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A Pain in the Arm and the Wallet

I type this with a right arm that’s a little bit sore, and a left arm that’s not too bad off, but wouldn’t be happy if you gave it a friendly punch. This morning Jeff and I accomplished one of the big to-dos on our list: we got vaccinated. In an earlier post, we invited you to vote on what vaccinations we should receive. And you should be pleased to know that we listened … for the most part.

I can now say that we are vaccinated against Polio, Tetanus, Meningitis, and Yellow Fever. We are 1/3 of the way towards being vaccinated against Japanese Encephalitis. And we have a pack of Typhoid pills hanging out in the refrigerator, and by the end of next week, we’ll be vaccinated against it too. So yes, we got 5 shots in the arm today, and we have two more to go. Fortunately, we’d both already been vaccinated against Hepatitis A & B, so we could forgo that one, and we passed on the Rabies. Although, to be fair, we didn’t have a choice. The rabies vaccine is in short supply right now and is being restricted to those who have actually been bitten. I can’t help but say I’m a little pleased by this, because it means I didn’t have to make a decision.

In addition to all the vaccines, we have a mountain of prescriptions waiting to be filled: two different types of malaria pills, anti-diarrheal pills, and general antibiotics.

We also have two bound books filled with information specific to our trip.

That makes me feel a little bit better about the office visit fee, and to be fair, we were there for an hour and a half, and they were very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. They were also more than a little blown away by our plans. I think they thought we were a little loony. (She did double check with us that we didn’t have any known psychological issues when going through our medical history forms.)

As for the answer to the question you’re all wanting to ask—what it all cost—well my friends, the answer is $1,263. And finishing off the Japanese Encephalitis vaccines will cost us another $540.

For those unable to do math, that’s a whopping $1,803. (You can see how that breaks down in the Details section of our site.)

It’s a phenomenal amount of money when you consider that what we got out of it is some sore arms and the possibility of feeling like we have the worst case of flu ever (that’s a direct quote from the doctor, but so far, so good).

But it’s a tiny amount of money when you consider that it will go a long way towards keeping our brains from exploding, our jaws from locking, our limbs from paralyzing, and our organs from failing.

In the end, you were right. You can’t put a price on your health, and I’m fairly certain that my life is worth more than $901.50.

******

Next on the to-do list in regards to health:

1. Make a decision on health insurance policies.
2. Get life insurance.

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Mission Impossible: Planning the South America Itinerary

Your mission, dear readers, should you choose to accept, is to determine how we will spend our time in South America. (You didn’t think we were just going to let you visit our blog and not do any work, now did you?)

You will need to keep the following in mind:

1. We will have approximately 22 weeks. Though we don’t have exact dates yet, for now we will assume the dates to be October 19 through March 21.

2. In this time period, we would like to visit: Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.

3. We must start in Nicaragua.

4. We must end near a major airport with international flights.

5. We must be in Peru (on the Inca Trail to be exact) the last week of December/first week of January.

6. Things that we are intent on doing include: the Inca Trail (4 days + acclimation period in Cusco), Roraima in Venezuela (5 days), Spanish lessons in Granada, Nicaragua (1 week), the Galapagos (7-10 days), hike the Circuit or W in Torres del Paine in Patagonia, Chile (5-7 days), Amazon tour [unsettled on location–Peru, Bolivia, Brazil–you pick] (4-7 days).

7. We would like to minimize flights/optimize overland transport, while at the same time not burning days and days on travel.

So what do you got? Is there just absolutely no way for us to fit all of this in or is this entirely doable?

Post your best attempt at an itinerary in the comments. It can be as basic as Weeks 1-3 Nicaragua or as detailed as Day 1: Arrive in Managua, Transfer by bus to Granada. (We would seriously owe you if you did that!). Whoever ends up closest to our actual itinerary (as lived out by us, not planned by us) could win a prize. (Then again, they also could not… And then again, I could just mail you a postcard and call that the prize…)

Now that Jeff and I have given notice to our landlady that we’re moving out in two months (!!!!), this is our next big project, and let me tell you, it’s not as easy as it should be. There’s always “what about this” or “well if we went this way, then we could…” And yes, yes, we hear you about not over planning, leaving room for spontaneity, etc. We will, we will. We just want to have some kind of rough itinerary planned out. Maybe we’ll get going and toss it out the bus window. Or maybe we’ll stick to it like peanut butter on jelly (ewww…have I ever mentioned that I have never eaten that very weird food combo…). Only time will tell. For now, give us your best shot.

Come on, you just know you want to tell us where to go.

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A Welcome Day Off

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that we’ve had a busy summer. If not, welcome, we’ve had a busy summer. I am trying to finish my graduate thesis, with all the experimenting, writing and bureaucracy that entails. Theresa has been working full time and writing full time putting together a hiking guide to DC. So on the weekend we actually go on these hikes so she’ll have something to write about during the week. Needless to say, there’s not a lot of time in between for us.

In fact, since we went on vacation with Theresa’s family toward the end of May, we have not had a single day not spent entirely either at work or on a mountain hiking (before that, it was I don’t even know how long). Needless to say, today was a welcome change to all that. We had set a goal of two ten mile hikes for the weekend, and got them both in on Saturday (minor aside: two more bear sightings to add to the total, including one that must’ve been 40 feet up a tree … it quickly rappelled down and ran off … so that’s why they tell you not to climb a tree to escape a bear).

Our prolific Saturday left all of Sunday off, no major trips to make, no major jobs to accomplish. We just were able to have a normal weekend day like we used to. We slept in. We made chocolate chip waffles and bacon for breakfast. We read the Sunday paper. We made our first (and possibly only) trip to the pool. We even got to spend a little time planning our trip. Who would’ve thought, crazy. But the joy of it was we had the freedom to wake up when we chose and decide what we wanted to do that day.

And so we got to talking about how soon, this would be every day. Sure, we’ve got grand goals and buses and flights to catch, but we’ll wake up every morning with complete freedom. To lay around if we want. To go somewhere if we want. To not have drastic future consequences either way. No deadlines. No requirements. Just where we are now, where we want to go and where we want to be at the end of the day. It sounds so liberating, and ultimately, a big reason why something like a round the world trip appeals so much to us.

But this actually led us back to something we discussed long ago in our planning, and I think today reinforced its importance. We both have something wrong with us, in that when we have the freedom to choose ourselves, we end up busier than ever. When we travel, we both have a tendency to try to do as much as we can in as little time as we can, usually due to the fact that we have a short amount of time and a lot of things we want to see, but is also just our nature. Such nonstop busy-ness becomes unsustainable after a short while, especially on such a long trip. I guess you could say this is our first marathon after a number of short sprints. So we need to learn to pace ourselves.

We decided it would very important to regularly take a day and do nothing out of the ordinary. Sleep in, wander to the market, sit in a hammock and read a book, take a short walk. Recharge. Today was a fine example. We’ve been feeling exasperated, hopeless against the piles of things we need to do, even as we furiously work to do them. But we spent just one day escaping from it and it feels more manageable. Not do-able, mind you, just more manageable. One day a week (or so) where we make it a goal not to have any goals, and we should be able to keep our sanity for the trip.

So that’s our plan. Anyone out there have similar “issues” and found good ways of dealing with them?

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It’s Official!

We have official acceptance of my thesis application! This pretty much confirms my defense date will be September 26th and we’ll be able to leave on schedule in mid-October. I’ll spare you the nightmare details of the Swedish bureaucratic system, but I’ve successfully navigated it and we’ve got approval. So, I guess this means no more meandering stories about bears, its time to get planning. Departure date is now officially less than four months away!

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Budgeting for Africa

This the third in our three part budget outline. See Part 1 – South America and Part 2 – Southeast Asia.

We’re currently planning on spending approximately three months working our way down the east coast of Africa, from Ethiopia south to South Africa.  This leg of the trip has been the most difficult to nail down a budget for.  There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, our sole experience in Africa has come from our amazing trip to Egypt in 2006. We found Egypt to be fantastically easy to navigate and very cheap, characteristics that do not seem to fit the rest of the east coast as well. The second is also entirely our fault, because it is the part of the trip furthest away. Therefore we’ve done the least planning for it, so we really don’t have a great idea of our must see places and our must do activities (more specific than … go on safari, and … see Victoria Falls, etc).

Among things that are not our fault, Africa has a less developed tourism infrastructure that well known backpacking destinations like Southeast Asia do. Overall, there seem to be two poles of tourism service, the “very low” and the “over the top”, but little of the happy medium for budget minded travelers like ourselves. This makes it difficult to predict how much we will spend on average. And finally, it seems there’s more variance between the countries we’ll be visiting than Southeast Asia or South America. But I won’t back down! We’ll give this a go.

Every Day Expenses

Food seems like it will be quite cheap on the whole, I think we’ll be quite comfortable assuming $10 a day. Accommodation seems as though it will vary quite a bit depending on what is available in a given area. I think $40 a day should be a comfortable number, we’ll be well under that enough that it will make up for the times we’ll pay substantially more. Transportation will be somewhat the same way, since while buses are cheap, they may not exist in some places we want to go and private transport or airplane is not cheap. I think we’ll be safe and budget $20 a day. For our daily activities then this comes to $70 a day.

Activities

This is also a very uncertainly defined area at the moment, there are a number of things we want to do, but they can also vary wildly in cost.

Gorilla Trekking $1000

Safari $2000

Climb Kilamanjaro $1500

Any number of other adventure outings requiring guides $priceless

Put this all together and we expect the costs for Africa to be quite substantial. 90 days at $70 a day comes out to $6300 and you add it our additional activities and the total balloons to ~$12000.

Now, as evident throughout this post, this part of our trip is thusf ar the most poorly planned and the most poorly researched. So there are bound to be inaccuracies in this, and we would love to have you correct them. Any experience in Africa? What were your expenses? How easily were you able to get around?

———-

So to summarize our entire budget and come to one big number, our entire budget comes to $32000 for two people. This presumes our RTW flights are covered with frequent flier miles and is based off of daily projected costs in each area with costs for the additional activities we hope to do factored in as well. This number does not include pre-trip costs such as insurance, immunizations, moving, storage, gear, etc. We’ll address these issues and their costs as they come up.

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Southeast Asia Budget

We were in the midst of outlining our budget for our trip in three parts (see Part 1 – South America) when a week-long vacation to South Carolina so rudely interrupted us. So now that life is back on its busy schedule, its time for us to finish the last two legs. Our second continental stop takes us to Southeast Asia, where we are planning on staying approximately three months. We’re breaking our trip down into two categories, every day expenses for our daily food, lodging and necessary transport and activities for all the crazy, unique things we will want to fill our time doing.

Every Day Expenses

The region is a backpacker haven for a region: it is cheap. Most of what we’ve read pegs decent budget hotel rooms at under $10-15, cheaper in some of the less developed nations. So as we’ve been trying to do, we’ll play it safe and budget $15 a day for hotel. Eating will also not tax our wallets. Street food can be found for less than $1, with restaurants slightly more. I’m not sure I’ll ever be motivated to cook on my own when I can get some fantastic noodles for less than a buck, so we won’t budget too much home cooking in. $10 a day should cover the occasional splurge. Since the region is fairly small, we will traveling primarily by bus, which is quite inexpensive. We will likely take a flight out to either Indonesia or the Philippines (help us decide), though even those seem relatively inexpensive at the moment due to heavy competition. $5 a day should do us handsomely. That brings us to $30 a day between the two of us.

Activities

Here’s the thing. There are actually very few special activities we want to do in Southeast Asia, at least ones we will have to arrange in advance and hire guides and shell out expensive fees for. Obviously we will go to Angkor Wat, but guides can be hired just for the day if desired and access to the park costs $20. To me, that seems to fit into the range of the general activities costs. Most of the other sights we want to see fall into this category*. So we will simply budget $10 a day for our activities and consider this done. If Angkor Wat is only $20, this should be plenty to cover our adventures.

So again, adding all of these expenses together, we plan on spending $40 a day for 90 days, or $3600. Now that I get here, I’m shocked at how little that is. I’m not as confident we’ll hit this budget as I am about our South American budget. But, I guess you can’t argue with math. As I said earlier, it’s a backpacker haven for a reason.

*There is one big activity that would blow our budget, though we have not yet officially decided on it yet. Theresa will have more on it soon.

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Useful Things Learned Hiking

Did I ever mention on here that I am writing a hiking book? Well, I am. I have a contract to write a DC area guidebook on hiking for a major travel publisher. By September 15, approximately one month before our departure date and about two weeks after I hope to have jetted over to Sweden, my entire manuscript plus maps and photos is due. What this means is that Jeff and I spend every single weekend hiking, checking off one by one the eighty hikes that will be in this book. So if you’ve ever noticed that our Sunday evening posts aren’t all that fabulous, well I apologize, but come Sunday we’re pooped—not to mention rank smelling.

And though spending every waking moment of our free time out on the trails isn’t exactly awesome for checking things off the RTW to-do list, it isn’t completely wasted time. In fact, we’ve learned a list’s worth of stuff.

1. The gear is good to go. Do we have a comfortable and safe way to carry the camera? How will my clothes hold up to the heat and humidity of the tropics? Can I layer effectively to stay warm without taking anything heavy? Is that Light My Fire Spork going to cut my mouth or be an effective tool? No way to know but test them out, and that’s where hiking has come in. Back in March, I layered up clothes I planned to take and set out for 10 miles of hiking. Verdict: Impressively warm. This past weekend, I donned two other outfits and went out in the near 100 degree temps plus stifling humidity and hiked nearly 20 miles in each. Verdict: There’s not much to be done when it’s that hot, but if I have to wear clothes, these are the ones. Every hike Jeff slings the camera bag across his body, wearing it along with his backpack and snapping away at everything from frogs to waterfalls. Verdict: Comfy, easy to access, and secure even when we’re scrambling over rocks and tramping through water. This weekend, we threw the sporks in the bag and used them to make peanut butter sandwiches and prepare and eat Jamaican chicken. Verdict: Not just a cool piece, but functional too.

2. We’re not going to be the kids holding up the trekking tour. No, we will be the kids laughing in the face of Dead Women’s Pass on the Inca Trail. Okay, maybe not, but we’ll certainly be in shape for the many adventures we plan to take. When Jeff and I stood at the trailhead of our final hike—what would be miles 32-38 for the weekend and miles 41-47 if I also include my Thursday hiking—I can say that neither Jeff nor I were certain our legs would carry us all the way to the ridge and back. But not only did we do it, we did it in less time than what a hiking club that focuses on uphill hikes told us it would take. So if you’re thinking about joining one of our trekking tours, you better come prepared. Otherwise you’ll be seeing nothing but our dust.

3. We really do like each other. When we’re hiking, it’s Jeff, me, and that’s it for up to 12 hours per day. No friends or family members are around to provide conversation. No TVs, iPods, or computers offer diversion. There’s no one to talk to but each other, and though we’ve been doing this all-day, all-weekend hiking for 2.5 months already we’ve yet to run out of things to talk about or become sick of being together. Woohoo! We just might make it around the world for a year without killing each other.

4. Squatting, no problem. Though I will always hold the porcelain pot dear to my heart, I can do without it. I have the squatting thing down. Aren’t you glad to know that?

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Chucking Stuff

I’ve been raised a bit of a pack rat. I hope my folks don’t get too offended for being sold out on the internet, but my mother has plastic boxes full of ten year old brochures. Heck, she has plastic boxes full of plastic boxes that she no longer uses. My Dad saves all the old screws and nails he pulls out, in addition to everyone’s favorite, the cutout underwear waistbands. I don’t think anyone knows what those are saved for (Dad, care to chime in and clarify?). Needless to say, I was destined to be a “saver”.

What I’ve never really understood is the whole psychology of it all. I’m always worried that something I throw away will be the exact thing I will need somewhere down the line. And therefore, I figure I can just file it away for when that time comes. It’s also the same reason I’ll buy something I don’t need when its a ridiculously good deal. I figure, it’ll be perfect someday, and then I’ll be so thankful I got it when I did. But most of the time, it never actually is useful. But I guess the rare occasions I do have exactly what I want reinforces the behavior enough.

So that’s why I think the most daunting part of this trip is probably what to do with all of the stuff we are leaving behind. In four years of living in this apartment, I’ve managed to accumulate a lot of things. A surprising amount. Especially for the small amount of closet space our apartment allows. Among all the things we are going to need to do this summer, packing up all of our things is going to be a big project.

I keep saying I because Theresa doesn’t have this issue that I do. I keep finding small bundles of clothes in the corner whose presence Theresa explains to me as “I don’t wear them anymore, so I’m gonna throw them out.” I’m pretty sure I have more clothes than Theresa, but I usually wear the same ten shirts, three jeans and four pairs of shorts.o fortunately, I have her to help me out with my “affliction.” She’s got a pretty good gauge of whats useful or not and she’s more than happy to share it with me. It doesn’t necessarily make throwing it away any easier though. Of course, I know to ignore her indignant stares about my video games and other electronics.

But needless to say, it’s the one thing about preparing for this trip that I’m dreading the most. Which I guess is good, because as far as issues go, its a pretty minor one. So are you a chucker or a saver? A Theresa or a Jeff? How are you able to fight your compulsions? I’d love some psychological help this summer.

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Time’s a Ticking

October still sounds like it’s a long way off. With summer just taking off, I think of October, a distinctly fall month, and I convince myself that we have plenty of time to get things figured out. But, the truth is, the clock is tick, tick, ticking.

Our mid-October departure date is only 4.5 months away, but in reality we have even less time than that. Jeff will be leaving for Sweden in late August, and I’ll be following him at the beginning of September (provided we get the okay next week for him to proceed with his thesis defense). We won’t return until the beginning of October, at which point we’ll tie up loose ends and take off. We’ll be notifying our landlady in just one month of our intent to move out, actually moving our stuff to Louisville in mid-August, and turning in the keys at the end of August. That’s soon!

Which means there are a lot of things to be done in a short amount of time. (And in saying that, I’m just referring to trip planning things, not Jeff’s writing his thesis or me hiking my remaining 40 trails and completing my book.) Fortunately, if there is one characteristic that I have it’s discipline. I can always buckle down and get the job done. I do what needs to be done, and I don’t accept excuses. So I’m going to lay out a couple of items here that I want to get done in the upcoming weeks. Having them here for all the world to see will provide me with the necessary motivation to get them done. I’m not sure, however, how inspiring Jeff will find this. He doesn’t seem to have the guilt issues I have.

To Do in the Month of June

1. Lay out a general itinerary for the South America leg of the trip (estimated length of stay in each country and must-see sites).
2. Purchase life insurance.
3. Reorder contacts and get a large enough supply to last the entire trip.
4. Determine what vaccinations we are going to get and when/where we’re getting them.
5. Figure out what we have to do to assign power of attorney to someone else to handle our finances. (Any lawyer friends out there want to help us make sense of this?)
6. Make a list of everything we still need to buy.

I’m tempted to continue, but I’m trying to be realistic (not always my strong suit) about what we can accomplish. Anything you can think of that I’m leaving off but should be getting around to about now?

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Dinero, Dinero, Dinero. Budgeting South America

Well you guys did an awesome job on the Straw Poll (and please, continue to add in your estimates/experiences, we’ll keep a running tally). Since I’ve been analyzing data nonstop for the past few weeks, I ran some statistics on what you’re responses, looking at our “collective wisdom.” The theory goes that all of our collective knowledge should produce the most accurate results. We’ll see how that works out. Here’s what you all collectively said:

Total responses: 12

Median budget: $41,000, $34,250-50,000 (25-75%)

Mean budget: $41,171, $34,835-47,507 (95% confidence interval)

So there you go, a nice normal distribution tells us it will cost $41,000 give or take $7000 for us (or two of you) to travel the world for a year.

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Now, that said, Theresa and I get our own say =). We are going to detail for you in as much detail as possible what we expect to spend, but we are going to do it in three parts. One for each continent. This will provide us with nice benchmarks by which to keep tabs on how we are doing with our budget and all of you with a continent by continent breakdown (since that’s where the greatest variance in costs are). We’ll update the finances to see how well we actually did at the end of each continent. So hopefully this will work out.

I’m going to start today with South America. We will be spending approximately 5 months in South America (with a brief stop in Nicaragua). There are two kinds of costs that go into any trip like this one, the first being your mundane, every day existence costs, mainly food, lodging, and transportation between places. The second is all the entertainment and adventure we want to do … which is the real reason to do a trip like this. So that’s obviously going to be a substantial chunk of change. So that’s the gist of how I’m going to sum our planned expenses up.

Every Day Costs:

In our research, we’ve come to the conclusion that private two person rooms at budget hotels/hostels are going to cost us around $30-40 a night. With the nose dive the dollar has been taking these days, we’re going to assume closer to the latter. Now obviously, we have no direct experience with this, but that’s what we’re going to budget. As far as food goes, nice restaurants tend to average ~$5 each for a meal. We also plan on eating some street food and cooking on our own relatively regularly. Using that as a vague basis on which to make estimates, we’ll budget $20 a day for food. This hopefully will be a little on the high end, and will help a little with the “sticker shock” from how little our dollars will buy anymore =). Travel by bus is relatively inexpensive, but by plane is relatively expensive, and neither will be an every day occurrence. Plus, we’ll try to keep our plane travel expenses controlled with frequent flier mile trips (there’s still a lot of work to do on that part of the trip). We do plan on using buses or trains for much of our travel, which seem to be quite cheap. I’d say budgeting $10 a day will cover us for the variety of transportation needs we are going to have. This leaves us at a conservative $70 a day between the two of us. You multiply that by the ~150 days we will be there and we’re looking to spend around $10000 on regular expenses.

Activities:

First of all, we’ll want to do plenty of things like go to museums, go into national parks, rent bikes, things of that nature. I’d say if we budget $10 a day we should cover an activity or two a day for ourselves, and I’m sure we won’t want to do a whole activity or two a day after a very short while. At least not activities beyond lie on the beach or walk around town. A number of the specific activities we want to do in South America are going to be relatively expensive. This is because they are pretty darn cool and lots of other people with plenty of money want to do them too. This isn’t a be and and end all list, but here are most of the specific things we will want to do that we have to specifically hire guides/pay for services:

Galapagos Islands – $1500 per person

Trek to Roraima – $200 per person

Machu Picchu – $400-500 per person

Nicaraguan language school – not more than our food and lodging budget

Amazon Jungle Trip – not clear as our approach is not settled (be sure to vote for your favorite), but likely not more than $200 more than food and lodging.

So when you combine all of this up, we’re looking at around $10000 for both of us to get around, keep ourselves fed and have beds to sleep in. This assumes any flights we take use frequent flier miles or do not gouge our expenses too greatly as they can get expensive in a hurry. It will cost us another $5000-6000 to do all of the things we want to do in South America, leaving us at a total of around $16,000. So there you go, our budget for two people for five months in South America is $16,000.  We’ll evaluate how we did after that leg of the trip.  Next up, Southeast Asia.