rain or on steaming hot tube trains, the UK's overcrowded streets and roads etc. that feeling soon fades. I think returning to the UK is going to be like the first day back at school after the summer holidays - you kind of look forward to it towards the end of the summer break, but once you're back, the excitement fizzles out after a few days and you spend the rest of the year wishing you were on holiday again.
Is there anywhere you didn't manage to get to?
We'd always planned on seeing South America and hiking to
Machu Picchu but while booking the round the world flights, it suddenly became very expensive to add this relatively short detour to the route. Also, it would have cut into our time in other places and we did not want the trip to become too rushed. Secondly, the USA is enormous and the entire northern half (from Boston to Seattle), along with the West coast, will have to wait until another day.
What has been the most difficult part of the trip?
To be honest, nothing has been "difficult" to the point of making us want to go home. Certain things became tiresome or frustrating, like having to pack a very well loaded rucksack every few days, or not always being able to eat the food you really crave, and in some cases the slightly antiquated way of life in a few countries became a bore. Thai train stations, for example, often do not have signs informing passengers of where they are. So when a three hour train ride ended up taking six hours, and without a single sign telling you what each stop was called, and no train guard in sight, the backpacking adventure got a little stressful.
The tricky part to any trip, I guess, is really just deciding where you want to go and what you want to see. 365 days is a long time, but the world is a huge place, and I would often get the feeling that I was "missing" something. Travelling as a couple, also, means that if I go ahead and book a dodgy hotel in a rubbish part of town, Rosie has to put up with it too, so there was always some pressure in making the trip as comfortable and enjoyable as possible, whether it be deciding what hotel we stay in or which town or city we visit next.
Would you do it all again if you had the chance? Would you do anything differently?
I'd do it all again in a heartbeat and really wouldn't change much at all - although I might make it a two year trip instead. With a little more time, you can really get away from the tourist/backpacker routes and find your own adventures and nuggets of undiscovered paradise. I also wish I'd invested in a "proper" camera from day one. We switched up to a DSLR style camera in Malaysia when our less than robust pocket camera filled with dust and fluff after months of constant use. Although I'm no photographer, having a decent camera has allowed us to take
photographs rather than point and shoot "snapshots".
How much money do you need to go around the world?
How long is a piece of string? Given our advancing years, we always knew we didn't want to take the absolute budget option. We'd always want a private room over a cheaper shared dorm and steered clear of the rowdy, gap-year backpacker haunts. So, although it could be done much cheaper if you're happy to rough-it a bit, we had around £37,000 between us on the day we left the UK. Beforehand, of course, we'd paid for the round the world flights (approx. £1,450 each), insurance (approx.£400 each), vaccinations (approx. £150 each) and Visas (approx. £175 each), along with equipment, clothing, rucksacks, mosquito repellents and other essentials we needed to take with us.
So once we'd left the UK, we had a budget of around £100 per day. Of course, we probably didn't even spend half of this in many parts of South East Asia, where a private room in a hostel costs around £15, a beer 15-50 pence, and two people can eat a large evening meal for under a fiver. On the other hand, we have also spent over half of the trip in the United States and Australia, so any savings made in Asia gave us the surplus funds to afford the much higher cost of living in and travelling round these two countries. Rosie, ever the mathematician, informs me that at present, over the entire course of the year, we have averaged a daily spend of £90, including car and campervan hire, petrol, accommodation, food, beer, souvenirs and the postage fees to mail them all home - everything.
How did you save that much cash?
Quite simply, you stop buying s**t you don't need or can't afford. We have never been ones for relying on credit cards, we don't drive flash cars we don't actually own and we made our own packed lunch every day for ten years before going to work. Try buying lunch in Mayfair five times a week and see how quickly £100 disappears (in less than a month is the answer). For many years, we set ourselves strict spending budgets for groceries and enjoying ourselves, and always asked ourselves 'do we
really need this?' when shopping. We switched to pay as you go mobile phone plans (£10 per month rather than £25 for the same number of minutes, texts and data, minus the flashy phone upgrade that, you've guessed it, you don't actually need); we often drank at home rather than going to the pub, we didn't go on holiday for a year and limited our spending on Christmas and Birthday presents - to name a few methods. All of these small changes really added up and eventually allowed us to live entirely on my wages alone, with 100% of Rosie's head of department salary going straight into the savings pot. Additionally, the only items on our Birthday and Christmas lists for the couple of years before we left were
STA travel vouchers.
How on earth do you pack for a year of travel?
Check out our
kit list, compiled just before we left London. This has changed slightly during the course of the year, with items such as coats, hats and scarves being added in the chilly South West of the USA, and various other bits and pieces of clothing and souvenirs being picked up along the way. I intend to do another list of everything that comes out of the bags when we get back to England.
What would be your top ten most useful items of luggage?
1. Netbook - Wifi is everywhere these days (maybe less so in Australia), so for researching your next destination, booking hotels and trips and keeping in touch with home - as well as shifting the thousands of photos onto a portable hard drive, a netbook or laptop is an essential item in any traveller's kit list.
2.
Travel towel - although many hostels will provide towels these days, in the event that they don't, or the ones they give you are more like a thread bare T-towel, you're going to need your own lightweight towel at some point. These things are super absorbent and pack down into a tiny pouch so space is never an issue.
3.
Travel washing line - A good friend recommended we take one of these, and we are so glad that she did. Whether you want to hang your swimwear up to dry after a day at the beach, dry a soggy pile of hand-washed underwear or simply need to air your towels, this thing will do the trick. Ours has been strung across our cabin during our ocean voyage to China, stretched from one side of the campervan to the other as we rumbled along the Australian coast, and hung over the bath in countless hotels and motels.
4.
Universal sink plug - When you want to hand wash your clothes in a sink with no plug, now you have a plug.
5.
Portable speaker - Travel is not all fun and games and bar-hopping. You will spend a lot of time just sitting around in your hostel or hotel room, researching your next stop, writing emails & blogs or just hiding from the weather. So after just a few days in China, only two weeks into the trip, with very few bars around us and nothing but a few flickering Chinese TV channels to fill the silence in our room, we picked up a very fake, yet very cheap, mini speaker. For all its fake-ness, the sound quality is very good and it even has its own on board FM radio. We plug it into the iPod for music, the netbook for Youtube videos and Skype calls, and even had it sat on the dashboard of our campervan when the stereo packed up.
6. Good quality mosquito repellents. We packed a wide variety of these for the various conditions we had to live in - Your average Jungle Formula from Boots is fine for a warm Summer's evening in France, but Rosie has tasty blood and South East Asia is mosquito paradise - we also didn't take anti malaria drugs, so although the risk of developing the disease is actually so much lower than western literature would have you believe, we figured we might as well take the best repellents we could find.
Our most powerful weapons:
- Repel 55 - 55% DEET and good for daily use in malaria zones and areas where mosquitoes are prevalent. It stinks, but it works.
- 3M Ultrathon SRL-12 - This cream is thick, gloopy and sticky, but during intense physical activity in malaria zones, it won't run off with sweat. It was developed for the US military and Ray Mears loves it.
- Bugproof Ultra Clothing Treatment - We sprayed our wardrobe with this before hiking in Laos - the place with the highest risk of malaria on our entire trip. You spray it all over your clothes, including your socks, it dries without residue or odour and stays active even after your clothes have been washed a couple of times. Any mosquito landing on treated fabrics will die instantly.
- Impregnated mosquito net - Again, the bugs will die upon contact with an impregnated net, and after a few nights use, the white mesh of ours was dotted with black splodges where winged bloodsuckers had met their fate. We chose one that could be hung from a single point above the bed which came in very handy when hooks and nails were absent. Many nets are box shape and must be hung from four points - if it's too much hassle, you're more likely to leave it in it your rucksack and wake up itching like a mule.
Once we were outside of the malaria zones, we toned down our sprays to slightly less potent products. So although we weren't humming with the stench of DEET, we did get bitten a few times - it's always going to happen. In this case, a
Zap-it device is really going to save you from the intense itching a cluster of bites would normally produce. It's basically a tiny keyring sized gizmo that administers a small electric shock directly to a bite. This kills the histamines that build up under a bite and cause the itch. It's not as painful as it sounds and feels like being poked gently with pin. Despite mixed reviews on Amazon, it worked time and time again for us (and my parents are now Zap-it converts too). We used it in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia and the USA. It even stops the swelling so your legs don't end up looking like bloated pin cushions.
7.
Sporks - Sometimes, you just want to eat a freshly microwaved, home-zapped meal, whether that be rice and chili in a motel room in Nevada or noodles and tuna on a mountain top in Malaysia. Lightweight, strong and much kinder to the environment than disposable cutlery.
8.
Tenguis - Given to us at the start of our travels as a gift by our friends Mai, Yukio & Kaoru in Tokyo, these are a traditional Japanese hand towel made from cotton. We had no idea that a simple piece of fabric would come in so handy. Many public toilets in Asia do not have hand dryers or towels - use number one.. When the temperature is soaring, they also double up as a cloth to dab your face or the back of your neck. Use number two. And so it goes on. On our beach side veranda in Thailand, ours became lampshades for the bright white light bulb hanging over our heads. In the campervan in Australia, they served as ideal covers to protect the iPod and camera sitting in the centre console from the sun and prying eyes. When a bottle of fizzy drink explodes over your hands, the tengui is there to mop it up. If you want to protect something in your rucksack, wrap it in your tengui. If you're hiking and want to have an impromptu picnic, the tengui is there to sit on, or use as a table cloth, or drape over your sandwiches to keep the flies away. When you've just smothered yourself in sunscreen or mosquito spray and want to wipe your hands clean - tengui! I'm beginning to sound like a salesman...
9.
Re-hydration sachets. In South East Asia, in Australia, in the USA...it...gets...
hot! You may think you're drinking enough, but that slightly nauseous feeling, that loss of appetite or mild headache - that's dehydration. Although in its mild form, it won't kill you, and yes, drinking water will help, but it can quickly ruin your day when you're doing heavy exercise or just wandering in the sunshine. For the sake of a few of these in your pack, you can replace the sugars and salts lost during perspiration and get back on track much sooner. Pour the powders into a bottle or cup of water, mix and drink. On many occasions, we were able to pick these up in pharmacies for just a few pence each and drank them all day instead of plain old water. If you run out of sachets, many travel first-aid kits contain a small
scoop that measures out a palatable mixture of sugar and salt to add to a cup of water. Re-hydration solutions are also vital during intense bouts of diarrhoea and do a great job at preventing hangovers if consumed before going to bed.
10.
Travelpacks - Yes, two of the best things we took with us are our rucksacks. When you think of a large rucksack, you'll probably think of a tall, top loading, camping style sack with hiking boots and a frying pan dangling from it. But then imagine that the one item you really need is right at the bottom and the only way to get it is to take
everything out, and you only packed it all in there an hour ago. When you're living out of a rucksack, you really,
really need a travelpack. With these, the whole bag zips open, presenting all of your luggage "suitcase" style. Ours also have handy detachable day-sacks. We used Osprey Waypoints. They are expensive but incredibly tough bags. When your bag is zooming along a packed airport carousel, you want to be able to grab it and yank it without it falling to bits, or when you only have a few seconds to grab something out before a grumpy bus driver closes the luggage doors, you don't want your zip to burst open and pour your belongings onto the road - a year of travel will test every part of a pack, from the adjusters and clips to the fabric itself. Also, if you're travelling around Asia, don't even think about bringing a suitcase. Trust me.
What was the scariest moment?
Thinking we were in the middle of a terrorist attack in Phnom Penh. Our room had no windows and the explosions from the market place outside were deafening. Read the full story
here.
Are you different for the experience you have just had?
I'm pretty sure our parents will still recognise us when we get back - we're not dressed in baggy tie-dyed trousers, carrying bongos or anything like that. If anything, I think we are going to be less intimidated by unfamiliar situations and far more open to new experiences or new ways of living. We're also used to living with such a small amount of "stuff" now. We've realised how unnecessarily cluttered our home and lives had become.
Finally, the world is now so much smaller to us and we have really seen that it actually is as easy as clicking a few buttons on
Expedia and spending a bit of cash in order to go see it - what's the worst that could happen? If an Englishman has been there before, an Englishman will have already made a complete hash of the language, will have already walked into the kitchen instead of the toilets, will have flicked his chopsticks into his neighbour's lap and will have already asked directions to something right in front of him. Grab a
Point-It book, grab your passport and go see something different - you'll probably love it. And if it all goes wrong, at least you'll get an anecdote out of it.
What now?
Good question. We're going to try and get back to Vietnam somehow, to live, study and work, but really, we're open to a wide list of countries if the right opportunity comes along. We'd love to move our life to New York permanently, but without work, which is hard to get, you can't get a Visa, and without a Visa, you can't get work. For now, we're heading back to England to outstay our welcome at parents' and friends houses while we get ourselves sorted.
Any regrets?
None. Well, maybe that we'd done this whole thing sooner. but I also think thirty is a good age to take a break from the routine of life and properly hit the "reset" button.
If you have a question or would like more information about anything at all, please leave a comment below.
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