After taking care of all the boring administrative stuff, the nice part is to plan the trip itself, or at least to think about it.

Most of the people doing a world tour have a very precise idea of what they want to see and do… They know which countries they are interested in and which countries they don’t want to visit. I am quite different. I like to think that I am interested in all the countries, even the ones nobody wants to visit. I use to find beauty in the ugliest places. I remember even enjoying Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, which is subjectively the most awful city I have ever experienced! But of course there are some places I have been dreaming about that I would like to put on my to-do list, like Iran, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Bali, French Polynesia, Easter Island, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, and many more I guess.

However, the challenge while planning a trip is that you cannot just go from one place to another without thinking about the seasons and climate zones! This influences strongly the route. For example, nobody wants to be in Asia during monsoon season, or to visit Australia in the rainy winter! Since I am leaving in February in German winter, I thought it would be nice to be as quickly as possible in a warmer weather area. I looked on a map and found out that a close place with good winter weather on the way to Asia are the United Arab Emirates, so I decided to start my trip there! It might be nice to be there as long as the temperatures remain human! Looking for the flights to get there, I found a very cheap flight from Budapest, so I had the idea to fly to Budapest first, even though I had been there twice before. But it is such a great city I am not getting bored of! Since I already knew I didn’t want to stay in the Emirates forever, I booked the next flight… to Sri Lanka. That’s where the adventure really starts! Knowing the first destinations, I took care of the flights and of the visa for Sri Lanka; another administrative work but a fun one! While requesting the Sri Lanka visa, I noticed it was possible to stay for maximum 30 days only with a online visa. Since the Sri Lanka part had a programmed end, I thought about the next step too and booked a flight to South India… and also did the visa work for India!

A great way of planning my trip was to dream in front of my Europe and world maps, and to look at my world stress ball I got from my friend Knut. This always gives great ideas! I could spend hours in front of a world map. By the way, the flags are the places I have been to… but there are still enough places without a flag!

So that’s how I am planning! The plan is actually to have no plan! My idea is to be as spontaneous as possible… to follow my feelings and my mood, and to remain flexible so that I can do whatever I want whenever I want. I want to be able to stay somewhere if I really like it, or to leave a place quickly if I hate it. I want to have the chance to follow fellow travelers whose company I enjoy without having to tell them no because I already have fixed plans. For this reason, I didn’t buy any around the world flight ticket. I prefer buying the tickets about 1 month in advance when they should still be cheap, and see where it goes.

A negative aspect of this free planning is that it doesn’t really allow friends to join me. Several friends asked me if they can join me somewhere and if they can book their tickets but I was absolutely unable to tell them when I will be where. But we will see… maybe someone will be quite flexible and join me somewhere, which would be awesome!

I want to keep the same flexibility concerning the length of the trip. I don’t have a concrete plan of how long I want to travel… I like thinking that I will be on the way as long as I enjoy it! One thing is sure: I want to be back in France for next Christmas. Being with my family for Christmas has been a tradition forever and I like it a lot so I don’t want to break it. But who knows if this Christmas break will be the end of my trip… or… just a break in-between? Or maybe I will be back home way before because I had some trouble, got sick… or I am simply fed up!

Concerning the style of traveling, I would love it to be different than usual. I guess this trip is the chance since I have no time limit. Less planning of the activities, less pressure. No planning of the accommodation weeks in advance… Leaving a lot of room to improvisation, following the flow. This is quite challenging since I am a perfectionist control freak and I love planning and organizing. I really love to know what to expect and I don’t like surprises…  but isn’t such a trip also the chance to challenge oneself?

I would also love to change my targets. Usually, my trips focus on old stones and concrete, and on nature. I love sightseeing, visiting a temple or doing a great mountain hike. But this time, I want to focus more on people. I want to meet locals, I want to learn more about their culture. This is the reason why I want to use Couchsurfing as much as I can. For those not knowing Couchsurfing, it is an internet platform (and app) bringing people together who are offering a sleeping space to travelers… for free! It is all about community spirit, giving and taking. I started using Couchsurfing as a host in Berlin about 9 months ago and had amazing experiences, hosting about 20 guys in total. The challenge about using it as a traveler is obviously that you cannot be picky. You don’t always know in which neighborhood the place you sent a request for is. It might be 20 km in the suburbs! And not everybody has a nice bed in a guestroom, so you must also be ready to sleep on a couch (as the name says!), on the floor, or share the bed with your host. It is also quite hard to find hosts in some areas, and you need to send many requests before somebody accepts you, and maybe only for one night instead of the 3 you need. But it is worth the work! I really love the fact that people don’t do that for money. It is very rewarding to pay hosts in a non-material way, like by cooking a dish of your country, helping them cleaning the apartment, or just entertaining them with your life experience and travel stories. I am quite excited to report about how this works for me in this blog in the future!

Before reporting about the travel part – even though it is the most interesting I guess – I thought I’d write something about the preparation of a world trip. Many people have indeed asked me questions about how easy it is to organize such a tour and how I proceeded.

There are basically 2 big types of things to take care about when preparing a long tour… 1/ preparing the tour itself and 2/ organizing everything home in order to be able to leave for a long time!

I will start with the boring part first… the things to do before being able to leave!

After signing the termination agreement and putting an end to what I thought was my only big commitment in life, I naively imagined I would be totally free and could leave right away! But it was without thinking about all the other things which commit us in life. If there is something I learned for sure in this phase of the planning, it is that you are never free even when you think you are. As soon as you get rid off the main handcuffs which refrain you from going away, you notice that there are many more you haven’t really thought about.

 

The apartment

Typical things that prevent us from flying away are material. I cannot recall how often people asked me about what I will do with my apartment while I am away. It was very often the first question I got asked, even before being interested in the trip itself. And this question really annoyed me since it was something I was struggling a lot with. I had basically three options: giving the apartment away, subletting it or leaving it the way it is. I excluded pretty quickly the first option. Coming back to Berlin, I would never ever find a comparable apartment with a similar location and rent… I even think that I wouldn’t find anything comparable for double the price! Being unemployed, I basically would have no chance to get anything! And in addition, I would also need to store my furniture and things somewhere which would cost a lot (and I wouldn’t want to sell my furniture for 1 euro… I still like everything!). I thought for a while about subletting but finally decided against it. I have some trust issues about letting somebody I don’t know use the flat with me being away, and I don’t want to have troubles while I am at the end of the world. But more decisively, I don’t want to lose the flexibility of coming back from my trip whenever I want to. Maybe I will be fed up after 3 months, or I might get sick and need a break, and it is really nice in this case to have a place you can call home. So yes, I decided to keep the apartment empty, to pay my monthly rent and to lose a lot of money… but to me, it is worth it. And I don’t need to tidy anything and put my things away… It’s really convenient. The only backside is that I need to annoy friends who once in a while need to check that everything is fine, empty the letter box, water the plants, etc. I am very grateful to my flat care team, the bear’s den team (“Bärenhöhle Betreuungsteam”!) as I like to call them!

 

Administration

Another huge part of the to-do list concerns the administrative matters. For those of you not living in Germany, it might be hard to understand… but German people love paperwork!

I needed to apply for unemployment money before the trip in order to… get some money after the trip! Nice paradox! If I hadn’t done the paperwork before leaving, I would have lost the right to get unemployment money when I come back because I wouldn’t fulfill the necessary criteria anymore. But taking action before leaving guarantees my right to get this money for 4 years. It took me a while to figure this out but some great German backpacker sites helped me a lot. Many bloggers made checklists with all the things you need to think about, which was very useful! But this meant spending a lot of time filling forms, going to the Agentur für Arbeit for meetings, collecting documents, etc… So finally, I was officially registered as unemployed for less than 2 weeks, and cancelled my registration on the day I left.

I also had fun writing contract termination letters to many services I wouldn’t use for a while like the gym, streaming services, cable TV, useless insurances, etc.

I also had the chance to deal with French administration! I originally planned to travel with my German passport (yeah! I have both French and German citizenships!) but noticed that I only had about 8 empty pages left, which is not a lot knowing that the customs guys love putting their stamps in the middle of the pages! Instead of renewing it, I thought it might be good to get a new French passport, the old one being expired for over 5 years. I made an appointment at the French embassy to apply for it, and was prepared to lose half a day there and to wait 3 months to get it! Even if it hurts to admit it, I was really impressed about how efficient it was! I got an appointment within 3 weeks, and an email informing me my passport was ready for pick-up 4 days after I filed in the request! And they are printed in France! Quite amazing…! Maybe the Berlin administration should have some of their employees do an internship at the French embassy…

 

Health

The health-related preparation was also time-consuming. I needed to find a world health insurance to cover my stay abroad and also had to figure out what to do with the German insurance… If I hadn’t done anything, I would have had to pay every month a lot of money for something I cannot use!

Talking about health, I also had to take care of vaccines! I went to the tropical medicine institute of the Charité hospital in Berlin to discuss about what I needed. I was quite confident that I wouldn’t need much, since I already had done so much for previous trips… But no! I had to go there 4 times, getting many shots of all kind of stuff! Japanese encephalitis, typhus, rabies…! And as a little extra, I also got a flu shot! I also received a prescription for paludism prophylaxes drugs in case I am entering in a malaria endemic area. To round this up, I went to my general doctor too to discuss about standard drugs to take with me in my travel pharmacy.

 

Money

I also had to think about the money topic. Because traveling without money is not really working! And nothing more annoying than being abroad in front of an ATM and not being able to get cash because your credit card is refused. Since I already had this experience several times abroad, I am well prepared and have many credit cards from different banks and countries, and there is always one which is working. I also got 2 cards from banks where you don’t need to pay fees for paying in foreign currencies or getting foreign cash which is really convenient. And I always have some emergency cash… in case nothing is working or I lose my cards. I was frustrated to get dollars for this though! I never understood why most of the countries want dollars but not euros! I feel like the times where the US dollar rules the world are over… but I seem to be the only one to think like that. Haha.

I also needed to set up the online access to my bank accounts on my phone and travel computer in order to be sure that the safety systems for money transfer would work from abroad.

Shopping

Continuing with material things, the trip preparations were a nice opportunity to do some shopping and get some new stuff which I thought I might need… like for example a flexible water bottle, some backpack packing bags, some new clothes, a new camera, etc.! Not that I really needed all of this stuff, but I had to take the chance to use my Amazon Prime subscription before canceling it!

 

Digital life

What took most of the time was to prepare my “virtual” luggage, i.e. to prepare a set of data and files I might need, and put it on a cloud… scans of passports, ID pictures, lists of login and passwords and more! Also, I put together a selection of some pictures of Berlin, the Alsace region, my apartment, my family and me. It happened quite often during my previous trips that some locals or people I met wanted to see pictures of where I am from, and I was always frustrated to google-image for pictures instead of showing mine. Finally, I prepared all the social media stuff, like this blog or my Instagram account to be ready to go!

 

Beloved ones

You can imagine that all this stuff kept me quite busy! But there is more than material stuff to take care about… and it is way more important! Because when you leave your home for a long trip, you don’t only leave things, but you also leave people behind you! You leave friends who might be stuck in their hamster wheel. But you also leave your family, parents and sister, which will worry about you being far away and will miss you. And you won’t be there for them when they need you! I realized that traveling was a selfish thing. It is something you do for yourself and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for others. In a paradox way, caring loved ones limit your freedom. But they also give you roots. You might not be as free as you’d like, but you know you have a place you can call home and you cannot get lost in the wild world. Luckily, we are living in times where technology can compensate for the bad conscience of being far away… and I hope I will be able to keep in touch very regularly with friends and family with WhatsApp, Skype and this blog!

And so we come to the maybe saddest but also nicest part of the trip preparation: saying goodbye!… and I really enjoyed all the goodbye cafés and dinners I had in the weeks before leaving!

After all that was done, it was time to take care of the trip… which is another story in another blog article. To be followed…