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Tag Archives: family world trip
RTW Travel – How Much Does It Cost?
How much to travel the world? This post on our costs is way overdue…
To travel around the world was my childhood dream. The restlessness behind such a dream is one of the few personality traits that I share with my husband. We left Ireland in 1995 planning to spend “just a couple of years” living and working in the US before continuing onwards ever onwards. Fifteen years later, as I approached my 40th birthday and we considered high schools for our older son, our settled, normal life rankled.
How Much To Travel The World: Our Research
Our dream to travel for a year took shape slowly. We agreed to research costs. We postponed any decision-making until we had facts, in dollars and cents, to evaluate. The data posted by sixintheworld and 360degreeslongitude was invaluable. (The recent collation of real-life examples of RTW trip costs by jackandjilltravel.com is excellent). There is general consensus in these sources that $25,000 per person is a good baseline approximate cost for a year’s travel.
How Much To Travel The World: Itinerary Choices
To refine our budget further, we needed an itinerary. I read Tim Leffel’s excellent World’s Cheapest Destinations for ideas on where to go to make our money last longer. I pulled per-country budgeting guidelines from the Lonely Planet website and plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet. (Look under Practical Information/Costs for the country you’re interested in visiting. Here’s the entry for Thailand, for example). I used a per-country simple formula of:
(LP’s higher daily budget amount) * (number of days we planned to be in the country) * 4
and then summed that up across all the countries we planned to visit.
How Much To Travel The World: Our Budget
A copy of our initial budget lay on the table. We both stared at the rolled-up total, which came in at just under $80,000. We went back and forth on whether we should or should not go. The conversation ebbed and flowed over a number of days until we faced the decision which we’d probably really made the minute we had agreed to do the research. We had to go. Not to do so would leave a dream unfulfilled.
The decision to make this trip required that we plunder our savings and home equity. Or what was left of them since we’d already seen our savings decimated twice: once with the dot-com crash and again with the market implosion of 2008-2009. Deciding to spend what we had left before it too disappeared was perversely, an easy decision.
Taking this trip is a huge gamble. We’re betting that once we return to Seattle we will be able to get work and continue working for another 30 years to rebuild retirement savings. That we’ll likely need to work past normal retirement age is a price we’re OK with paying for an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
How Much To Travel The World: Our Actual Costs
* Flights have been our single biggest cost. We chose not to buy a RTW ticket, preferring instead to travel overland as much as possible and buy point-to-point tickets as necessary (i.e. to jump oceans). Total cost per person: $3,200.
* We’ve scheduled (and may add) a limited number of Big Ticket Experiences, roughly one per continent: the Inca Trail Hike and the Gibbon Experience so far. Next week the boys will be doing a one-week scuba certification course. I’ll add the total spent when the trip is over.
* Our Daily Budget is $150 to cover food, transportation and accommodation for all four of us. This is easier to keep to in some countries (Thailand, Ecuador) than others (Chile). As I add per-country pages to this website, I’ll include the actual average daily cost – see the Ecuador page for example.
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Photo Credit: LiteForex
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Bokeo Village Faces
We’ve all been downed by a cold/flu for a few days so instead of a post, today I’m sharing some photos of the villagers which we took on our way out of the Gibbon Experience . Enjoy!
We met these local boys on our way back into the village. They were having a grand old time constructing monster balls of mud.
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Brothers Together In Penang
There are times when my boys fight with each other just for the sake of it. There are times when they go out of their way to bug each other. And then there are moments like this. Unprompted, unscripted and priceless.
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A Day In Penang
The overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Penang arrives at the Butterworth station between 5am and 6am. The train station is tiny with just two platforms and a small office.
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A Day In Kuala Lumpur
We arrived in Kuala Lumpur early in the morning (Air Asia flights are dirt cheap but seem to always be between 6am and 8am regardless of where you’re flying from or going to).
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What Does Nationality Mean Today?
Where Are You From? This innocuous question, frequently asked during our travels has led me to ponder, possibly too deeply, what national identity means. So today I’m going to indulge in a little navel-gazing on this subject – feel free to check out now if this is not your cup of tea.
When someone asks me “Where are you from?”, I usually reply “I’m Irish, but I live in Seattle”. The typical response is something like “I thought you were American” usually said in the tone of “I knew it was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick” since I, accent-chameleon that I am, have only a shadow of a brogue left in my speech. (I have lived in the US for the past fifteen years and I have US citizenship.)
We’ve met other expats with similar life stories on our travels. On a winery tour in Argentina, we met a friendly German who told us he was from Hamburg only to later share that he’d been living in Brazil for over forty years. On the same tour we met a much older couple with the sharpest New York accents that I have ever heard. It turns out that the wife was born in and had lived her whole life in that great city but her husband was Argentinian and had immigrated to New York in his twenties. He didn’t correct our initial assumption that he was American. I can attest that sometimes I don’t correct people either since, for a brief conversation with someone you may never meet again, the explanation is just not worth the hassle.
But, my nationality is not my accent. It is not where I choose to live, work, vote and pay taxes (and unlike some, I do vote and I value the right to do so). I will likely never describe myself as American because, being an expat, I don’t consider myself American.
All of which has led me to consider, what does cause me to identify myself as Irish? It’s hardly language since the only Gaelic I know is the little I learned in school. Music and literature are important in Ireland and there are plenty of both in our house but books and songs alone seem insubstantial. Guinness does not a cultural tradition make and Ireland has great seafood but nothing like the strong culinary identity of say, France. I think it’s fair to say that national customs are important but nebulous. The weight of any one thing, whether it’s food, dance or sport, depends not only on the country in question but also on personal interest and participation.
I grew up in Ireland, moving to the U.S. when I was 24. Having lived there is very important but I haven’t lived there in 15 years and, as any long-term expat knows, countries change. My experience of Ireland is very different to the Irish college kids who we met at a hostel in Peru. After all, they were about twenty years younger than me and had spent their teen years in an affluent country enjoying the benefits of the Celtic Tiger whereas I remember an economically very weak country with rampant unemployment.
Here’s a thought: “Is history the key factor?” Certainly I can give chapter and verse on the various wars and rebellions that make up Irish history. History as a driver of national identity would also account for my children passionately choosing to describe themselves as American – even as they present Irish passports at borders. They have adopted the stories they’ve learned about the Pilgrims and the heroes of the American Revolution as their own.
We’ll soon be visiting Vietnam. Is there a better example of where nationality and history crash together in a way which will influence what we see and do while visiting somewhere? Whether you travel with your children or not I believe that as a parent today, you need to educate your child not only about your country and culture but also, with nuance and feeling, about how your country has behaved on the world stage.
I believe that nationality still matters. I believe that history is an important part of national identity. Do you?
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Bathroom Door Sign
My boys fell over themselves laughing when they found this by the restrooms in a cafe in Santiago. (We’ve since seen it in other restaurants, cafes and the odd hostel).
Oh, yes, the joys of traveling with teen boy (bathroom) humor. It’s a laugh-a-minute most days. Trust me.
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Colca Canyon Trek Peru
One of the best things about our Colca Canyon trek was that this was the first time we hiked as part of a group. Even though I’d been avoiding this since I wasn’t sure how other vacationers would appreciate being paired with my sometimes cantankerous children, it worked out fine.
This is our group at the top of Colca Canyon having just climbed up from the valley floor on the morning of the third day of the hike.
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Information on traveling to Peru with Children.
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Packing To Travel For A Year
Before we left on our trip, one of the first questions friends asked was “What will you bring with you?” – usually my (women) friends and usually incredulously.
This post is a long-overdue answer to that question and also because my friend Peter challenged me that even with all my careful shopping the contents of our packs will be completely different by the time we get back to Seattle. (Full pack lists are at the bottom of this post.)
We packed four days worth of clothes each. The boys each have four pairs of convertible pants, four t-shirts, undies and socks. Murph has a shirts rather than t-shirts. My wardrobe is a little more varied: I have one dress, one skirt and two pairs of convertible pants; I have three t-shirts and two light wool tops from Ibex. We each have a set of thermal undies, flip-flops, low hiking shoes, a fleece sweater and swimwear. In the specialized gear category we each have a silk sleep sack, a large travel towel and either a bandanna or a hat. We all have Petzl headlamps (extremely useful) and a light rain shell jacket.
We bought almost everything at either REI or ExOfficio – OK, except the Ibex tops I have which were a splurge. We did have some gear (such as long undies and rain jackets) already, but since both of the boys had grown a lot in the past twelve months, they needed new clothes and shoes anyway. Shoes were our largest single expense at about $100 each. It didn’t help that my kids are both in adult shoe sizes.
Even though I know that you can buy clothing in every country, I did go out of my way to research products in advance with two things in mind: CAM is notoriously difficulty to dress (this is a kid who has previously had year-long phases of wearing just one particular brand of jeans); specialty gear such as convertible pants are very handy when traveling but can be ridiculously expensive to buy outside the U.S.
One small fashion note: I a-g-o-n-i-z-e-d about wearing convertible pants. There’s just no way to make them look anything but dorky. In the end, I couldn’t justify packing both pants and shorts and so I went looking for the least offensive pair of convertibles that I could find.
The total approximate cost to kit us out for a year? $1500.
We also have a bunch of electronics – camera, netbook, kindles, iphone – most of which we had already. The kids started with a school packet each containing workbooks, paper, a fully-stocked pencilcase and a journal notebook. (Since BigB’s backpack was stolen in Arica, he’s skipping math until we can get a new copy of his math book but we’ve replaced everything else). We’re using backpacks that we had already. We have a basic medical kit which I re-stocked from our local drugstore before we left and basic toiletries.
So there you have it. We’ll see if Peter is right and we’re all wearing completely different clothes by the time we get home.
Full Packing Lists
BigB: 4x REI boy’s convertible pants, 2 cotton t-shirts, 2 technical t-shirts, 1 Eddie Bauer fleece sweater, 1 pair of REI boy’s thermal underwear, Lands’ End swimsuit + swimshirt, 1 Sierra Designs light rain jacket, 3x ExOfficio men’s briefs, 3x Thorlo hiking socks, 1x Merrell low hiking boots.
CAM: Almost identical to BigB except his pants are REI men’s small and the swimwear is Quicksilver.
Murph: 2x REI men’s convertible pants, 2x ExOffico pants, 2x ExOfficio long-sleeved shirts, 2x Columbia short-sleeved shirt, 1x North Face shell, 4x ExOfficio undies, 1x thermal undies (no clue what the brand is, we had these already), 3x Smartwool socks, 1x Merrell low hiking boots.
Me : 1x North Face convertible pants, 1x ExOfficio Amphi pants, 1x REI Pinyon Peak skirt (black), 1x ExOfficio travel dress (black), 1x North Face printed t-shirt, 1x REI OXT t-shirt, 1x ExOfficio ExO Dri t-shirt, 2x Ibex fine wool short-sleeved tops, 1x Lowe fleece, 1x REI rain shell, 1x Teva light hiking boots, 3x Smartwool socks, 4x ExOfficio undies, 1x Snow Angel thermal underwear.
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