How We Did It

Planning the trip of a lifetime is obviously very exciting, but it's not without its challenges. The epitome of 'first world problems' has got to be the God awful task of narrowing down the cities you're going to visit while globetrotting. In the end, we decided on a understated 20 countries to complete our tour. Our route looked something like this:

Ireland - Malaysia - Australia - New Zealand - Chile - Peru - Brazil - USA - Mexico - Canada - UAE - South Africa - Hong Kong - India - Japan - China - Malaysia - Thailand - Vietnam - Laos - Cambodia - Malaysia - USA - Ireland

We purposely reduced our European section to just a short layover in London while flying from New York to Dubai. We can do Europe anytime and would rather use those flights for other parts of the world. Plus, inter-railing is definitely next on my list. 

A great place to start planning a trip like this, or just for fun, is OneWorld.com. There, you can choose the three, four or six continent package. Obviously these packages may not be realistic for everyone, but the important thing to remember is there are a million ways to travel, this is just the way we did it. Thanks to an unbelievable 18th birthday present from my Dad, Alan and I were lucky enough to avail of the six continent package which includes 16 flights. Naturally, we included the long haul flights within the package and covered the shorter flights ourselves. 

It's so fun to plan your itinerary but once you've decided on your top picks, get ready to narrow them down. When planning your dream trip, it's easy to forget about the many inconvenient layovers needed to travel on such a large scale, which will all be included in your flight package. 

After you've perfected your round-the-world itinerary, the tricky part comes. I struggled with the next stage of the route planner which consists of settling on flight times, and making sure your route is in accordance with the One World Explorer guidelines. 

We were already flying to Australia for Christmas before we decided to go for the round-the-world trip so technically, our One World ticket didn't start until we flew from Australia to New Zealand. Because of that, if I wanted a travel agent's help I needed to find one in Melbourne. Thankfully, I got in touch with an amazing women named Melanie from Hello World who helped us immeasurably. 

After many months of back and fourth, our flights were eventually finalised and we moved on to the tricky task of organising visas, vaccinations and insurance, on top of actually planning our trip. As I mentioned before, I'm slightly OCD and so I filed every piece of paperwork we may need into a folder and I scanned all important documents and saved them to Dropbox, just in case. At the beginning, when I had about 12 million sheets of paper, putting everything into the order in which we would need them was helpful. 

My organising tendencies got into such a state at this stage of planning that it even rubbed off onto Alan. He put several spreadsheets together for each country we would be visiting with information on the relevant visas, what the weather would be like while we were there and the local currency. Everything you can possibly do before take off will make your life on the road easier.

One last thing most people ask about when thinking of taking a trip like this, is funding. It seems completely unrealistic that two twenty-somethings can afford to get up and travel the world for eight months without working. And it some ways that's true. I can't see how we would have made it work without the help of the One World ticket. BUT, that doesn't mean it was easy. We both moved home, forfeited many nights out, saved like demons, borrowed from our families, took out loans and I sold my car. If you really want to do it - you can. Work, borrow and worry about it later. Whatever you can do, it will be worth it. 

Megan x