360 Degrees Longitude

by John Higham

Bicycles are a way of life on Ambergris Caye. Although the more affluent families on the island can afford golf carts, most of the population tools around on their one-speed rusty beach cruisers.

  On our last day on the island, we packed some snacks and drinks into the wire basket mounted on the handlebars of my bike, filled the basket with ice to keep the foodstuffs cold, and then set out for a picnic at a pier at the end of the island.

  As we pedaled down the sandy road on our 1968 VW Bug-bikes, I couldn’t help but think about how far we had come during our year, both figuratively and literally. Our near-state-of-the-art tandems were waiting for us in storage at home. Most people in the world will never know the difference between a two-ton, single-speed beach cruiser with a wire basket mounted on the handlebars and a finely engineered modern bicycle, let alone a finely engineered modern car.

  I knew the difference, though. Luckily, over the past year I had learned to be just as happy on a rusty beach cruiser, bouncing across potholes and sliding in the sand; I no longer saw my identity formed by where I lived, what I drove, or what I did for a living.

  We arrived at the pier and ate our picnic. After we finished eating, no one moved. The sun was setting in the west and the four of us watched the horizon as it transitioned through the color spectrum from bright blue to deep red. “I can’t help but think back on the sleepless nights before we left for Iceland, contemplating ‘what if…,’” September mused.

  “Had we known Katrina would break her leg, or that we would get stranded, penniless, in Lushoto, would we have stepped on that first plane?” I responded.

  Jordan stopped what he was doing and stared at me as if I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. “Why would that have stopped us?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Before we left, we worried a lot about what could happen. A lot of the things we worried about actually did happen,” September replied. “It’s possible if we’d known all these things we may have simply stayed home.”

  That was true. Given the cold facts, September and I may have just chickened out. If I had learned anything though, it was that cold facts are just that. Cold. To understand something, someone, or someplace you can’t simply analyze it intellectually and expect all the answers. To be understood, places, humanity, and culture have to be felt. To be lived.

  “It’s lucky you can’t tell the future, then,” Katrina responded. “Because everything turned out just fine.”

  REENTRY

  John’s Epilogue

  After being away for more than 52 weeks, we landed at the San Jose, California airport at 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday night. I had to be at work for the first time in over a year at 9:00 the following morning.

  When I arrived at work the next morning a colleague bumped into me in the hallway. He said, “Hey! I heard you were back. I, uh, expected you to be more suntanned.”

  He was looking for some sort of change in me. I had changed, but it wasn’t visible. There was no real way to communicate that change, so I smiled and said, “A suntan is more than skin deep.”

  Later that evening a box full of mail was thrust into my hands. For twelve months, home had been “where our stuff was.” Now I was holding mortgage statements, IRA statements, letters from the IRS, and property tax assessments. I hadn’t opened a letter in more than a year. Why should I care about any of that stuff? Or any “stuff” at all? “Stuff” just creates stress. Who’s to say that hakuna matata isn’t a better philosophy?

  In the weeks that followed, I would find myself waiting in line at the grocery store, and a stranger would introduce himself (or herself) and tell me how much he (or she) enjoyed my e-mails and photos from our trip. “September’s friend forwarded them to me!” Then came the standard follow-up question: “How is it being home?”

  How is it being home? It took me months to sift through all of the conflicting feelings to formulate a good answer for that one.

  It is good to be among friends again. It is indescribably wonderful to have a hot shower whenever I want one. We can also walk into a grocery store, buy fresh milk, and take it home and put it in the refrigerator where it will stay fresh.

  But during our travels, “home” wasn’t a place. It was a feeling of being together. Now that we have activities taking us in different directions, the hardest adjustment is that home once again has become a place. Capturing that same feeling of being together requires work.

  Within a few months of reentry Katrina had entered a world of cell phones and chemically dependent hair. Jordan had become assimilated into a world of baseball and superhero comic books. September was once again doing hand-to-mouse combat with 1’s and 0’s and I was working on the next generation of satellites for satellite radio.

  When we were traveling it felt natural that we would always be together. Now, our individual interests pulled us in different directions; if we wanted face time as a family, we had to schedule it on the calendar. So that’s what we do.

  “Movie night!” I exclaimed. “We’re watching Forrest Gump!”

  “Whatzit about?” Katrina and Jordan asked simultaneously.

  “Doesn’t matter. The four of us are going to cram onto the bed and pretend it’s the Unimog and we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere. There is a force field around us so nothing can get in or out until the movie is over. Cell phones off!”

  An hour or so into the movie and the familiar “Life is like a box of chocolates” resonated as it never had before. In our year abroad, we found things are rarely what they seem. People are complex and are more than the sum of their experiences and our preconceptions. Seeing the WTO riots in Hong Kong left a much different impression than when I read about them in the New York Times. Being rescued by the humble people in the Usambara Mountains left a much different impression on me than if I’d read about those kind souls in National Geographic. As with chocolates, so with life. You may get chocolate-covered dulce de leche or a chocolate-covered prune; it might be a Horse Shit Ball special delivery from Switzerland or a tropical island-made bar that tastes like dirt. Or quite possibly M&M’s on the Bolivian Altiplano.

  But you’ll never know until you take a bite.

  Jordan’s Epilogue

  I wore my Tevas all the time when we were traveling. My first day back at school I was playing on the playground and one of the yard duty teachers said I couldn’t stay on the playground because I was wearing sandals. She said I might stub my toe because they were open-toed shoes. What’s up with that? I wanted to tell her that I had worn these shoes to search for lions in Africa and look for anacondas in the Amazon. But I thought that might be rude, so I didn’t say anything.

  I mostly don’t talk about the trip to my friends because they don’t really know where all of the places are. Sometimes when school gets a little bit boring I sit at my desk and remember things like feeding the alligator or riding on the elephant and I get a big smile on my face. When I get home I talk to Katrina about it and we laugh like we have a big secret!

  Katrina’s Epilogue

  When I came home I was nervous about going back to school, since all we covered during our year away was math. But when I talked to my friends about it, they said I shouldn’t worry because they didn’t really learn anything in the sixth grade. At first it was difficult to adjust to all the homework we got in the seventh grade, but I found I wasn’t behind my friends and they had to adjust to the homework, too.

  Whenever adults ask me about how our trip changed me, I don’t know how to answer. It is part of who I am. How would I know if I would be different if we hadn’t gone? But I find myself thinking about our trip every single day, even though we’ve been home for over a year now. While Dad worked on his book he read us the chapters and I would remember things I hadn’t thought of for a long time, like how a howler monkey would get kicked out of its family if it fell from a tree. Sometimes things he read didn’t agree with how I remembered them.

  One of the most memorable parts of the trip for me was reading books about people and p
laces and then visiting those places. I’ll never forget how bad I felt for the Japanese who were left in Korea at the end of World War II when I read So Far from the Bamboo Grove. But then reading the story of how badly the Japanese treated the Koreans in Year of Impossible Goodbyes made me realize that there can always be more to a story.

  I want to take my own kids on an around-the-world trip.

  September Gets the Last Word (You Expected Something Else?)

  Now that we’re home, holding onto the feelings of togetherness that we experienced on our trip has been like holding sand in our cupped hands. As we’ve gone about our suburban lives—registering the kids for school, moving back into our house, going back to work—some of that sand is slipping through our fingers. To counter that, we are now more careful about what individual activities we do so that we can continue to have time together as a family. It’s a challenge. There are so many things competing for our family time—homework, church activities, sports, music lessons—that it takes constant prioritizing to make sure we carve out enough time to simply be together.

  When we walked into our house for the first time, the kids exclaimed, “The house is way too big!” After spending twelve months rarely more than two feet from one another, even our small, three-bedroom house seemed like more space than anyone would ever need. The kids refused to sleep in separate bedrooms for several weeks. For me, I now delight more in simple things. I love my washer and dryer. I run out to my garden every morning to see if anything new has sprouted.

  Many of our friends never expected to see us again. The consensus was that we would find some nice part of the world and just stay there. When we actually did return, our friends predicted that we would be too restless to endure suburban existence for long. The idea for the next big thing would materialize and we would vanish.

  Tempting as it was to “just keep going,” the reality was that our bank account had run dry. And beyond that, we had a reason to return home. Two reasons, actually: Katrina and Jordan.

  Countless Sunday dinner conversations have been devoted to the topic of living an alternative lifestyle somewhere outside of the United States. The four of us agree that traveling the world enriched our lives so much and that we see the world through different eyes now than we did before we stepped on that first plane to Iceland. John and I agree that while there may be a place in our future for adventure and a romantic lifestyle on an island away from it all, that shouldn’t be our focus. First we need to turn two kids into responsible adults who contribute to society. Along the way we want to find a way to make a contribution to the world that has given us so much.

  We’ll surely keep traveling. We still need to see huge chunks of the world—India, Australia, Russia, the Himalayas—but we’ll have to squeeze future trips into the short spaces of time when the kids aren’t in school. In the meantime, we’re enjoying the things we missed while we were on the road—friends, extended family, neighborhood parties, refrigerators, supermarkets. As long as we can be together, life is mighty good.

  APPENDIX OF

  FAST FACTS

  Cost for four people to travel around the world for a year. Includes everything from plane tickets to ice cream cones to storage costs for household items and a certain broken leg.* $121,275.89

  Countries “entered” 35

  Countries “visited” 28

  Number of places slept in 150

  Average length of stay in one place 2.5 days

  * For a more detailed cost breakdown, go to www.360degreeslongitude.com

  Longest stay in any one place 28 days (Belize)

  Types of accommodations/number of nights airplanes 5

  trains 6

  buses 5

  boats/ferries 10

  airport departure lounge 1

  hostels 131

  tents 43

  caves 4

  friends’ places 6

  guest houses 20

  YMCAs 2

  hotels 46

  cabins 48

  condos/apartments 38

  Miles traveled More than 67,000

  Times we wished we were home zero

  APPENDIX OF

  HOW TO

  So. You think you would like to do a year around the world with your family, but don’t know where to start. You’ve come to the right place.

  That said, no one book or person can tell you how to plan and execute a trip of this magnitude. Further, there is no way you can plan a trip like this in detail as you might a two-week vacation. Get used to the idea that trying to find accommodations at your next destination is your full-time job.

  As with almost everything, the more you know about something, the more there is to know. By far the best advice is simply, “Don’t panic.”

  How Much Does It Cost?

  The number one question people have, but are often afraid to ask is, “How much does it cost to go around the world?” The quick and easy answer is that I don’t see how twelve months on the road can be done for less than $30,000 per person.

  Our total cash outlay was $121,275.89 for four people. Okay, so I’m a bit obsessive about numbers. Of that amount, $29,971.60 was spent before we even set a toe on a plane. Wow! That sure is a lot of money to spend before you even start! That’s what we thought, too, but we had to take care of several up-front costs, such as plane tickets, equipment, clothing, vaccinations, storage, and medical insurance.

  Thirty-thousand dollars per person per year seems like a lot of money, too. It is, but there is very little “air” that can be squeezed out of those figures. For example, we spent less than $100 on souvenir shopping for the entire year. For souvenirs we let the kids each get one item per continent, and collect every kind of coin they could find.

  Methods to reduce costs would include:

  • Reduce the number of countries visited, as getting from point A to point B was one of the biggest line items in our budget.

  • Travel by bicycle for the same reason.

  • Limit your itinerary to the developing world, as places like Switzerland are far more expensive than, say, Thailand.

  We were very thrifty when it came to food and accommodations. Unless you can eat just bread and peanut butter and sleep outdoors full-time, it isn’t possible to travel much cheaper than we did.

  We were less thrifty when it came to activities; endeavors ranging from Wild Wadi to the Inca Trail do not come free. Our philosophy is, “Why travel at all if you can’t partake of the local attractions?”

  Equipment

  There are a lot of equipment list suggestions available online. Some are okay, others less than helpful. I read one packing list online that boasted you could travel the world with only ten pounds of gear. The first entry at the top of that list was a three-pound computer. Rubbish.

  In the weeks prior to our leaving, I think we became our local REI’s favorite customers. The best investments by far were a new lightweight tent, tropical-weight sleeping bags, and silk sleep sacks. Even though they took up a lot of space in our luggage, we sure were glad we had them. When we were no longer camping, the sleeping bags and silk sleep sacks were still worth their weight in gold so we wouldn’t have to sleep in fifty years of dust, as you might find in some of the bedding in less-than-elegant hostels.

  Every time we considered purchasing something for our trip, we asked ourselves, “How would we feel if this were stolen?” We were careful not to overspend, because the reality of travel is that many people do have their backpacks or suitcases disappear. This was one reason we brought only a very small camera, no laptop, no GPS, and no satellite phone. On the Christmas before we left, I bought September a plain gold wedding band with the words World-the-Round Trip engraved inside so that she could leave her diamond ring at home. Remarkably, we never had a single thing stolen on our entire trip, but that was not the case with many of the people we met on the road.

  Before we left I had a long list of “stuff” that we had to buy that I thought I couldn’t live without. When w
e were finally packing “for real” a lot of it got edited out and even more got left behind in various campgrounds during our first few weeks on the road. By the end of the year, other than some simple clothes, my silk sleep sack, and tropical-weight sleeping bag, the only thing I found that I was hoarding in my suitcase were my plastic eating utensils.

  The lesson is you can get by with very little, and what you absolutely need, you can usually get on the road. And if you can’t get what you absolutely need on the road, you will find you can do without that, too.

  Books

  Guidebooks are the single most important thing you will need to make your travel go smoothly. The problem is, you don’t want to have to carry a year’s worth of guidebooks with you all the time. They are really, really heavy! In many cases, we were able to find guidebooks along the way. Most big cities have at least one bookstore with a few books in English. In other cases, we had guidebooks sent to us from the United States along with our monthly shipment of books for the kids.

  Typical guidebooks like Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are good sources of information for a specific geographic region, but have no information for planning an expedition. One great source of practical information is The Traveler’s Handbook (Globe Pequot Press). Now in its ninth edition, it has over nine hundred pages of information on topics ranging from how to respect local customs, to how to anticipate probable repairs for an overturned vehicle, to how to meet entry requirements for every country in the world. Some of the best information is about relative safety and general weather patterns per country.

  If you will be traveling with children, and if your children like to read, keep in mind that there is nothing available in English for them overseas outside of a few obvious places, such as England, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I take that back. You can find the Harry Potter series in English nearly everywhere, as it is popular among those trying to learn to read English. Other than that, you might be able to find Moby Dick in a bookstore in China, but trust me, your kids won’t like it. Buy all of your children’s and young adult literature before you go and arrange to have someone ship it to you. The good news is that nearly all juvenile literature is printed on cheap, porous paper, which happens to be fairly lightweight.