Only 9️⃣ days to go until our trip! To fuel a little anticipation until then, we're posting a little spam about our travel plans every day. Today:
Our itinerary
There are seven continents, around 200 countries, about 7000 languages, countless cultures and landscapes. If you want to travel the world, where should you start? We have come up with the following plan: We give ourselves two months for each continent. We'll start in North America in late summer, then switch hemispheres and explore South America and Oceania during the summer. When the season changes again, we will then spend time in Asia and Africa before returning in time for the European summer.
Sounds logical, no? But how are you supposed to explore an entire continent like South America, for example, which stretches over 7600 kilometres from north to south, in eight weeks? That is simply impossible. Instead, we have a few selected destinations in mind for each continent and are aware that we won't be able to see everything - we have the "courage of missing out" (COMO).
When making our selection, we made sure to exclude travel regions that we could also visit later in a shorter trip. That's why we don't want to go to South East Asia, for example, but to Sri Lanka, India and Nepal instead. Although we would like to travel everywhere in the world, we have to make do with the limited time available.
Last but not least, one thing is particularly important to us: flexibility. We haven't booked anything apart from the first flights to North America. This means we can take advantage of every opportunity that arises along the way and also stay longer in places that we particularly like, or in the event of illness, or perhaps if we get tired of travelling.
📖 Book recommendation: "Where to go when?" by Lonely Planet. Leah's primer, which she used years ago to start planning our future trip around the world - even if we still have differences of opinion about the right time to travel to South America...