First Blog – Two Weeks Before Round The World Trip Departure – By Ajit

Some Background…

Ajit and Mariya at Mumbai Airport.

As some of you may know, my wife Mariya and I are about to embark on a 15-month round-the-world adventure. A lot of our friends have asked us to document our trip. So I am kicking things off with my first ever blog.

As they say ‘you regret the things you did not do more than the crazy things you did do’. Mariya and I are about to try this notion out for ourselves. After dreaming about it for some time, we have decided to make it a reality and travel around the world.

For better or for worse, I have been a little more adventurous than most of my family members and close friends. I went to Europe in 2006 and spent a couple of weeks in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Though traveling around Europe is a fairly common thing for Americans and Canadians, it is much harder for an Indian citizen with the travel and work visa situation. Plus Indians typically don’t venture out on things not tried and tested by hundreds of our kind before. So it was a big step for me personally.  That trip to Europe really opened the world to me and proved that it can be done. I made a promise to myself to travel to at least one new country every year. I am living by that promise so far.

Somewhere along the road, I met my partner, Mariya. Though wanderlust is not what brought us together (actually I still don’t know what exactly did), we both enjoy traveling together and on our own. We traveled together to a few places – UK, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Vietnam, China and our native countries India and Bulgaria. Most of these trips were somehow managed through the meager 2-3 weeks of vacation per year you get in the USA. For all our trips, we had to make suboptimal choices regarding where to go and how long to stay there. We were always running around from one destination to the other and trying to make the most out of it. All the trips were great and we had a lot of fun but we always came back thinking what if we had more time…

Taking a year off??

During our trip to Vietnam last year, we met two couples who were on a year-long journey. Mariya and I found that concept intriguing. We asked them a lot of questions and started doing research after we came back. In February 2011, we got our permanent residency (Green Card). That gave a big boost to our plans. Both of us have spent most of our adult lives in the USA and can’t imagine living somewhere else; at least for now. The Green Card brought us the option to travel for a while but still be able to come back and pick things back up in the USA.  Plus our parents have been pushing us to ‘expand’ our family and a trip like this is much better accomplished before than after having kids.

How do we do it??

We found some help online in trying to figure out a budget. We had to come up with a high level itinerary and a general sense of timing. After a few refinements to the country list – we got to about 40 countries over 5 continents as suspects and about a 15-month timeline. We decided not to book anything in advance – just go with the flow. If we like a place we will stay longer, if not push off. Travel visa is going to be a potentially big hurdle – especially for me and some for Mariya. If a country doesn’t want me, it will be crossed off the list. Mariya being the Excel guru started translating the information we had found to fit our plans on a 8-tab spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has fun information like visa requirements, daily budget, best time to travel, destinations to visit and other notes about currency, safety etc. per country. My job was to figure out our finances and see if we can make the numbers work. Having had saved some money for a business venture that never panned out really helped. So at least theoretically we could see ourselves surviving without an income and paying all the expenses for our trip. We also budgeted for 6 months of expenses upon our return.

Then we started to go back and forth about the departure date. My brother got engaged mid-2011 and they were trying to figure out a wedding date. The longest they could hold out was till beginning on 2012. That gave us a good target. We agreed upon Christmas-New Year time frame for our departure.

The next step was to set our things in order here for our departure. The major one being what to do with all the stuff we owned. So we went through ‘purging’ rounds and donated/recycled/dumped the things we did not care to hold on to. Though Mariya disputes this, she emotionally blackmailed me into giving up our TV and cable – her logic: I might as well get used not watching TV. So we have been on a no TV diet for 6 months. Our lease came up for renewal in September so we vacated our place and moved in with one of our neighbors for the last couple of months (thank you, neighbors). A good friend offered to store our furniture, clothes and other miscellaneous things in her basement (thank you, good friend) while we are away.  Mariya’s brother got one of our cars and one other good friend will be getting the second car when we leave (thank you, other good friend). Our townhouse in VA is rented out and the property management company we work with will handle rental renewal or any other items related to the property (thank you, Riner Rentals).

Almost There…

So here we are less than a couple of weeks away from the BIG trip. Both of us have already notified our employers. Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend marked the most shopping we have done within a 36-hour period ever (made both of us sick). But we have most of the things we need for the trip. And now it is down to the last few items on the list. The farewell parties have already started. The clock is ticking!!!