Rich RV the World

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-61792-973-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

The easiest, most comfortable, safest and least expensive way to see the entire world is by RV, which the author has done on every continent save Antarctica. When people learn the author and his wife have traveled the world continuously for 18 years, living in 147 countries, everyone is curious. The questions are always the same: Does it cost a lot to travel full time all over the world? How much? How are you able to navigate all those foreign countries? What's the best way to do it? Then comes, I wish I could do that, to which the author always says, Anyone can do it if they really want to. It's easy and inexpensive. The book answers all these questions and takes the reader on a tour of Europe, Scandinavia, North Africa and the Middle East, further answering where to go, what to do and exactly how to do it. The sights include all the Seven Wonders and much more, from fantastic cities, national parks, sprawling antiquities and incredible mountains to exotic shopping, fine dining and pristine beaches. Here's how to ship your own RV all over the world or go wherever you'd like and buy an RV there, obtain insurance, deal with foreign languages, the requirements of the proper RV and how to sell it locally before moving onto the next continent. Full-time international travel is easy when you know how to deal with the necessary details from mail, inoculations, documents, weather, costs, airfare, investments and healthcare.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rich, David

Leseproben

RV THE WORLD

Robert Louis Stevenson

CHAPTER ONE

The Monkey on My Back: To See It All

My earliest vivid memory was a photo from an old geography-book: Vesuvius in full-color eruption spewing fluorescent orange magma, burying rich Romans in Pompeii and Herculaneum, striking me between the eyes. What four-year-old wouldn’t?

I could never kick this early memory, which evolved into a recurrent dream of seeing the world, the whole lot of it. I simply had to find the most interesting volcanoes and countries, curiosity spurred by school-teacher parents with a fixation on travel and geography. Call me doomed from the start, bereft of alternatives and required by heritage to see the whole entire world or die trying.

But I found that continuous world travel isn’t so tough or dangerous and dying likely isn’t on, with the possible exception of touring the hotted-up portions of those countries actively at war. This world travel addiction was aggravated by a stay-at-home aversion, seeking more enchantment than a daily commute past the neighborhood McDonalds Restaurant.

I nagged long-suffering parents to drive down every road, reasoning as a pre-kindergartener that we might stumble across Vesuvius most anywhere. Humoring the four-year-old they drove down lots of roads, mostly dirt with many ending on the edges of deep canyons in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, the Four Corners area where I grew up. They’d brought it on themselves, infecting me with a travel and geography obsession, insisting in return for my see-the-end-of-every-road harassment that I learn context, all the states and capitals, crushed to find Vesuvius nowhere near the Four Corner’s Monument.

Umpteen years later I’ve lived in 147 countries, not a difficult task for a homeless rolling stone. After sixteen years fulltime international travel and decades of sporadic gallivanting, while allegedly working, I’ve seen three-quarters of the world’s countries and 90% of its area in depth. That’s enough so far because it leaves places to go next year. With 191 countries in the United Nations and over 200 in the Olympics there are countries left to explore and people to see, new photo opportunities for bombarding myriad inboxes.

The best places on earth are difficult to tally because everyone likes different things. There’s no accounting for tastes, or lack thereof. You may like beaches while I rather don’t, working and living in Arizona, dodging the sun for decades. Instead I love national parks, mountains and natural wonders, living my first twenty some years in Colorado. If required to list a single wonder from each continent I’d be hard pressed. However, there are eight or ten splendors for each landmass that I can highly recommend, where I hope to return, to see how they’ve fared in the interim. I found in 2007 Morocco that you can’t go back again, to the same country you saw years before. It’s disappeared and gone, replaced by a remarkably different place.

Perhaps Europe conjures Paris in springtime, or Viennese pastries, or the Alps, Algarve and Absinthe. The highlights of three years RVing Europe, details later, were the fjords and Lofoten Islands of Norway, the Scottish highlands and lochs, the Picos de Europa in northwest Spain with perhaps the world’s best blue cheese, the Greek ruins of Sicily, kitschy Malta, Greek Monasteries, Turkish baths and hospitality, Guinness on tap in Ireland, Scottish lochs, Belgium’s Venice-like Brugge and medieval Ghent, most everything in Italy, former Yugoslavia’s Marco-Polo-Dalmatian coast and fabulous friends and places in Holland. That’s old Europe with years of travel lore omitted.

The undiscovered continent is South America, where we spent two years RVing and which offers more natural wonders than Bayer does aspirin. From the world’s highest waterfall, Angel in Venezuela, to the world’s largest and most incredible waterfall, Iguaçu bordering Argentina and Brazil, two miles from Paraguay, and most of the world’s expanding and clean glaciers in Perito Merino Parque Nacional Glacieres, far south in Argentina’s Patagonia, to fantastically photogenic Torres Del Paine in Patagonian Chile, this is South America. Perito Merino includes ethereal Mt. Fitzroy, named after the commander of HMS Beagle, and icebergs bobbing down Lago Argentino, and even further south, Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city and the jumping-off place for Antarctica. My favorite hike in the entire world is up Roraima tepui in Venezuela where Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela intersect, with more indigenous species than the Galapagos, which are definitely don’t-miss islands. The question remains: does South America contain the world’s most picturesque country or most perfect volcano?

This barely scratches the surface of South America’s nigh inexhaustible wonders, omitting Machu Picchu, the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash in Peru, the death roads of Bolivia, its incredible Uyuni salt flats and colorful lakes, not to mention enchanting Sajama and the border crossing into Chile where twin-volcanic peaks perfectly reflect in alpine lakes, shores pocked with alpaca.

South America would be perfect except for the poverty that encourages disparate desperados in the sprawling urban areas of a few countries, easily made safe if traveled sensibly and with care.

The safest continent is expansive and diverse Asia with its fascinating cultures and cuisines. Asia’s incredible jumble of countries laces the continent into an unimaginable potpourri of utter enchantment, very picturesque. But before going I had no interest in Asia until we decided China was must-see. We figured, ?, so we did and loved it.

We found exotic Thailand with cuisine, temples and people to pine for, tragic Cambodia embellished by Angkor Wat, laidback Laos and beleaguered Myanmar (required to say, ) with enchanting Bagan (Pagan) and Mandalay where the Mustache Brothers busily ‘dissed the military regime. Don’t miss surprising Vietnam with short memories of minor wars, cobras in wine and so much more, all indelible. After the first trip I returned to Thailand yearly for routine medical check-ups at my favorite hospital on the planet and for Bangkok’s October film festival, always on the way to somewhere in the neighborhood, whether Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia or the Stans, former Russian republics.

How about Africa? For some grotesque reason people shy away from Africa. There’s little to be shy of outside of two nasty cities, Johannesburg and Nairobi. The rest of Africa, all 56 countries (excluding these two cities that are only dangerous at night), is relatively safe and fairly easy to get about, seeing ultra-close-up. Africa offers gems: the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia with its wild mountains, ancient tribes and lovely Lalibela; kick-back opportunities in South Africa, especially Cape Town and the south coast with its wine country and wild surf; the easy environs of Namibia with colorful and incredible desert dunes, and Botswana with the phenomenal Okavango Swamp. That’s almost all the way up to Victoria Falls on the border between Zimbabwe, innocuous for tourists, and very civilized Zambia with several great game parks. Then it’s easy to drive up friendly Malawi via the shores of rift-valley Lake Malawi to the paradise of Tanzania. Vying for the top spot with Mali, Egypt and Morocco, Tanzania offers one of the longest lists of top incredible places in Africa: the Ngorongoro Crater, a perfect subterranean caldera stuffed with Africa’s finest big game animals, flamingos and much more, the Serengeti, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar.

Go to Morocco before it’s too late, before it becomes more Europe-south than it already is. And don’t miss incredible Mali: take the Niger River trip to Timbuktu; check out what’s likely the world’s oldest market aged 1000s of years at D’Jenne and the largest mud mosque, culminating in a few-day hike through the mind-boggling Dogon culture. And there’s so much more in Africa, including Tunisia, Egypt and Togo, vast swatches as safe as where you live now.

You can do the same as I did on every continent and better, catering to your own interests, which may include beaches. The best beaches in the world, if that means the whitest sand, most translucent waters, cleanest and most deserted, are the 365 islands of the San Blas, an autonomous refuge in the Panamanian Caribbean, one of the few areas in the Americas fully administered by indigenous, except in the Canadian Arctic. I exclude Africa where corrupt governments and military officials are perfectly indigenous.

There are plenty of ways to travel the world and excluding one, they come up remarkably short of pleasant. My wife, Mary, says I should more diplomatically say, I always listen to what Mary says, which is an essential key to harmonious international travel, though on occasion she has suggested I’m obliviously hard-of-hearing.

The choices of how to travel the world range from the easiest and most boring tours,...