The Wander Year

There are two kinds of vagabonds: those who make room in their backpacks for an inflatable clothes hanger, and those who don’t.

The around-the-world journey my girlfriend, Andrea, and I are about to start will feature members of both camps. Andrea deems the plastic blow-up device essential, whereas the first thing I plan to pack is a sense of humor. That’s not to suggest there is nothing funny about an inflatable hanger. In fact, we may need to pull it out for a laugh should we succumb to dysentery in Katmandu, say, or misplace our passports in a Saharan sand dune.

Our split over the best method of drying hand-washed attire is no small matter, as it may point to friction farther down the road. Sure, Andrea and I have been great friends for a dozen years, living together the last five. We have shared vacations in Ireland, France, Scotland, Guatemala and Ecuador without a single argument.

But prolonged travel through the cramped Third World--where we expect to be during much of our trip--is another animal entirely. Like a stint on a submarine, it tends to force all character flaws to the surface.

It’s me I worry about, not Andrea. She is easygoing, bordering on serene. But before we clear U.S. Customs a year from now, I know I will somehow compel her to whack me upside the head with her inflatable hanger.

Our goal is to spend 2000 circling the globe, starting from our house in San Diego and heading west. We’ve penciled in an itinerary, but we’re carrying a big eraser. No blueprints for this trip. We intend to pass through the South Pacific, Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Europe and North Africa, but we’ll make most plans on the fly. Countries will be added, others dropped, and there’s always a chance we’ll end up somewhere we never considered, like Tierra del Fuego in South America.

If we sound a bit aimless, it’s because we pretty much are. There is no grand purpose or point to our journey. The heaviest part of it, I suspect, will be our backpacks. We are not out to find ourselves, or even to lose ourselves. We’re merely seeking a pause in our routines. Call it the Wander Year.

“I’m willing to take the risk, professionally,” says Andrea, who is leaving a lucrative career in the health insurance industry. “I don’t want to wait until I’m 65 to do the things I want to do. I may not live that long, and I may not want to do them then anyway. I just want a break.”

Andrea is 40; I’m 42. Neither of us has been married, nor do we have children. That makes this next year less risky than it would be for many people. The $40,000 we’ve budgeted for the trip won’t come out of a youngster’s college fund. If ditching work during a booming economy proves a boneheaded move and we wind up flipping burgers into our 80s, we will have hurt only ourselves.

Our plan isn’t unique. Travel agents who specialize in selling around-the-world air fares are writing more tickets than ever. “Right now I’m so swamped, I’ve got bookings I can’t even get done,” said Owen Rosenberg of TicketPlanet, a San Francisco agency that specializes in such trips. Sales of global treks are up 30% in the last two months, he says.

His typical client is a young professional who makes a good income and is confident of rejoining the work force at the end of the trip. Most are women. Rosenberg recently sold around-the-world tickets to four people who simultaneously resigned from the same Silicon Valley software company.

“They’re not worried,” he said. “They know they’ll come back and find jobs.”

In 1988, when Eimerd Evertsen founded Air Brokers International, another San Francisco global ticket specialist, his clientele was almost exclusively the backpacker set--people who lived to travel. These days his agents deal mainly with early retirees, people on leaves of absence and people in their 30s who are between careers. Evertsen, who was born in the Netherlands, said Americans are moving toward a more European lifestyle with respect to the balance between work and play.

“The feeling is that work is OK, but it’s not everything,” he said.

The Big Decision

Andrea certainly feels that way. Her most recent position was sales manager for the San Diego office of a major health insurance company. Her longest time off in 15 years of work was three weeks, and that was only once. Last month, after seven years of night school, she finished her master’s degree in public health at San Diego State University. She figures she has earned a respite.

It’s harder for me to rationalize my involvement in our year abroad. My resume already includes a lengthy gap. In 1992 I jumped at a buyout offer from the San Diego Union, where I worked as a feature writer, when it merged with the Tribune. The buyout money allowed me to roam through Central America, Mexico and the U.S. for the next two years.

The danger of chucking a career to travel--which I have pointed out to Andrea--is that it’s tough to return to the workaday world. I lasted four months in my next journalism job before despair led me to quit abruptly and hitchhike coast to coast with no money.

Crazy, I know, but I was lucky. I actually made a profit on my midlife crisis, turning the experience into a book called “The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America.” A few years later, it’s a new rut, but this time the demons I flee are far less melodramatic--prime-time television and Haaggen-Dazs ice cream.

We got the idea to travel for a year in December 1998, when Andrea’s employer was bought by another major insurance company. There was a good chance her job would be eliminated and she would get a substantial severance package. Images of exotic destinations flashed in her head. Months later, when the sale went through, she was sad to learn she had a job with the new company. There would be no golden handshake. But by then the fantasy had taken hold, and she decided to quit anyway.

Our initial plan was to take several trips over the course of a year, returning home between them. We concluded this was impractical since we needed to generate rental income from our house and it’s hard to find tenants willing to sign a two-month lease. It made more sense to leave for a whole year.

Suddenly we went from studying individual pages in our atlas to spinning our globe. Andrea and I have traveled extensively throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe, and we expect to go back to those parts of the world on future vacations. But one objective of this journey is to visit harder-to-reach countries, places that we may never have the chance to return to.

But What to See?

We quickly agreed on two destinations: Years ago, I grew fascinated with Vietnam after writing several articles on veterans of the war. Andrea countered with Bali, drawn by its rich culture and lush landscapes. It was a start.

Mapping the rest of our tentative route took much longer. We pored over dozens of travel books from the library, only to return them and check out dozens more. Neither of us had ever pondered New Zealand, but the more we read of its stunning beauty and friendly people, the surer we were we had to go. India and its teeming humanity soon became intriguing. While there, it seems prudent to venture into neighboring Nepal. We kept hearing from veteran travelers that Turkey was one of their favorite countries, so it was added. The current buzz surrounding Morocco is hard to resist. It will be impossible to skip Spain, where we each have visited several times. Fiji and Thailand easily made the list because two of our flights stop there.

Other countries still in the running include China, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Cambodia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Croatia, Slovenia and Portugal. Oh, yes, and Kyrgyzstan. The Central Asian republic is tough to access, but I simply can’t shake the image of cavorting with yaks and sleeping in yurts.

We are independent travelers, shunning organized tours and cruises. We enjoy temples and ruins as much as the next sightseer, but we are more enthralled by what we see between the sights. Serendipitous snapshots of life, honest and unrehearsed. Sudden glimpses of the sad and the sublime. We like the sensation of being on the way, in the middle, gone. It excites us to wake up in an unfamiliar place and greet the uncertainty of a new day.

Endless Planning

After resolving to take the journey, there were ceaseless logistics to attend to. Our biggest concern was what to do with our pets. Maya is a smiling retriever-shepherd mix whose presence in our home has added years to the life of our aging cat, Aretha, a black American shorthair who had no previous exposure to aerobic activity. Saying goodbye to these two characters will be brutal.

We looked for someone to care for our pets in exchange for reduced rent. To our surprise, there was no shortage of candidates. We struck a deal with a friend of a friend, a responsible professional and animal lover. He’s basically taking over our lives: furniture, plants, everything stays put. The utilities will stay in our name, and our tenant/pet sitter will pay the bills. The rest of our payments--credit cards, house, car, health insurance--will automatically be deducted from our checking account. We’ll arrange to file our income tax returns and receive absentee voter ballots while away. Andrea updated her will. I thought of writing my first ever but decided against tempting fate.

The one colossal mistake we’ve made thus far is allowing four months to prepare for the trip: way too much time. I’ve traveled enough to know that the supreme reward of any journey--that rare and wondrous moment of epiphany--can’t be planned. So why sweat the endless piddling details? I could have learned to play the ukulele in those four months.

Early on, I got sucked into the quicksand that is the World Wide Web. It seems every traveler has a home page filled with photos, advice and links to related sites. Before you know it, it’s midnight and your eyes are bugging, but you can’t release the mouse because that next link might have a nugget of information you think you desperately need. I knew that pointing and clicking had gotten out of hand when it delivered me to a site titled “Fatal Events and Fatal Event Rates by Airline Since 1970.” I’m an inquisitive guy, but there are some things I don’t want to know.

We invested an absurd amount of time in a chart we dubbed the Weather Matrix. Down one side of a sheet of paper, we listed the countries we hope to visit. Across the top, we wrote the months of the year. We colored in the corresponding boxes: green for good weather, red for bad, yellow for tolerable. Routing the trip through the green zone creates an unorthodox itinerary. For example, the chart told us to travel to India after New Zealand, then double back to Indonesia. This adds hundreds of dollars to our air fare, but it’s worth it to dodge monsoons and heat waves.

Given our modest budget, the sensible source for airline tickets was one of the agencies specializing in around-the-world fares. The three leading U.S. companies in the field--Air Brokers International, High Adventure Travel and TicketPlanet--are based in San Francisco. Each can tack together a customized itinerary made up of deeply discounted one-way air fares on various well-known--and not-so-well-known--carriers. The resulting cost is often half of what you would pay by buying tickets directly from the airlines.

Global fares are advertised for as little as $995. But this is for travel in the low season, in one continuous direction, with stops in only a couple of popular cities, such as Bangkok and London. To zigzag, backtrack and dip into the Southern Hemisphere, as we intend to do, runs closer to $3,500 each. I spent countless hours playing at https://www.airtreks.com, the Web site of High Adventure Travel. The page features a nifty interactive device called “TripBuilder” that allows you to create millions of custom itineraries and instantly get the estimated fares. But in the end we went with Air Brokers International because it was the quickest to respond to each of my phone calls, taking hours instead of days.

Our trip extends beyond the time most airlines sell seats to discounters, so we’re leaving with only enough tickets to get us halfway around the world. We’ll buy the rest in Bangkok, a mecca for cheap air fares.

‘Come Back Alive’

The reactions of friends and relatives to our journey have ranged from envy to pity. My good friend Bruce Del Fante, a chiropractor with a wife and two boys, played it down the middle when he said, “That is so far out of my realm.” Most folks tell us we’ll have a great time, but the look in their eyes fairly speaks, “Better you than me.”

The most honest opinions of our world jaunt were conveyed by some of the Christmas presents we received. One friend gave us a first-aid kit, complete with an abdominal trauma bandage. Another bought us a travel clock equipped with a flashlight, smoke detector and intruder alarm. A third gave us the books “Come Back Alive” and “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” (the latter contains tips on how to fend off a shark and elude a charging bull).

We’re prepared to encounter a far deadlier creature--the mosquito--which is responsible for 1.5 million to 2.7 million deaths each year. While traveling through Asia, we’ll take Lariam, an antimalarial drug that costs about $10 a pill. We’re packing plenty of mosquito repellent and permethrin, an insecticide that is sprayed on clothing. We’ll also carry a roll of adhesive tape to mend rips we may spot in hotel mosquito nets.

We switched our health coverage to a high-deductible plan with Blue Shield because it does not limit the length of time members may travel outside the country. Other health precautions include vaccinations for typhoid and hepatitis A. We’ll also take iodine tablets to purify water wherever the bottled variety is unavailable.

Our budget took a huge hit before we even boarded our first flight. So far we’ve blown about $5,000 on equipment, clothes, footwear, health products, visas and guidebooks. Throw in the estimated $7,000 we’ll spend on air fare, and we’re down to making our way around the world on roughly $75 a day. That’s a handsome sum in Southeast Asia but a pittance in Europe. We’re banking on it all balancing out in the end.

A Packing Dilemma

Our first big expenditure was on his-and-hers internal-frame Eagle Creek backpacks--$285 apiece. The shoulder straps and hip belts stow into zippered compartments, allowing you to check the packs like regular baggage. They are appropriate for the moderate trekking we’ve planned and will leave our hands free when we’re moving through cities--better to fend off touts and pickpockets.

As our departure day looms, the pile of stuff we’ll try to cram into our packs grows ever higher. Our purchases reflect all the expert advice: lightweight nylon pants, Gore-Tex rain shells, titanium mugs, sewing kit, drain plug (for washing clothes in sinks), super-absorbent pack towels, 8-inch umbrellas, padlocks . . . the list goes on. Individually, each of these items makes sense. Collectively, they add up to our own personal outlet store. When Andrea tossed a copy of “War and Peace” onto the pile, it hardly made a difference.

The decision to take a year off and travel the world, renting the house, selling one of the cars--it was all child’s play compared with the awesome task that now stands before us: packing. When globe-trotting, you are what you carry. So we will spend the remaining days before we leave defining ourselves: Five pairs of underpants or four? Yes or no to the miniature pillows? And what of that confounded inflatable contraption of Andrea’s? It’s always the little things that hang you up.

GUIDEBOOK

Think Globally, Book Locally

You can book round-the-world trips--RTWs in industry lingo--on the major airlines (which use partner airlines to get you around the globe), starting at about $2,500. But discounters may be able to do it for half that price. Here are three companies, all based in San Francisco, that specialize in booking complex global flights:

* Air Brokers International, 150 Post St., Suite 620, San Francisco 94108; telephone (800) 883-3273 or (415) 397- 1383, fax (415) 397-4767, Internet https:://www.airbrokers .com.

* High Adventure Travel, 442 Post St., Suite 400, San Francisco 94102; tel. (800) 350-0646 or (415) 912-5600, fax (415) 912-5606, Internet https://www.airtreks.com.

* TicketPlanet, 59 Grant Ave., San Francisco 94108; tel. (800) 799-8888 or (415) 288- 9999, fax (415) 288-9839, Internet https://www.ticketplanet .com.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Today begins a weekly series that will follow one couple’s journey around the globe. Mike McIntyre and his girlfriend, Andrea Boyles (both at left), have quit their jobs, rented out their San Diego home and arranged to have their pets and other responsibilities taken care of in order to spend a year on the road. What happens to them along the way is anyone’s guess, but you can follow their adventures every Sunday in Travel.