RTW – Itinerary
I’m writing this post from what is effectively the first AirBnB stay of our Big Trip, although we haven’t left Houston yet. We moved out of our house about a week and a half ago when our tenants moved in, and we leave for South America in a few days to start the adventure – 14 months of travel. In the midst of all of the things we have to do to get ready to leave, I have just enough time for a couple of posts about planning and preparation for our round the world (RTW) trip, starting with this post about our RTW itinerary.
Our RTW Itinerary – an Overview
Below you can see a map with our planned route around the world. You can use the + and – buttons to zoom in on specific parts of the route and click the “pancake stack” at the top left to see a list of destinations.
Read on for some more details on our RTW itinerary. I’ll also note some highlights we are especially looking forward to.
South America
Our first stop after leaving Houston is Bogota, Colombia. Unfortunately, this is just an overnight stop on our way to Ecuador.
After arriving in Ecuador we have two nights in Quito, the capital. We’ll have one full day to check out the sights before heading to the Galapagos Islands. There we’ll do an eight day cruise around the islands in a small (16 passenger) vessel. We can’t wait to see all of the wildlife in the water and on the islands. After the cruise we’ll have a few days to relax and hang out on the beach. We may do some land-based tours if we haven’t had enough nature from our cruise.
Our next destination will be Peru, and we’ll be here for about a month. After a week in the capital of Lima, we’ll be following the so-called Gringo Trail to see Peru’s major attractions, ending up in Cusco to see the Sacred Valley and the must-see Machu Picchu. We’ll be using the backpacker bus service Peru Hop to get around, easing our way into the long term travel lifestyle.
Following Peru will be Bolivia, spending some time in La Paz before a three day tour of the spectacular Uyuni Salt Flats. After the tour we’ll cross the border to transfer to the desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile.
After that we’ll take a bus and cross another border into northern Argentina, for a driving tour of the area around Salta. Because Argentina is such a huge country, we’ll take some domestic flights to save some very long bus rides. From Salta we’ll fly to Iguazu Falls, then to Buenos Aires.
From Buenos Aires we’ll fly to Santiago to get a more urban Chile experience.
Island-Hopping Across the Pacific
Our final South American experience will be Easter Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s actually a part of Chile, so we’ll fly there from Santiago.
The feat of RTW itinerary planning that I’m most proud of is figuring out how to juggle schedules and mix and match frequent flyer miles from different programs to island-hop across the Pacific. This will be much more fun than flying all the way back to the Chilean mainland from Easter Island then taking a long trans-Pacific flight to Australia.
From Easter Island we fly to Tahiti, we’re we’ll spend a few nights on the island of Moorea. This island is not as expensive as the more famous Bora Bora, but even on Moorea it was a bit of a challenge to find budget-friendly accommodation. We did eventually find a reasonably priced bungalow right on the lagoon, where we’ll spend some time relaxing after our South American travels.
Our next hop will be to the Cook Islands. After landing on the main island or Raratonga we’ll make an even smaller hop to the tiny island of Aitutaki. This is a real get-away-from-it-all kind of place. We’ll explore the spectacular lagoon and get in some more quality beach time.
After a few days in Aitutaki we’ll make our final Pacific hop to Sydney.
Australia and New Zealand
The next phase of our RTW itinerary will be a couple of months in Australia and New Zealand. We’ll land in Sydney, but won’t spend much time there as it’s a destination we’ve been to many times.
For the first three weeks in Australia we’ll travel to a variety of destinations, seeing a range of what Australia has to offer.
First, we’ll head to the Northern Territory and do a couple of short camping trips. We’ll visit Kakadu National Park, then Uluru and the Red Centre. After that we’ll head to Hobart, Tasmania, which will be quite a contrast from our Outback experiences. Finally, we’ll visit Australia’s capital, Canberra.
After playing tourist in Australia, we’ll spend a few weeks at our house in Brisbane. As well as catching up with friends and family, we’ll take some time to relax and do some travel planning for the rest of our RTW itinerary.
After Brisbane we head to New Zealand. We’ll be there for the month of November, starting in Auckland and working our way south. On the North Island we’re looking forward to Hobbiton and the thermal attractions in Rotorua, and also spending a few days checking out windy Wellington.
After taking the inter-island ferry we’ll explore the natural wonders of the South Island. As well as the mountains, glaciers and lakes, we’ll try some of the adventure activities that New Zealand is famous for. Nothing too crazy, though – no bungee jumping for us. We’ll probably try our hand at some white water rafting and Lachlan definitely wants to try zorbing. Our final stop in New Zealand will be Queenstown.
South East Asia
Although a lot of RTW itineraries include a lot of time in Southeast Asia, we’ll be spending a limited amount of time in this region, just less than a month. From New Zealand we’ll fly to Singapore. We’ll only spend a few days there, as it’s an expensive city.
After Singapore, we’ll head north through Malaysia, which is a Southeast Asian country that we haven’t been to before. We’ll cross the border to Thailand either by land or sea, then make our way to Bangkok. After spending Christmas in Bangkok, we’ll move on to the next big adventure – India.
India
We are planning for two months in India, to give us time to acclimate, and also to see a good part of the country. Two months is really only enough time to scratch the surface, but we will get to see some of the highlights.
The plan is to start in Kerala in southern India. This should be a good introduction to the country without the maximum craziness we will surely encounter elsewhere in India. After some time there, we’ll start to make our way north, with stops in Mysore and the ancient ruins of Hampi before visiting Mumbai.
From Mumbai we’ll head further north to the famous sights of Rajasthan – forts and desert and camels. Next we’ll get to a couple of must-see destinations, Agra (the Taj Mahal) and Varanasi.
After a short time in Delhi we’ll head to the northwest region of India. We’ll start in Rishikesh and spend some time in the slower-paced cities and towns of the Himalayan foothills. Our last stop in India will be Amritsar, and we’ll fly from there to our next destination.
Uzbekistan
The Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan are places that we were always going to include in our RTW itinerary. We’ll spend just over two weeks here, visiting the fabled cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand as well as the capital Tashkent. We also plan to visit the vanishing Aral Sea.
Turkey?
After Uzbekistan, our plans are more fluid. We would like to spend a few weeks in Turkey to get to places like Cappadocia, Ephesus and Gallipoli. However, this will depend on the political and security situation at the time. We may skip Turkey and head straight to Europe after Uzbekistan, or limit Turkey to a stopover in Istanbul. We have just found out that friends are now living in Moscow, so we may go and visit them.
Europe
Our plans in Europe are also flexible. How much time we spend in eastern vs. western Europe may depend on how our budget is holding out. We’ll also have to keep track of which countries are in the Schengen zone. We’ll only be allowed to spend 90 days total in these countries. This is complicated by the fact that there are some countries that are trying to join the Schengen zone, so we’ll have to keep an eye on whether any of them are successful. However, there are some places that we definitely intend to work into the plan.
We plan to be in Italy in April, to beat the worst of the summer crowds. After that we’ll head east to Croatia, then Romania and other Balkan countries. We’d like to then work our way via Prague and other places along the way to Berlin. The plan is to rent a car for a driving tour of Germany from Berlin to Munich.
From Munich, the plan is to make our way to Geneva. Finally, we’ll hit the highlights of Paris, Brussels or Bruges and then Amsterdam before flying back to Houston.
RTW Itinerary Planning Tips
Actually, I don’t really have many generally applicable tips, as planning a trip like this is very personal. The process and the outcome could look different for everyone. It depends on your interests and resources available for the trip (in both time and money). So I guess that’s a tip of sorts – plan your trip for you. Don’t include destinations just because everyone else goes there. As an example, we aren’t spending much time in Southeast Asia, even though it’s a great (and budget-friendly) place for long-term travel. Other places are a higher priority for us.
RTW itinerary planning used to be based on routing rules for round-the-world air tickets sold by the major airline alliances. With increased airline competition, these days it rarely makes sense to buy one of these tickets. It’s usually much more economical to mix and match one-way tickets from different airlines. Different airlines may be more competitive on different legs of your trip. This is especially true when you’re using frequent flyer miles and credit card points for a lot of your flights like we are.
Further Information
For RTW itinerary planning I like the “Pillars” approach where you first decide on a number of places that you absolutely must include in your itinerary. The next step is to build a plan around that. For us there were some “bucket list” activities we wanted to include (e.g. the Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, Kakadu National Park, Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan), and also some countries that we have been putting off going to until we had time to really do them justice (e.g. New Zealand and India).
For more details on this approach check out this post which does a great job explaining it. The same website has another post that is a great overview of the factors you need to consider to do your more detailed planning once you have decided on your Pillars.
Let us know in the comments if you have been to any of the places we are planning to go and have any “must-sees” that we should check out along the way.
