Where, When and How?
Where, when and how?
We brainstormed ideas, places, events and festivals and came up with a "wish list". We purchased a huge map of the world and fixed it to our dining room wall, which became the focus of all our mealtimes
Travelling with a child also determined many of our destinations. War torn countries, those with high rates of violence and crime enabled us to cross off large areas of the world, at least until we become seasoned, more street wise travellers. The series 'Walking the America's' managed to cull quite a few more and left us feeling perhaps we were not being very realistic in where we should travel with a child. Feeling slightly over whelmed and disheartened we decided we needed to talk to other travellers and began to search for blog's and sites of other families already doing it.
Find your Tribe
Yes, not only was it doable, but we were not alone! A whole army of global travelling families existed out there and had found one another on line. There was heaps of inspiring blog's, groups and tips with recommendations and ideas which started to refine our decision making even further.We also started to host couchsurfers and open our home to travellers from all over the world. Unlike typical hospitality services, no money is exchanged for accommodation, although often couchsurfers will offer their particular skills or expertise for a bed and meal for a couple of nights. It is a trust based social media platform, where you treat people well and they write you a reference which in turn helps you when you perhaps need a bed for a night while travelling. I declined the request from two Scandinavian blonds offering to do massages, which appealed to the teens in my household!
Couchsurfing was a great experience for us as a family. Each new request became an opportunity to sit around the table with a bottle of wine, sharing and hearing awesome traveller's stories from different parts of the world. Denny our Italian visitor taught me how to cook pasta the correct way as he was appalled to find the man of the house was the cook in our home!! Likewise, I gained a daughter with Sofi from Uruguay, who stayed 3 months and helped us plan the South American leg of our journey. These travellers inspired us and gave us new focus, some great apps to use to help us plan our trip and real insight into where and how to travel safely.
We had a plan and it was starting to come together. We wanted to see countries as backpackers, off the beaten track away from the tourists and to go as far as we could, for as long as we can and that was going to require us travelling on a budget. A tight one at that! Time to pull in a spreadsheet!!
How much does it cost to travel the world?
We are by no means rich and to satisfy curiosity, no we haven't won the lottery. Playing it would help! No, we are your typical kiwi family, luckier than some to own our home, couple of cars and a few nice bits and bobs which we have collected over the years.
Where to start? Well much to my disappointment googling "how much does it cost to travel the world" didn't give me the magic number. We needed to research. We approached each country as a mini budget. Spent hours tracking back packer blog's on how to travel on a budget and collected bulk travel guides and brochures on the must-see destinations for each country, which gave us a pretty good idea of where we want to go and what we want to see. It also confirmed that I would never book through a travel agent ever again!!!
Connecting the dots was the fun part. Rome2Rio app becoming my favourite go to and what appeared on the map as a 2-cm short distance was in fact a 10-hour bus journey or 2 trains and a ferry! Hmm maybe we need to budget in a break somewhere for a sanity stop.
Accommodation being the next big expense to factor in. Fortunately, there are so many amazing apps that cater for every budget and taste. Free accommodation, via CouchSurfing , Airbnb, one of my favourite sites being Booking.com We quickly began to get a feel for the average costs in each country, but be careful, they can vary significantly in different cities as well as whether you are located central to amenities or not.
Some great apps such as budgetyourtrip.com also gave us an idea of average costs for food, water entertainment and even factored in average costs of being ripped off. I doubled that figure, as saying no to salesmen has never been my strong point. Travelling with Michael means that we need to take it slow and not over do it, so rather than lock down and book each destination we deliberately decided to go with the flow, giving us the flexibility to have down time as well as factor in unplanned problems such as illness and meltdowns.
We tackled each country one by one and then placed them together like a huge jigsaw. 'Boom' we had a figure, sadly $40k over budget, so now came the negotiations. What's was a nice to do versus what can we do another time. Alas for us the Trans-Siberian Railway took the chop on this trip, but I scored an extra week in Chile - Win!
As in all budgets there will be stuff not factored in but don't make the same mistakes we did. After planning, securing the finances and then realising we hadn't factored in the cost of vaccinations, visa and insurance! Fortunately for you by the middle of 2018 we will have a pretty good idea whether our budget was right and some 'actuals' to help you plan your journey so watch this space.
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