Our awesome worldtrip route

This was the tricky part! We remember how much excitement we felt when we were making our bucket list. What did we want to do once in our lives? What are our dreams? How long can we be on the road with the amount of money we have and especially, in which countries can we accomplish these dreams? We knew it was impossible to achieve everything of our to-do/to-see list, so we had to make a good plan to make the most out of the possibilities we did have. We had visited some countries already in the past, individually or together, so we took this also into account for our future route.

As you can see we have visited some countries, but still the map should be far more blue. So during our world trip we are planning to see far more countries. We’ve made lots of excel sheets to have a good oversight. Eventually we had one with our bucket list, one with best time to visit, (visa-)costs & duration of stay per country, our to-buy/to-do-list as preparations for the journey & the packing list. On this basis we have been able to work forward.

First of all, we decided we would not go for the around-the-world-tickets from Kilroy since that goes at the expense of our freedom. We want to visit some countries which Kilroy has not fixed in their several routes or during the travel we may want to stay shorter or longer in some areas (because of temporary jobs or just because we want to live there for a while). Therefore we need flexibility which Kilroy can’t offer us unfortunately. Besides, buying tickets individually doesn’t automatically mean it’s going to be more expensive. It’s a matter of searching well for cheap tickets like last minutes. Furthermore, we are not planning to only fly from one country to the other, but wish to travel with busses and trains as much as possible to actually experience the ‘change’ from one country to the other.

We bought a world map to make a global route (attaching the coloured stickers was an ultimate ‘halleluja-we-are-actually-going-there-moment’ for me haha). Because we had to take day budget per country, visa costs, weather conditions and safety issues into account, we had no other choice than skipping some countries (like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia) unfortunately.

Here is the first half of our route till Australia, subjected to changes anywhere, anytime!

The complete route

Where	When	How long
Santorini (Honeymoon)	September	5 days
Turkey	September	Month
Georgia	October	2 weeks
Armenia	October	2 weeks
Iran	November	Month
India	December – February	3 months
Nepal	March	2 weeks
China (incl. Tibet)	March and April	Month
South-Korea	April	2 weeks
Japan	May	2 weeks
Taiwan	May	Week
Cambodja	May and June	2 weeks
Singapore/ Malaysia	June	2 weeks
Indonesia	June and July	3 weeks
Australia/ New Zealand	From July	?

Australia/New-Zealand is our final destination. We need at least 3500 euros per person to get entrance in Australia and 650 euros per person for New-Zealand without being obligated to buy a two-way ticket. We have to find a job quickly before we run out of our money, in order to work for couple of months and earn/save money for the rest of our travel plans. Afterwards we hope to continue our traveling through Australia for 2 months and then a month through New-Zealand where I am going to make my ‘lord of the rings’-dream come true. Yes I am.

After Australia and New-Zealand, we are hoping to head  to South-America through Africa if possible (I just have to do that safari once!) . Countries on the list for South-America are: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba and then heading to North of America. But for now it’s just too far in the future to plan the route for that part of the world, since I know for sure we are going to stay there for a while as well! This is how the world map would be coloured if we would visit all these countries:

As you can read, we are going to take our time to visit the different countries. We have chosen to travel this way on purpose, because we really want to get to know the country instead of just having gone there and visited some touristic places. That is not the reason we want to travel. We actually want to experience the countries like the locals do.