My Radical Round-the-World Sabbatical

Learn the ropes from a traveler who took 15 months off to roam the planet.

While Malawi's principal highway is illustrated on maps as a proud red swath, its northern half — unpaved and deeply rutted — is more like a crudely graded horse trail. This hasn't stopped our wild-eyed driver from achieving near-freeway speeds. At daybreak, he picks up my wife, Jackie, and me near Chitimba, a tiny village beside Lake Malawi where we'd been thumbing a ride. Suddenly we're soaring through lush landscapes, the tiniest bumps pitching us airborne. Jackie and I are enduring this perilous trip while clutching plastic jump seats in the back end of a Mitsubishi SUV, watching the road recede. It's only the first part of a day's journey that will include several hitched rides, a two-mile walk in the midday sun, and four sweltering hours packed into a Toyota minivan with 22 passengers, one of whom sits on my lap for at least half the ride, and another to my left who has sustained some sort of head injury that no one seems to notice. The collar of his white shirt is saturated with blood trickling from a wound above his hairline.

Our plan is to reach Tanzania by evening, and oddly, after 275 days on the road — three-quarters of the way through a planetary expedition to 32 countries and four continents — the 15-hour, 150-mile trip isn't so tough. In fact, during our bone-jarring push to the border, we one-up each other with equally abominable travel tales.

“Remember Mongolia?” says Jackie as we lurch to dodge an elderly bicyclist. “We rode horseback through pelting rain for days on wooden saddles?”

“You're forgetting Laos,” I reply. “Five hours sitting on plastic stools in the center aisle of an ancient bus.”

Despite a handful of exceptionally miserable incidents, however, our yearlong journey around the world isn't a daily endurance test of wits, patience, and physical trauma. Surprisingly, the surfeit of discomforts related to travel in the developing world soon goes unnoticed. They're intrinsic to movement and are almost always short-lived. And as the months pass, we get better at guessing which segments are most likely to yield bruised butts and frayed nerves, then pad the hard travel with a spell on a tropical isle or a few days in a mountain lodge.

Excessive? Perhaps. After a harried six weeks in India, we took a month to sample the glorious beaches in the Maldives and Mauritius. Required rest, really, for the next leg was in Africa, a three-month, 2,500- mile overland trek from Swakopmund, on Namibia's desolate Atlantic coast, to Dar es Salaam, the gritty Tanzanian capital.

So why visit Africa and not South America? Trek in Nepal instead of Bhutan? Choose Cambodia over Burma? The temptation to see it all is irresistible. But money and time are inescapable constrictors. While a year affords endless possibilities, it's astonishing how quickly our bare-bones I've-Always-Wanted-To- Go-There list consumed weeks, then months, of the trip. After some debate, we agreed on several must- sees: a river trek in Laos, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, anywhere in Mongolia, the Tibetan-Nepalese Friendship Highway, India's Rajasthan, the Rwandan mountain gorillas, a walking safari in Zambia, Kenya's Masai Mara, and Prague.

Some, like Mongolia, we chose for the uncharted appeal, others, such as the Masai Mara, because Out of Africa tops Jackie's favorite-film list. Mystique and romance drew us to Angkor Wat. A walking safari in Zambia would mean a few days' respite from weeks confined to a minivan bouncing over Africa's merciless roads. And then there were the legends: Renowned beer lured us to Prague; renowned hospitality attracted us to Laos.

Before we could start plotting the minutiae, however, we had to pick a heading: east or west? This was a critical detail, as the wrong choice could have deposited us in the Gobi during raging seasonal sandstorms or stranded us in the bush just when rains breached the Zambezi's banks. There were far too many scheduling variables to place us in every country at the seasonally opportune moment. So instead we stuck to a simple strategy: Follow the sun — travel the Northern Hemisphere between April and November, dipping south of the equator when things turn cold.

To book flights, we determined major stopovers, which included Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Bangkok, Beijing, Bombay, Cape Town, Casablanca, and London, but we stopped short of prescribing our day-to-day activities. There would be ample time for that later. Several travel agents specialize in around-the-world itineraries and are experts at forseeing logistical snags and finding the less-obvious deals. Try San Francisco-based Air Treks (www.airtreks.com); our agent there knew that intra-Africa flights are outrageously priced. So he booked us on Gulf Air, with a detour to Abu Dhabi, to get us from Nairobi to Casablanca, which slashed about $1,400 off our combined airfares.

It took three weeks of phone calls, e-mails, and face-to-face meetings with our agent to finalize the itinerary. Then, a few days later, the FedEx envelope arrived: Inside was an inch-thick stack of airline tickets. Our giddy anticipation turned to terror. Were we insane? Until now, we had ignored well-traveled friends who told us we'd be robbed in India if we rode the trains, that we'd contract malaria because our route transversed Central Africa during peak monsoon season, and that bottled water, even with a safety- sealed cap, is polluted and toxic. Except for a single bout with intestinal bugs in Morocco, however, the doomsayers were wrong.

To be sure, staying healthy, eating well, and sticking to a budget wasn't without its hiccups. But faithfully keeping tabs on daily and monthly expenditures averted bankruptcy, and heeding culinary instincts (just because Laotian men gulp down rice liquor infused with bull testicles doesn't mean it's safe) prevented visits to the doctor.

Unexpectedly, the toughest aspects of long-term travel began to surface two months into our journey, once we'd finally eased into a casual, carefree, and ever-changing existence. Gazing from a vista on China's Great Wall, we watched wisps of fog slither up the forested valleys and creep over the ancient stone like ghostly fingers. It was late afternoon, the end of a perfect day walking the peaceful ruins, and suddenly I was heaving with fear.

Were we idiotic to uproot our lives, abandon our responsibilities, and convince ourselves that a year away won't derail us for decades? It was a troubling thought. Of course, my momentary descent into moral interrogation was silenced minutes later when we opted for one of the more bizarre descents from the Great Wall: a nonstop, ten-minute, 1,500-vertical-foot plunge in a plastic street luge that dumped us at the parking lot.

Now, months later, speeding through Malawi in a seemingly out-of-control SUV, a similar foreboding sneaks into my thoughts. Nah, I conclude as our vehicle slams into a pothole, then fishtails sideways until another dip shoves us headlong into the ruts — I wouldn't change a thing.