World Tour 2000 - 2002
First of all you need to save lots of money, unless you are going to work when you travel which we are not. Find a savings account that gives the best interest rate and dump as much as you can in there each month. We used the Prudential EGG bank with an internet only account which gave 6.25%.
Once you have saved your pile of cash, work out how much you have each day of your trip to spend. Remember to leave aside some for trips, dives, and other add-on activities. Our budget works out at 32 UK Sterling Pounds per day for the two of us.
Secondly you need to pay off all your debts, leave that one up to you how you do it, we hid our credit card for 8 months and took sandwiches to work. Sounds silly but we saved heaps.
Decide the basic outline of your route. Some people say it is best to plan two of three bigs stops on the way round with a few smaller stopovers in between. Once you have worked out where you want to go talk to a travel company about RTW tickets. Be prepared to alter your route as it may not be possible to do exactly what you want with the RTW packages available. We used Trailfinders and we added on a few extra flights to the RTW package to add in all the places we wanted to go. Our RTW ticket is with One World.
Visa's. Work out what you need well in advance as some need to be applied for by post (eg USA) although we used Trailfinders to sort out the USA one to ensure we got it. The USA can be dodgy to get one for especially if you have no job to come back to or no mortgage (eg a traveller). Most other visa's can be applied for in person the week before you go at the appropriate embassy in London and it does save you some money to do it yourself.
Vaccinations, these proved a bit of a pain to sort out as no two people we went to see gave us the same advice on what ones we needed. We worked on the principle of if in doubt have it but some of them are very expensive. Again work out what you need well in advance as some, like rabies, are a course of injections over three months and you get full protection at the end of the course not after the first jab. You can get a lot of jabs free from your NHS doctor but expect to pay for yellow fever and make sure they give you an official certificate of vaccination as this will only be accepted when travelling from affected areas.
Travel Guides. The important thing to remember with these is the word GUIDE, use them as that only. They do give you lot of information on where to go and what to see but you will find out other things on the way. We used a mixture of Lonely Planet and Rough Guides to get some back ground information. We have found, now we are travelling, that the South-East Asia on a Shoestring Guide, although useful, does leave out a lot of detail on the places you are visiting, and the full Malaysia guide for instance is more useful.
What type of backpack you take more or less depends on what type of traveller you intend to be. If you are mainly going to be staying in hostels the best one to get is the suitcase style backpack which allows you to flat pack you clothes and easy access. If you want to do a lot of trekking where you have to carry your tents and provisions etc, it is better to get a top loading trekking pack. We have choosen Karrimore Panther 65L (ladies fit) and 75L, as we intend to do lots of hikes and treks.
We recommend you take your own sleeping bag, and it is always a good idea to get a special liner to go inside as it is easier to clean than the whole bag. What rating bag you take depends on where you are going and what you are going to do. Make sure you do not fall into the trap of getting a light sleeping bag because the country is hot during the day. Most hot countries get really cold at night and rate you bag to keep you warm then. Also the higher up mountains and hills you climb the colder it gets. We have choosen Vango Ultralite 1300 sleeping bags and we'll let you know how they fair up.
If you work you will need to inform your tax office you are going, they will send you a P85 to fill out. It is also a good idea to let the DSS know, or they may chase you for National Insurance contributions for the period you are away when you get back.
We have put our car in storage, and you can declare SORN with the DVLA which means you do not have to pay car tax or MOT the car whilst you are gone, only caveat is that it must be off the road on private property (thanks Dad). You can also insure your car with laid up cover but it cannot be driven on road and it must be kept in a locked garage, works out at a tenner a month if you need to do this.
Now the rest of our preperation was spent buying the little items we thought we would need to take. We will list below the things we took and used a lot, and the things we took and ended up never using, as we have only just begun our trip this may take a while......