Go Away! Here, I Will Help

by Greg Herbowy

Many comments followed Julia Phillips’s “Living With Your Wanderlust” last week, some by readers who said they’d love to leave town but didn’t think they could find a way. Don’t worry. There are lots of ways.

Last year, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I left our jobs and apartment for six months in Asia. We had one-way tickets to Singapore, a place to stay in the city, and two more booked flights: one to Ho Chi Minh City, a few days later, and one to Colombo, about two months after that. We’d bought a few guidebooks and travel things and sketched out a baggy itinerary. We’d gotten shots and a few pills and visas. As far as planning our next half-year went, that was about it.

Everything worked out fine, and some one hundred and eighty-odd days later, after a late-planned detour to France, we flew home on a budget airline’s decommissioned Iron Maiden tour plane.

A lot of people have asked us how we managed it. The answers are, without exception, boring and obvious. They’re also not necessarily the smartest. Really, though, that’s a good thing. It proves that, provided you have a reliable income and relatively few responsibilities (big qualifiers, admittedly), a trip like ours is easy to make happen. Be not afraid.

Ready to get ready? Here’s what to do.

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Savings. There’s no magic to saving. Identify the goods and services you pay for and find ways to spend less on them. We had no internet or cable, loaned movies and books from the library, and took advantage of work benefits like flexible spending plans. I kept a cheap cell phone with a cheap plan and sold unwanted books and CDs online. We didn’t go nuts — we still went on occasional vacations and ate out more than we should have — and this reluctance to go nuts probably made the saving take a lot longer than necessary (all told, maybe three years).

Our rough goal was a year’s worth of expenses, a sum we based on our monthly expenses at home. Half of this was marked for the trip, half as a cushion, in case we couldn’t find work immediately upon our return. We knew we’d likely spend less abroad than we would in the States — nearly everywhere we went had an exchange rate favoring the dollar — but didn’t want to feel hemmed in by a miserly budget, as this would likely be our only shot at a trip like this. By the end, we’d spent about $8,500 each — more than anticipated but still within our means.

Was this a lot? (That’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical.) There are plenty of hardcore travelers who would denounce our profligacy, and there’s no question we could have done it for less, particularly if we’d been less mobile. Still, at this amount, we were able to stay in private rooms with private baths, eat big meals whenever we were hungry, buy gifts for family and friends (and foot the shipping bills to send them home), and spend a few nights in ritzy hotels.

So yes, absolutely, you could do it for less.

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Work. Once you’ve saved the amount you need, set a date of departure, start looking for flights, and tell everyone you know about your plans. By getting the word out about where and when you’re going, you a) stand a good chance of uncovering contacts at some of your destinations, b) can also put out the word that you’re looking for someone to sublet your place (if you’ll need that), and c) set yourself up for multiple public shamings should you falter in resolve.

Among the people you’ll talk to will be your employer(s). If you want to work at wherever you’re working again, or even just leave on good terms, give two to three months’ notice, say you’ll work to minimize any disruption your leaving might cause, and ask about alternatives to resignation. Maybe they’ll grant you an unpaid leave of absence. Maybe you can work out some sort of sporadic freelancing arrangement, as I did. Or maybe you’ll get escorted out. If so, who cares? You’ve already decided to go.

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Taxes, Etc.. Are you going to be away in the first part of the year? File for six-month extensions on your tax returns, federal and state, and, if necessary, pay the government(s) any amount you think you will owe — otherwise, you’ll get charged interest. The forms are simple and available online, and extensions are granted automatically. (If you’re going away for a whole year, I have no idea what you’d do. Ask an accountant.)

If they’re not already, set up things like loans or your mortgage on auto-pay.

Right before you leave, call your bank and credit-card provider and let them know where you’re headed, so they won’t see a withdrawal or charge made halfway around the world and think your account’s been hijacked. Then suspend your phone service for however long you’ll be gone, or as long as they’ll allow you. (Once that time period has passed, suspend it again.)

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Visas. The biggest potential hassle is probably getting all your necessary visas. Sometimes, a visa just means paying some official about $20 at the border and getting a tiny sticker pasted into your passport book. Sometimes a visa isn’t required at all. Other times, you need to get the visa ahead of time, usually by working directly with an embassy or consulate, though some countries outsource the process to third parties. Go to travel.state.gov, or the country’s U.S. embassy website, to find out.

One well-traveled person I spoke to before our trip suggested we take care of our visa needs on the road. I guess this makes sense. In various tourist hubs, we definitely saw a lot of outfits offering visas and other permits for a small fee. But it still seems to me better to handle all that business ahead of time, especially if you’re only traveling for a handful of months.

That said, if you don’t live in or near one of a very few cities, getting visas can be time-consuming, since you’ll be doing it by mail. Each country runs its embassies and consulates differently, each has its own specific requirements and red flags (my India visa was held up because of what I’d put down for my profession), and some can take weeks to do whatever bureaucratic thing it is they do. It’s worth it, though. Visas are awesome — seriously, the best souvenirs.

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Health. The Center for Disease Control site has country-specific health advice, but run their recommendations by your doctor, too. Mine actually advised against some of the vaccinations, sparing us some painful shots and a few hundred dollars each. (Though in retrospect, it might’ve been safer to insist on the rabies.)

Traveler’s health insurance policies are inexpensive and legion, and often allow you to tack on things like reimbursements for lost luggage or canceled flights, all options we ignored. I think it was the Times’s Frugal Traveler blog that once posted a link to an insurance policy price calculator — anyway, it’s here. I can’t remember if that’s how we found our agency, the cornily named World Nomads. Our policies cost $224 for just under six months. Neither of us used them.

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Okay, enough. I could go on. I won’t. We figured it all out as we went along. You will, too. Before I finish, though, a story.

One consequence of not giving much forethought to our route was that we would sometimes end up somewhere when it might have been better not to be there. Late spring in Rajasthan, India’s desert state, for example, turns out to be terrifyingly hot. One hundred and five degrees is like the baseline. I swore I could feel my brain cook.

Luckily, in Jaisalmer, we found a hotel run by a friendly group of brothers. It had an open-air restaurant on the roof, and at night we’d bring up sheets from our room to sleep alongside the staff on cushion-lined stone benches. At dawn we’d wake up, cold and grateful to be cold.

One afternoon we were in the lobby and two of the brothers asked if we would like to take a ride. They and their friends were heading out to play cricket and there were some monuments near the pitch that the wife and I could explore.

We went, piling into their Jeep, and wandered around the site for a while, then over to the field to throw the ball around with the brothers and their friends. The sun had started to set and the heat was dissipating. It felt like one of those idealized summer nights from growing up, when you’d be squinting to play in the near-dark.

Soon it was too dark and we drove back to town, dropping people off until it was just the brothers, my wife, and me. Then we went over to their house and ate dinner with their family, sitting on their foyer floor. Then we all went back to the hotel and up to the roof to bed.

Neat, right?

Greg Herbowy lives in New York.