Three months have now passed since we returned from our 86 day-long Antarctica to Zimbabwe trip that took us through Patagonia, the Antarctic islands of Falklands and South Georgia, Antarctica, the South Atlantic, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
I’d like to say that it’s been time enough to get caught up – except it hasn’t. But it’s been long enough that some of the lessons learned have started to sink in.
As we ramp up for our trip from Tahiti to the Atacama in October, it’s a good time to reflect on what worked – and where we’d improve.
(And indeed there are so many of these lessons that we are going to break this into a multi-part series. Conveniently they will be spaced between our actual trips, so look for these when we’re not on the road. We will cross-link them when they’re done.)
What Worked: Take the trip. There are thousands of reasons not to take an extended trip like this. Some of these reasons – like health or finances – are truly insurmountable. But there are also the little reasons. “I have too much to do around the house.” “What if the kids don’t like the food?”
My wife realized early on that there are few windows in life where you can go on a trip like this. We went on a round-the-world honeymoon after we first got married, and it’s taken us more than a decade to plan another trip. How many other windows would we get?
By focusing on the benefits of an extended trip – the chance to broaden our horizons, step out of our day-to-day lives, and reconnect as a family – we realized it was time to push through those doubts and make this happen. I’m so glad we did.
Science class hits different after you’ve watched a leopard scale a tree
Improve: Slow the pace. The once-in-a-lifetime nature of these trips creates incredible pressure to load up the schedule as much as possible. “Can we really skip XYZ?” we ask, interchanging XYZ with Victoria Falls, the red dunes of Namibia, Cape Cross seal colony, and so on. “We might never get back here again.”
But an 86 day trip is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s easy to tour yourself into a state of exhaustion – particularly during safari and expedition trips that require early mornings, as well as overland travel that requires extensive time on the road.*
*May not include actual roads. Each purple line represents roughly 5 hours of driving, 3 hours of which bounced us along on washboard roads – a huge undertaking for an 11 night trip.
There are no hard-and-fast rules that should determine pacing, but next time we will add at least one extra day in each location compared to a shorter trip. So if we’d stay 2 nights per location on a two-week trip, we’d change that to 3 nights for longer trips.
We also plan to build in more pre-planned “nothing” days that we can either use to tour about on our own time or simply laze around our hotel / vacation rental / ship’s cabin with a good book.
What Worked: Organize, Organize, Organize. All of our trips are planned out in painstaking detail. Each has a day-by-day spreadsheet that includes flights, hotels, tours, transfers, along with detailed file structures that lays out every single confirmation number. We check this several times before the trip, walking through the trip as though we were taking it. And yes, we even plan out when we’ll need to do laundry.
A few lines from our travel planning spreadsheet – the final version was 64 lines long
Is this time consuming? Yes. Has this saved us a great deal of hassle and prevented us from making embarrassing mistakes like accidentally booking a flight to Anguilla when I was supposed to book a flight to Antigua?
(Cough. Not like I would actually make that kind of mistake… and then have to charter a private plane out of St Maarten to get us to Montserrat. Cough.)
Improve: Get help. Travel agents are an amazing resource. We’ve been reluctant to involve them in some of our past trips – partly because we enjoy the planning process, and partly because we enjoy getting the best possible value for our money.
But an extended trip is a different kind of beast entirely. Any potential issues that you run into are likely to have a greater impact, and to be felt that much more keenly when you’re tired and far from home. This makes the marginal extra cost well worthwhile – indeed travel agents often save money in the long run.
We did run into issues flying into Punta Arenas on the way to EcoCamp Patagonia – Hotel Indigo was closed, and we were being re-reouted to Remota. Thankfully this happened under the umbrellas of our travel agent Deanne Leach and VIP Journeys. This meant that everything was handled quickly, and that we were able to get our laundry done as part of the deal.
Because if there’s one truism in expedition travel, it’s that the best views have the fewest washers and dryers
This convinced us to make much heavier use of our travel agent and tour companies for our Australia to Japan trip coming up in 2026.
There are many other lessons learned travelling from Antarctica to Zimbabwe, but it’s already time to prepare for our trip to Rocking Horse Ranch in upstate New York. Check back next week for the full day-by-day trip report! Part 2 of Lessons Learned can be found here.