Question: How do you plan a year of travelling?!

Answer: You don’t. At least not completely.

Ok, so you decide to spend a year travelling the world. Great! But where to go?! There’s just so many amazing places – how on earth do you work out which ones are ‘must-visit’ and which ones are ‘maybe-next-time’? Actually, ‘maybe-next-time’ was a key consideration for us as we set aside some tempting destinations that we’ll save for another trip.

We’re trying to strike a balance between being prepared and being flexible. So we’ve purchased our RTW tickets ahead of time so we know that at the very least we’ve got a ticket home already paid for! But the flight dates are flexible so we can stay in each place longer/shorter if we want. We’ve only started to plan the first stage of our trip at this point – we’ll look at the next stage nearer the time.

We knew we wanted to go to Africa. Kylie hasn’t been yet and Graham only spent a couple of weeks in South Africa/Botswana/Zimbabwe back in 2008. And a plan emerged to spend some time helping at a school in Zambia. The school was set up by Karolyn, an old uni friend of Graham’s, and her (Zambian) husband Martin. The idea is to spend about 8 weeks with them, helping with some of the ongoing building work at the school as well as getting involved in lessons, sports and crafts.

After a few months in Africa we fly to Thailand (via Doha and Dubai). We’ll travel mostly overland in S.E. Asia, maybe with some cheap domestic flights. We’re hoping to spend time in Cambodia, Laos (where my aunt has just moved to), Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Then we’ll hot-foot it down to Australia where we’ll probably spend a few months earning some money, inviting ourselves to BBQs, teasing the locals about their sports teams and hopefully seeing as much of the country as we can.

Around about the start of 2015 we’ll buy some raincoats and head to New Zealand for a few weeks.

The last leg of our trip is South America where we’re thinking of spending time in Chile, Bolivia and Peru. We have absolutely no idea what we’ll do there – its ages away! But a few friends have already expressed an interest in joining us for some of our time there.

Below is an overview of our flights. Just creating this map made me flipping excited!

• planning
• route