How to prepare for six months away

Lauren –

To prepare for a six months trip can seem like a daunting experience. I go between feeling extremely relaxed because we’ll have so much time on our hands, to quite stressed that there is too much to do.

The biggest thing we had to think about was budget, and what was feasible. We are both very lucky to be at a stage in our lives where we have savings to do things like this and we *hopefully* won’t be running out of money during the trip. But you still need to really think hard about what kind of travel you want to do and where is most economical to spend long periods of time.

After a long (very long) period of discussion, we decided to focus on Southeast Asia, Central and South America. I then got a bit obsessed with point hacking to make this happen cheaply. We applied for a few credit cards with favourable point offers (and borrowed a few points from friends who we’d pay back once the card points came through).

I spent many hours figuring out the best use of points and settled on:

1. Sydney to Bangkok – we paid for this on Scoot for $300 each
2. Singapore to Sydney – we paid for this on Scoot for $250 each
3. Sydney to San Francisco – 32,000 points and $250 each
4. San Fran to Mexico City – 18,000 points and $100 each
5. Mexico City to Colombia – 18,000 points and $130 each
6. Colombia to Peru – 18,000 points and $100 each
7. Bolivia to Chile – 14,000 points and $50 each
8. Chile to Argentina – 14,000 points and $45 each
9. Argentina to Brazil – 20,000 points and $100 each
10. Brazil to Dubai (Amy’s wedding) – 40,000 points and $225 each
11. Dubai to Perth – 40,000 points and $400 each
12. Perth – Sydney 18,000 points and $40 each

I think that is pretty good for twelve flights! We’ll see if it works out how we anticipated.

The other big thing to prepare before going was the health and insurance side of things. We were pretty confident that we wanted the best travel insurance we could afford. But we had no idea how expensive this would be! Most quotes came in well over $1000 which completely blew us away! In the end we decided to go with itrek comprehensive plan with the adventure pack added on. This worked out to be around $900 each and included most sports we could think of, along with unlimited medical. I think this is absolutely crucial.

We are currently figuring out what vaccines we need (a process I thought would be a lot more simple). We knew we’d need things like Hepatitis A, Typhoid and Yellow Fever, but hadn’t considered Rabies or anti-malarials.

Vaccines are incredibly expensive in Australia, we are currently toying with the idea of receiving a number of these vaccines in Bangkok and the world class travel clinic (for much cheaper). But for Rabies, as it’s a month long course of injections we’d have to get that here (for a cool $400 each!!).

In the end we figure that we’ve done everything we can to be prepared for any health concerns that may face us – we’ve also bought a quite substantial medical kit so fingers crossed!