Costs

Once made the decision and overcome the initial euphoric feeling that came with it, the first reality check were the costs. Can we afford it? Or rather, WHAT can we afford? We realized straight away that a full year like it was in our original plans, it is too hard both financially and school-wise. By reducing the time from 12 to 8 months though everything looked much more doable.

The first step in deciding the itinerary was to exclude any stop in Europe (we live in the middle of it, we can see it whenever we want) and North America, (we'll leave Christmas shopping in NY for when we'll be older and calmer). As cost of living, these are the most expensive parts of the planet hence we eliminated them completely. The next bit to be chopped off our map was Africa, only because we both see it as a place of its own, deserving a greater attention than the one we could give it in only a few weeks.

At that point we were left with Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South America. We both came up with our preferences: for me NZ, South America and South East Asia, in the order. For Brendan China, OZ and NZ. We both agreed that it made sense to spend as long as possible in the countries furthest away where we don't know if we'll ever have the chance to go back. We often talked about moving to Oz if the right opportunity arose, so this is our chance to try what it's like to live Down Under and see if it suits us.

Now we had a clearer idea of what we wanted to do: 3 months in Oz, 3 in NZ, partly staying put in one place and partly moving around, with a month holiday in Asia at the beginning and one in South America at the end. By simply putting things that way already made it more possible!

The next step was to talk with the local travel agency, Foreign AFares (thank you Sinead!) to organize the plane tickets. Always travel in one direction, back tracking not permitted, number of stops and restricted mileage, the rules were too many for us so we decided to look for the expert's advice. Once cleared our minds on these rules we understood very quickly that it wasn't possible to see everything, despite actually going around the globe. This was the second reality check and made another casualty: South East Asia will have to wait another trip.

The tickets we finally booked are called World Discovery Plus and allow 29000 air miles with the possibility to buy an extra 3000 for 150E per person. The airlines we'll be using are British Airways and Qantas, all the seats were booked in Y class as soon as they appeared on the system, some 330 days before departure. The final itinerary is as follows:

29Dec Cork-Heathrow-Beijing
surface to Shanghai
20Jan Shanghai-Sidney
07March Sidney-Cairns
surface to Brisbane
12Apr Brisbane-Christchurch
surface to Auckland
05Jul Auckland-Nadi (Fiji)
12Jul Nadi-Auckland
13Jul Auckland-Santiago
surface to Buenos Aires
19Aug Buenos Aires-Heathrow-Cork

Full cost, for 2 adults and 2 children 10400E, (2220+tax pp adults, 1690+tax pp child)

Listening to Red Hot Cili Peppers, Snow