My Sabbatical

I sit here, 4 hours in to my 15.5 hour flight to Beijing, and I am thankful the seats have power adapters. I just bought an MSI Wind Netbook – yes, I hear netbooks are dead – and I noticed yesterday it gets a whopping 2 hours of battery life. Thank god for in-seat power adapters. 

I am excited to get started my two week trip to China. Excited and a bit scared. I am travelling alone, and don’t speak that much Mandarin Chinese. Even the words I can speak I am highly doubtful I am pronouncing correct. I am well aware that Chinese has tones and inflections that change the meanings of words, so Ni Hao coming from my mouth might come out as a deep insult to the hotel receptionist’s ancestors. 

As I type this, my plane seems to be entering the air space over Greenland. Now to some of you, you might think, he’s flying from Toronto to Beijing, East to West, what the heck is he doing over Greenland? And I might have asked myself the same question except I did some reading recently about how imperfect it is to translate a 3D spherical map of the globe onto a 2D surface. So technically, the fight from Toronto to Beijing goes over the North Pole, and technically Greenland is lying lengthwise above Canada and not beside it as most Mercator maps represent. Also, Greenland is a LOT smaller in reality than most maps depict in true relative scale. I’ve seen maps that show Greenland as big as all of Canada. 

The Real Greenland - Above Canada

Researching hotels for China was fun. I probably did more research on them than anything else, because there are so many different varieties to choose from with different price ranges. The hotel I found in Beijing is very interesting. It gets good reviews on TripAdvisor (top 50 in Beijing), it’s cheap ($50 a night for the cheapest rooms), it’s close to many attractions (steps from the Forbidden City), has Internet access, and the staff reportedly speak English and are helpful. They say taxi drivers have trouble finding it, but I brought with me a map in Chinese. 

I have 4 nights in Beijing. I will visit the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Tomb, do some shopping in a couple of the famous markets (clothes and DVDs!), visit the famous night “snack market” where scorpions on a stick can be had (I will stick to meat), and perhaps do a tour that will take me to the site of the Olympic Games. Since Beijing is the capital, I am sure there are lots of very old and/or very interesting things to do there. 

I also just need to get oriented with being in China. How to get around, what food to eat, some basic words and phrases, and other beginner tasks. You just don’t know what you don’t know sometimes. 

I am tempted to hire a personal tour guide for a day. I saw a taxi driver who will drive you around for 500 Yuan a day, which is $75. Having an English speaking taxi driver for a whole day might totally be worth it. I will play it by ear when I get there. 

That’s all for now. I’ll have more to say about China when I’m there!

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Source: Omar A at flickr

This is a new experience for me. I have a couple of weeks vacation from work coming up at the end of July, and somehow I convinced myself I need to visit China. So I booked myself a plane ticket to Shanghai this past Thursday. No hotel, no idea what I’m going to do there. But I’m sure there must be interesting things. This has got to be the most disorganized trip I have ever booked.

It’s a bit scary to be quite honest and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I don’t speak a word of Mandarin Chinese. Usually if I go to a country that doesn’t speak English, I can “get by”. I can talk to people, order food, deal with taxis, read some signs. It doesn’t matter the European language - French, Italian, Spanish… even Greek. I can look at a Greek sign and make out the word Airport or make out the word for Acropolis, and I know I’ll be alright. I can look at a word, and it might sound terrible, but I can pronounce it and teach myself the language in a shorter time.

But Chinese is not a phonetic language in it’s written form. But a friend who once lived in China suggests I get the name of my hotel written in Mandarin before I go, because taxi drivers don’t speak English! That’s tough to comprehend, because in most countries it’s the taxi drivers who DO speak English. I am expecting to get really, really lost at some point. (Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. Getting lost can be fun!)

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Source: ToastyKen at flickr

For many years, I have been fascinated with the concept of Round the World (RTW) travel. There are many different ways to do that, and one of the most interesting for me is a “Round the World Plane Ticket”.

That is just as it sounds. For one fixed price, you get to plot a course around the world, across several continents, and have up to one year to take that trip of a lifetime. There used to be a couple of airline groups offering this, but from what I hear, the only one that now does is OneWorld with their OneWorld Explorer and Global Explorer programs.

In the old days, it used to work geographically in that you could book any number of plane tickets as long as they were all going in the same direction (east or west). I used to dream of taking 100 small flights to make my way across Asia and Europe.

Well I guess the airlines caught on to my evil plan, and the updated rules put an upper limit on the number of total flights at 16. But backtracking is now allowed in a limited fashion. Basically, you have to make your way around the world and can only cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans once each.

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Source: Rodrigo_Soldon at flickr

OK, let’s enter the world of fantasy for a brief moment. Let’s say you had quite a bit of money saved from many years of working, and wanted to embark on the most epic of all journeys – visiting every country in the world on one trip. Could it be done? Is it even remotely possible?

You might briefly think “yes”. After all, you could take a swing through North and South America in one big go – those countries are lined up in a row for the most part. And heading through Europe doesn’t seem so difficult. People do that all the time. So what does that leave? Asia and Africa? Seems entirely doable.

But what if I told you the current world record for visiting every country was 6 years, 10 months and 7 days? And that wasn’t all on one trip. If you could visit every country like that, you’d be the first to ever do so.

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Source: notsogoodphotography at flickr

From Horace’s poem, Odes:

Don’t ask (it’s forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don’t play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.

Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the rocks placed opposite
— be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

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Source: RussBowling at flickr

In my last post, See the World for $5,000, I outlined a 6 month trip to less travelled places in Asia that would run about $4,400 as an extremely cheap way to see the world.

I then realized I have enough air miles to fly for free.  So my budget actually works out to:

Lodging – $300
Food – $120
Travel – $75
Internet/Phone – $30
TOTAL – $525 per month reasonable budget

SUBTOTAL FOR SIX MONTHS – $3,150

Plus plan ticket to get there – $0

TOTAL FOR SIX MONTHS – $3,150

Now I realize not everyone has a lot of frequent flyer miles for a trip like this. But with a book such as Chris Guillebeau’s “Frequent Flyer Master“, you might be able to get plenty of miles just by applying for a few credit card offers.

This leaves a lot of leg room for more luxuries on the trip. Being $1,850 below the $5,000 target budget,indeed one can double the average nightly cost of lodging to $20 per night, and still be under $5,000 for six months. That seems like a sensible place to splurge, since for an extra few dollars one can get hot water, air conditioning, television, or WiFi Internet. Although these things often come at the lower priced places too.

Note: Purchasing Chris’ book through that link earns sabbatical.me a bit of revenue, to help fund my next sabbatical. Thank you in advance.

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Source: Marco Bellucci at flickr

There is a gentleman named Raam Dev who is currently managing to live 6 months, in 3 countries, for $3,000. Oh, and he’s counting the plane ticket to get there, so his all inclusive budget for seeing the world is $250 a month over a 6 month period, or $1500.

Of course, my gut instinct is to say, it can’t be done. To eat and sleep for a month requires more than $250 almost anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere I’d want to go I think.

Raam is oblivious, as he should be, to me calling this impossible, and is doing it successfully anyways.

That’s a mind blowing revelation to me. I am a guy who withdraws $200 from the cash machine once a week for lunches and dinners that week. And here’s Raam who will live an entire month on that including hotels. At the risk of sounding like an ass, $250 is such a small amount to me.

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