Reflecting on our Trip: Planning & Logistics

It’s now been several months since we completed our trip and looking back trying to think about the experience is a little daunting.  Over the course of just slightly more than 2 months Chris graduated from Columbia Business School, we got engaged, and we travelled around the world.  Does that make it the best vacation we will ever have?  Hopefully the best is yet to come, but it certainly makes it the most important.   

Our trip took us across two major continents, one subcontinent, the Middle East, and the islands of Hawaii, Greece and Ireland.  We both got to experience places and cultures that were new, different and exciting.  In all the places we went, we met interesting people and made unique friends. 

To summarize the trip, it’s probably best to break it up into a couple of definable categories and discuss them each individually.

It’s a Small World After All

As we were preparing to leave for the trip both of us started getting nervous about living out of backpacks for two months and relying on literally dozens of flights, trains, buses, ferries and every other kind of transportation methods you can think of to run on time from and to the places we were travelling.  Though we had spent months planning, and the trip made sense on paper, the anxiety of worrying about having missed some important detail began to take hold.  So, at the beginning, we agreed to take everything one step at a time and only worry about where we were and where we were going next. 

To be sure, we missed details: Our first flight to Hawaii had us sitting in separate rows, our flight from Japan to China arrived late at night when the first part of the tour required us to arrive that afternoon, our only flight transfer (in China) didn’t give us sufficient time to make the switch (though we ultimately made it), and there were multiple times we found ourselves wandering around international cities with our heavy bags wondering where the heck our hotel was actually located. 

Having now returned safely home, however, we can say with impunity that one of the most surprising features of our trip was the ease with which our travels progress and the lack of problems we encountered.  The system, as it turns out, works!  We never missed a flight, never encountered significant delays, and we (and our bags) arrived where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to.  The simplicity with which we gallivanted around the globe is truly a marvel of modern society (more on this in a moment).

Go West!

When first planning our trip we used a couple of different websites that helped immensely with visualizing the plan and with deciding the places we wanted to go.  One is www.oneworld.com and the other www.staralliance.com. They both offer effectively the same product which is an interactive map of the world with functional buttons for each city with an airport.  The only major difference is that “oneworld” is run by American Airlines and their global partners while “staralliance” is run by Delta and Continental along with their global partners.  Regardless, you should go to those pages and check out their functionality.  It’s fun to play with even if you aren’t planning a world trip.

In using this system we started to discuss where we wanted to go and in what order.  We developed a plan which turned out to be the single best decision we made in setting up our trip:  fly west, not east.

Having travelled to Europe several times previously, our natural inclination was to start our trip where we felt most comfortable.  When planning, however, we considered that it always seemed easier to come home from Europe than it was go to Europe.  The reason, in a word, is “time”. 

Jetlag is a factor wherever you travel, but there are two distinct kinds of jetlag, the jetlag from losing time and the jetlag from gaining time.  Jetlag from gained time is far easier to handle than jetlag from losing time.  Imagine if, every few days, you gained an hour of time (so waking up at 8am felt like waking up at 9am).  This is effectively what travelling west does.  The alternative is to travel east where every few days waking up at 8am feels like waking up at 7am and then 6am and then 5am and so on.  You can see the enormous advantage.  Almost every time we got on a plane, we gained an hour in the morning which made the trip that much easier.

For anyone who ever considers a round-the-world trip, if we could give you just one piece of advice, this is it:  Travel west.

Around the World in 80 60 Days

In 1873 Jules Verne published his classic novel, “Around the World in Eighty Days”.  In it, a wealthy British gentleman agrees to a wager (worth about $1 million in today’s money) that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days travelling through most of the same places that our trip took us (though in reverse as he wasn’t clever enough to go west). 

At the time of the book, the technological innovations of the 19th century had opened the possibility of rapid circumnavigation and the prospect fascinated Verne and his readership. In particular three technological breakthroughs occurred in 1869-70 that made a tourist-like around-the-world journey possible for the first time: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869).

It was the end of an age of exploration and the start of an age of fully global tourism that could be enjoyed in relative comfort and safety. It sparked the imagination that anyone could sit down, draw up a schedule, buy tickets and travel around the world, a feat previously reserved for only the most heroic and hardy of adventurers.

This idea of “global tourism”, developed less than 140 years ago.  At the time 80 days was, in Verne’s book, the absolute shortest amount of time that it could take a person to travel effectively the path we took without delays or time for relaxation. We made the trip in ¾ of the time and we spent a good deal of it relaxing on beaches across the globe.

The world we live in today is truly a marvel of interconnectedness and speed.  There is no where on the planet that can’t be reached within two days, regardless of where you start.  Distance has become less daunting.