Fighting The Travel System

I never thought that just trying to organise a route for a round the world travel would be so time consuming and frustrating.

 

The route that I chose seemed to be one that captured a flavour of where I wanted to go, included most of the fabulous archaeological and historical buildings of the world and some of the many wonderful international friends that I have made in the last few years from around the world.

 

But what started out as a simple matter of choosing where and when has become a mammoth task in itself.

 

Firstly the travel agencies and airlines want you to go one way round the world only, and attempting to go "the wrong way" seemed to be the my first big mistake as the list of places and cheap flights has already diminished to less than half of what was available had I gone the correct way around.

 

Next I found out the hard way that no one really expects or wants you to fly when you have a gap year or around the world ticket. Instead what they all assume, and almost force you into accepting, is to fly across the oceans but when it comes to overland they really want you to travel native.

 

Now although I agree that airports are a very modern method of travel and that they miss much of the real heart of the countries they are in, the desire to have to queue up at literally hundreds of train stations and bus stops to try and navigate my way across entire continents with only the most basic of the Spanish and French included in my foreign language arsenal is a very scary prospect.

 

Next was the disappointing fact that on a so called round the world ticket they only expect you to want to take a few actual flights, most suggesting as few as six stops on the entire journey. So again, unless you are planning to cross much of the the journey overland, a round the world ticket is little more than a carefully selected offering of city stops all sequenced in one general direction with a compulsory onward flight home from the final destination.

 

A real kick in the pants was the cost of flying to remote or 'untouristy' locations as the airlines available for those parts are few and far between, the chance of getting an flight from there to anywhere except where you have just come from is slim to none and the cost of the ticket is through the roof.

 

As an example a flight to Tenerife can be found as low as £80 for the 2,900 km journey, but a trip to Bamako in Mali, which is where you would need to land to reach Timbuktu, is not that much more than this in distance and also hardly different in its general direction or flightpath from the UK, but clocks up a staggering 600% increase on the average cost with the added downside of almost no onward destinations outside of Africa.