Round-the-world in 40 days: a memoir
“What is Jerusalem worth?”
“Nothing. Everything”
Since I couldn’t travel now, due to the pandemic and life in general, I feel it’s a good use of my time (yes this is sarcasm) to daydream and plan my next trip —a 6-month round-the-world trip happening (hopefully) after 3 years once I finish my PhD. As I felt like a backpacker again, I took out my old phone in the drawer to scan through the 6000 sth photos taken during my last RTW trip. It’s stunning how photos could bring me right back to the long-forgotten scenes on the road. Thus I decided to resume writing the travel blog, not to gain readers as before, but to remind myself of my wanderlust and ambition to see the world.
This was a journey exactly 4 years ago. After finishing my undergrad (and before starting my PhD) I spent 40 days traveling around the world. I managed to squeeze ~25 countries including airport layovers, in a pace mind-blowingly fast for most travelers. However I feel it fast but not too fast. The entire journey was exhausting yet exciting, stressful at a glance but quite compatible to my life style. Given how busy I am now, and what has happened to the world, in retrospect, I really should have extended the trip to at least 3 months. Going straight to Grad school — bad idea.
Planning was very haste. It only came to my mind 4 months before the trip that I should be traveling somewhere to celebrate my graduation. I once planned to do an internship in Jordan coordinated by my university, even went further to take Arabic courses for a semester in a nearby college. Later though I realize I would rather do the serious stuff here in the States, and go there just for fun.
Thus the trip pivoted around my long-term wish to visit the Levant (Jordan and Israel/Palestine). As for other stopovers, I was basically interested in visiting all the countries in the world. I ended up choosing them based on flight prices. As a famous so called “travel hacking” trick, flight price is sometimes not correlated with distance; in other words flying A — B — C being cheaper (sometimes vastly) than directly A — C, counterintuitively.
It turned out that to reach the Levant from East Asia, it’s much cheaper to book 2 tickets, with a South Asian stopover, than an interlining ticket. I chose Sri Lanka over Chennai India and made it a 4-day side trip to quickly see the country.
On the western front, there are many options to hop from the Levant to Europe: Cyprus, Malta, Ukraine, just to name a few. I chose Cyprus as I am a history buff fascinated with geopolitics, always wanting to see (and even cross) the Green Line on the island.
So there goes my itinerary: first a brief stopover home at Taiwan. After packing from home (I guess that’s when the journey really started) I headed south to Singapore and Malaysia, Singapore in particular to revisit the place I did International Biology Olympiad in 2012, which really kick started my scientific career and passion.
Then heading toward west to Sri Lanka and quickly see the country in 4 days.
Jordan and Israel are the most important part of the trip, so I’d spend one week in both countries respectively, with Kuwait (maybe) being just a 2-hour layover.
Then hopping to Europe via Cyprus.
Finally, I managed to book a $250 flight from Paris to Los Angeles. From there I would take an overnight bus to Bay Area to start my PhD.
This was the backpack I carried all the way around the world, which I used to do groceries from Trader Joes (I literally just did this half an hour ago)……..I seriously overpacked for this trip, but I didn’t have a chance since I was really going to start grad school with these stuffs (I could totally survive with 3 shirts, underwears and socks, and without laptop, but not doing intense research simultaneously I guess)
Kind of a random duck flag, but turned out to be an important item I saw during the journey.
More to come, stay tuned.
