In less than a month, we will be in Africa. I know, I kind of can’t believe it myself. Our itinerary is far from set (note the conspicuous absence of any “Our Itinerary” posts or pages), but we’ve drawn a fuzzy, imaginary line through Southern and Eastern Africa in a close approximation of a Cape Town-to-Cairo trek.
One of the questions we are most frequently asked (besides “Have you gotten all your vaccinations?”) is how we chose Africa.
The answer: not easily. When we first began seriously considering the idea of taking a career break to travel, we didn’t have anywhere in particular in mind. When friends would ask where we were going, we would shrug and respond, “Anywhere but here.” (Such responses were usually given on days when the Q train was running with delays, we couldn’t find anywhere to eat that didn’t have an hour wait, and/or some sort of cartoon character had impeded my path through Times Square to work.)
Beyond not knowing where we would go, we didn’t know how to go about making the decision. In the past, our destinations have been driven largely by how long we have to get away and the cost of the plane ticket to get there (see our trips to Guatemala in 2008 and Istanbul in 2013). Now, with nothing but time and the price mitigated by the length of our intended stay, we found ourselves unable to make a decision.
I spent days reading every blog post I could find on how to choose destinations for a ‘round-the-world trip, I purchased (and annotated) a copy of the Rough Guide to the First Time Around the World, I pinned scores of images on a Pinterest board devoted to the topic, I printed out sample itineraries from travel guides and blogs, I put 3M flags in my copy of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and I proclaimed that we needed to identify a list of pillars.
And still, we were no closer to determining where we would go. We sat down with glasses of wine and this Lonely Planet coffee table book with huge color pictures, thinking that making a list of everything inside it that interested us would help us narrow things down.
Spoiler: we were interested in 95% of the locations featured in the book, with 3% of the portion that didn’t make the cut being places we had already been and 2% being places that are currently too dangerous to visit.
Somehow we managed to narrow our choices down to either Africa or South America. While the idea of doing a true ‘round-the-world trip, lighting down in multiple continents, was intriguing, there was something more appealing about really diving into a continent.
Africa and South America stood out for a couple of reasons. One, neither of us has traveled extensively in either continent. (Marc has been to Morocco and Botswana in Africa, and Chile and Ecuador in South America. I have been to Egypt and nowhere in South America.) Each continent offered plenty of space for us to discover things together.
Two, each continent is huge and arguably best seen during extended travel. Having several months rather than a week would allow for overland travel to interesting locations, rather than just surgically hitting the highlights.
Three, each continent is diverse. Africa has the deserts of Namibia, the lush greenery of Uganda, and the heights of Mt. Kilimanjaro; South America has the Amazonian rainforests, Patagonia, and the Andes.
After a long, snowy Sunday afternoon at BRIC House, during which we consulted the internet and made pro/con lists (and I, because I can’t help myself, made lists of rainy seasons and required visas and any other metric I could think of), we finally admitted that we were at a stand-still.
And so we decided just to go with our guts: Africa is the destination that got us the most excited.
And excitement is really what we’re all after, isn’t it?
Did we make the right decision? Leave us a note in the comments and let us know what you think.
Namibia image via Monica Guy on Flickr
