So, we have been thinking about the rest of our trip, especially the five weeks in Thailand… Since we will be spending 2 weeks at the beach in Boracay very soon, and have decided not to go to Cambodia or Laos, or Vietnam, we are going to return to Europe earlier than planned. This will give us some time before Christmas to get organized, the kids will go back to school earlier, and Holger will also have some time to help them get settled. Also, we are looking forward to enjoying the Christmas season in Germany, with the markets, the gingerbread house and all… With the help of our travel agent back in the US, we have changed our tickets and are now flying back to Berlin on December 1st. Also, we have our plane tickets for our visit to France on December 26th-30th to celebrate Noel en famille! Merci Maman / Merci Mamie pour ce beau cadeau!! Il nous tarde de partager enfin Noel tous ensemble!
Browsing Posts in Preparation
We are also finalizing preparation for our trip to India through a travel agent, TGS Jaipur, recommended by our hotel in Delhi, we have booked train tickets for some destinations (Delhi-Udaipur overnight, Jodhpur-Jaipur) and car with driver (Udaipur-Jodhpur, Jaipur-Agra-Delhi), as well as reserved hotel rooms in the various cities. This has been very time consuming, mostly while we were in Cairns and in Tokyo, as it was difficult to decide on an itinerary that would not involve too much driving or packing-unpacking, but still see the sights of Rajahstan. I had been in touch with several tour companies, some offering a complete package with driver and guide all along, or (which is what we chose), only organizing transport and accommodation. But then we found out the seats on the day train were actually beds (??) and the berths on the night train are separate. I guess we’ll figure it out when we get there… Checking out the suggested hotel also took some time: I wanted to make sure we would have decent accommodation, with clean working bathroom and western toilets… A recent outbreak of dengue fever also prompted us to check the situation further, but all you can do is use very strong mosquito repellent, and wear protective clothing. We are also starting our malaria pills today. We chose Malarone, because it has the fewest and mildest side effects (unlike other medicine that can cause psychosis or anxiety!) .
Anyway, we are flying to New Delhi tomorrow. Hopefully, everything will go well and no one will get sick. We keep our fingers crossed!
It’s our last day in San Diego – June 22, 2010.
We packed everything – everyone got a backpack, and that’s all we take. Ziplocs are great to organize everything.
… and off we go on our trip around the world 
Today we moved … now everything is on the way to Germany, which will take about 8 to 12 weeks. Nathalie did a great job organizing the move. She sold all our furniture, cars and a lot of our stuff. She is the master of Craigslist, eBay and we even had a garage sale.
After all the selling and sorting through our stuff multiple times we were still left with 3 liftvans (600 cubic fteet, 4,500 lbs).
How to find your way in a foreign country? In today’s world, a GPS seems to be a very useful and relatively inexpensive solution.
We purchased a Garmin Nuvi 205 for under US$100 and added a 4GB microSD for about US$8.
Purchasing a map for every country would have been quite expensive, so we went with free open source maps from OpenStreetMap www.openstreetmap.org. We downloaded maps for all countries we wanted to go to from Free routable maps for Garmin brand Devices www.garmin.na1400.info/routable.php. The selected maps were automatically compiled into a single gmapsupp.img file for easy installation.
Uncertain about the quality of the free maps, we purchased a commercial map for Costa Rica for US$39 from GPS Costa Rica Map www.gpscostaricamap.com were we are going to rent a car. The RV we are going to rent in New Zealand already comes with a GPS.
We downloaded the free GMapTool from www.anpo.republika.pl/download.html that allowed us to merge conveniently multiple gmapsupp.img files into a single file.
We then just had to copy the gmapsupp.img file into a new \Garmin folder on the removable disk of the Garmin Nuvi device and the GPS would recognize all our maps.
We created our own BLOG for the world trip.
We used justHost www.justhost.com as our web hosting company and installed Wordpress www.wordpress.org as blogging software with the following plugins: Theme – Arjuna X, Restricted Access – Member Access, Photo Gallery – NextGEN Gallery, Contact Form – Fast and Secure Contact Form, Maps - XML Google Maps, Donations – Pay Pal Donations and Site Statistics – Google Analytics.
A blog is a great way to update everybody! It also provides an easy backup for our pictures.
We not only went on a trip around the world, but are also moving from the US to Germany – a different school system and a different language. The timing seems to be perfect – Athina completed middle school, 8th grade, in the US, and Lucas completed 4th grade in the US (end of Grundschule in Germany) and can now start with the Gymnasium in 5th grade in Germany. We wanted to stay as long as possible in North America to give our children the opportunity to learn English as their first language – but waiting until Athina would be in high-school would be pushing it. Even though I am reading and speaking German with my children and they were going to Germany and France every summer on vacations, German is their weakest language as we speak French at home. Athina and Lucas were fortunate to go to some of the best elementary (Del Mar Hills Academy) and middle schools (Carmel Valley Middle School) in the US and they were doing great at school. Comparing the academic curriculum, sure they are different, but they seem to be a little bit ahead in the US, which should help. So the major difficulty for them will be using the German language, especially writing. The year, before the world trip, we started a more formal German language program at home. We were very impressed with the German schools Athina and Lucas are going to attend in Germany: last year when Athina and Lucas were on vacation in Germany, the Grundschule Enger and Widukind Gymnasium Enger invited them to spend a day in their respective classes, which went quite well. Widukind Gymnasium Enger www.widukindgymnasium.de even let us have all the schoolbooks for 5th and 9th grade, so we could prepare in advance as they will be missing the first half of the school year. One interesting point was that for Athina to be admitted in 9th grade at a Gymnasium she had to have knowledge of 3 years in Latin or French – good we speak French at home, as the middle school in California did not offer any language classes before 8th grade and those were not mandatory neither. We scanned in all the schoolbooks and loaded them on our Netbook. Whenever we now have time – afternoons, flights, rainy days … – we are working on it. Poor kids, they just finished a tough school year working very hard, and now I am not letting them have a well deserved summer break and but instead nag them every day with German studies – sorry guys! As my (with me) desperate English teacher “Herr Erdmann” at the Widukind Gymnasium Enger always said to me: “Wer strebend sich bemueht den koennen wir erloesen! (If you relentlessly thrive to work on something you will master it)”. Looks like we’ve come full circle – my kids going to the same school I did … who would have thought?
We were debating for some time what camera to take with us. We had a little collection of a tough & underwater (3m) Olympus camera (Lucas), compact & handy Canon camera (Holger) and high performance, high zoom, but not that handy Canon camera (Nathalie).
We decided to take only one camera with us – given our luggage constraints and that we wanted to carry it around with us easily – one which would be a good compromise – a compact camera with maximum optical zoom. So no to: underwater photography, long video documentaries and professional photography.
After reading all kinds of reviews on the internet, there was a clear leader in this category, the Lumix DMC-ZS3 (Panasonic) a compact camera with 12x optical zoom. Being a true Canon fan, this did not work for me, I really needed to be convinced not to buy the Canon SX200 IS with a 12x optical zoom. We finally evaluated both cameras for a month. I have to admit both cameras are great to the point that I could not find any argument for the Canon – actually we found the Lumix at $269 on Amazon (no taxes) about $100 cheaper than the Canon and I felt uncomfortable with the Canon flash that pops out and might get stuck (in some reviews) or break on a little bit rougher round the world travel.
Turned out we are seeing this camera being used by many backpackers.
We purchased an unlocked dual-SIM card quad-band world phone – the Direktor – for US$98.18 from www.chinavasion.com.
We purchased an international SIM card for US$73 including $25 airtime from www.simcardglobal.com that provided the best deal for the countries we wanted to go to with free incoming SMS, free voice mail and the following fees (IN/OUT $US Cents): Costa Rica (free/43), Peru (143/189), French Polyn. (164, 195), New Zealand (63/114), Australia (free, 69), Japan (free/80) – but our phone won’t work in Japan, China (134/162), India (326/384), Philippines (82/134), Thailand (124/153), USA (free/52), France (10/52) and Germany (10/52).
List of international SIM cards to choose from: www.simcardglobal.com, www.globalsimcard.co.uk, www.roamforce.com, www.onesimcard.com, www.travelsim.com, www.mobal.com, www.telestial.com, www.uwtmobile.com, www.planetomni.com, www.zazzmobile.com, www.ustronics.com, www.travelsimshop.com, www.roamsimple.com, www.roam4less.com, www.tripmobile.com, www.telphin.com, www.0044.co.uk, www.gosim.com, www.maxroam.com.
Overall this is not a good solution for local communications or calling back home, but good for emergencies.
For local communications we intend to use local SIM cards, therefore we purchased a dual SIM card phone.
For calling back home we intend to use Skype from internet cafes.
USA | Tuesday, 16 March 2010
March 15, 2010
OK, what’s new? We have received Holger’s and Lucas’ new passports, so next we will be able to apply for our Indian and Chinese visas. We will be travelling as Canadians.
We have been working on our itinerary in more details. For each country, we are planning on booking at least the first night accommodation, since we often will be arriving late in the day. China is proving to be quite the nightmare… October 1-7 is National Holiday week, very busy and expensive… but we can’t buy train tickets until 20 days before travel time. In Shanghai, we will be going to the World Expo 2010. Last time we visited one was in Hannover in 2000 with Mumu, before Lucas was born!
So far, I have booked a guesthouse in Costa Rica, Tacacori Ecolodge (www.tacacori.com), run by a French couple. In Lima, Peru, we will stay at the Angels Inn Backpackers (www.theangelsinnperu.com)for 3 nights before flying to Cusco. In Moorea, we are going to be staying at Fare Miti (www.mooreafaremiti.com), and do nothing! In Delhi, we will be at the Nirvana Hostel…
Oh, and we took trip/ health insurance for the 6 months…
That’s all for now.