Itinerary and Budget - Our First World Trip

The most often asked question is regarding our itinerary and budget. Hopefully, this section will answer most questions, but please feel free to ask if any are not answered. Keep in mind that all the information provided is based on our specific experience.

Pre-Trip Expenses

The following is a list of pre-trip expenses, which may differ from traveler to traveler depending on their needs and any equipment previously owned. See the rest of the sections in this planning page for more details.

Backpacks: in order to travel light we bought two small backpacks – $185 USD

Clothes: we previously owned the majority of the clothes we are carrying except for the low-top hiking shoes that helped to save space – $240 USD

Electronics: the equipment and services we purchased specifically for this trip under this category were the biggest pre-trip expense. The items included: Porting over our phones to Google Voice, Canon SX260, Underwater Housing, Portable Flexible Tripod, Netbook, Long Range Antenna, Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Electrical Converter, and Portable Hard Drive – $1,550 USD

Travel Guide Books: we have estimated we will be purchasing a total of 18 electronic books on our Kindles along the way. The guide books include: New Zealand, Australia, South East Asia, China, Nepal, India, South Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Europe, Israel, Jordan, Africa, South America, Central America, Mexico, and Cuba – approximately $20 USD each

Vaccines: including malaria pills – $320 USD

Insurance: for the first year for the two of us – $761 USD

Miscellaneous: other items include a daypack, Couch Surfing verification, estimated WWOOFing registration fees, visa pictures, and the cost to host this website – $605 USD

Budget

We completed some research based on online information and travel guidebooks. Based on this research, we put together a budget database (pdf) with an estimated cost per day, visa fees, and transportation cost for each country. The budget gave us a starting point and offers you an idea of the cost per country. Be sure to see how our budget compared to the actual cost in our journal entries.

Itinerary

We laid out an ambitious schedule for our trip that, according to our itinerary, would have lasted a little over two years. As you will see throughout our website, we were able to accomplish all of our route and more!

Below you will find a map of the original proposed itinerary. Click on the pins to see the estimated time we planned to be in a particular country and on the route to see the mode of transportation. The yellow pin is the start and end of our journey. In general, the yellow route are flights, the red route is ground transportation via train, bus, or car, and the blue route is a ferry or boat.

Be sure to visit our actual route to see what we accomplished.