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There’s A Big Difference Between The Northern & The Southern Hemisphere

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Well, Duh?  You might say…and you’d be right.  It’s no wonder that the around-the-world backpacking crowd sticks so consistently to the upper half of this planet.  There is a whole lot more surface to walk upon.  Or, more to the point, to bus and train across.  It is so much more possible to slide across the borders with nothing but the usual show of passport and payup of visa and entry fees when those borders are not wet and vast.

But, if you are trying to go around the Southern Hemisphere in the same easy-going manner… Good Luck!  As I’m finding out, having finally buckled down to the serious business of figuring out how to make this next dream a reality.  A post or two back, I wrote about discovering a website to match travellers with boats going almost anywhere.  Www.findacrew.net.  And that’s an interesting site, which surely does a very good job and an important service, and I’m checking it regularly.

I might well wind up using it.  But, the time factor is a great unknown.  I haven’t any idea how to tell the number of days, weeks, months that it might take to sail across the Pacific Ocean, for instance.  Plus, many vessels have different purposes in mind and a lot of them plan to wander the islands and coasts in-between, which is very pleasant for someone who can travel full-time.  For awhile, I thought to stitch together commercial flying and recreational boat travel but that very uncertainty factor might scotch the idea.

Today, I spent a little time entering possible itineraries into the Airtrek.com trip-planner in a return to the fly-all-the-way-around idea, and I learned several things:

1.  It’s expensive.  About twice the cost of a circle of the Northern Hemisphere. 

2.  You have to go up and down just to hop continents.  You can’t, apparently, fly from Sydney, Australia, to Capetown or Johannesburg, South Africa.  You must go up to Singapore or Amman in order to fly down the continent.

3.  From Africa, you can’t fly across the Atlantic to Rio or Buenas Aires.  You must go to London or Paris first

Now, maybe there are direct flights connecting those cities, but they might not be companies that this consolidator deals with and perhaps they are very expensive since you would be buying a one-way ticket each time to just walk up to the counter and not have consolidator tickets in advance.  Anyway, I’m suddenly thinking that it might be much more cost-effective to sign up for varous Bootsnall.com trips and let them provide the bargain airfare to go with them.  That way, I’d get to run around more within the continents and give up the hard and costly work of simply moving between them.  I’m sure that it’s possible to delay one’s return flight for awhile to give more time after the group trip for more exploration of the nearby countries.  Maybe that’s what I’ll begin to look into.

Anyway, I’m learning that the Down Under half of this Earthbowl is not a piece of cake.  As any Aussie could have told me.