Ryan Estrada developed an awesome slideshow on how to travel anywhere on 20 dollars a day. Click to check it out — TRAVEL. 

Itʼs the ultimate trip: circumnavigating the planet, and stopping off wherever takes your fancy. Great for travellers who want to see it all, or who are just plain indecisive. But booking a round-the-world (RTW) trip can be a complex business. Hereʼs our guide to getting started.

How to do it

The most economical way to circumnavigate is to buy a round-the-world air ticket that uses one airline alliance. Theoretically, any routing is possible, but knowing how the RTW booking system works will make your trip cheaper. For example, the Star Alliance, a coalition of 27 airlines, offers a RTW ticket with a maximum of 15 stops. Its member airlines fly to 1185 airports in 185 countries.

There are rules: you must follow one global direction (east or west – no backtracking); you must start and finish in the same country; and you must book all your flights before departure, though you can change them later (which may incur extra charges).

How long you need

You could whip round the world in a weekend if you flew non-stop. However, the minimum duration of most RTW tickets is ten days – still a breathless romp. Consider stock-piling annual leave, tagging on public holidays or even arranging a sabbatical in order to take off two months, ideally six to 12. The maximum duration of a RTW ticket is one year.

Click to read more on how to plan RTW trips — TRAVEL

Lonely Planet guides have been incredible tools while traveling. Great work here.

Via Tynan–

Last night I landed in Florence. I had four layovers on the way here, which doesn’t sound like a positive thing at first, but I booked them intentionally. Very frequently, if I have a long flight, I’ll book tons of long layovers and actually leave the airport on each one.

My first layover was in Newark for almost five hours, so I rented a car, drove to see my family in New Jersey for a couple hours, and then headed back to the airport. My next flight brought me to Lisbon for two hours, which was a layover I couldn’t avoid, but was too short to enjoy. It was early in the morning when I landed, and it was a short flight to my next destination, Amsterdam, so I got there early as well. I had twenty-two hours in Amsterdam, so I checked into my airport hotel, dropped off my stuff, and headed downtown.

Downtown I had some lunch , visited the Rijksmusem to see the Vermeers (I’m on a pointless quest to see all 34 Vermeers), visited the Van Gogh museum, had dinner, and then walked around the red light district before heading back to the hotel.

The next morning I woke up early again and headed to Zurich, which I was warned was incredibly boring. I managed to take the least direct train downtown, which gave me a mini tour of the outer edges of the city, I walked down the main shopping street, wandered through old Zurich, ate a couple Swiss chocolates, spent a lot of time down by the water watching the swans, took some pictures, and then headed back to the airport to work in the Swiss Air lounge. After eight hours total in Zurich, I headed to Florence.

This amalgamation of flights cost the same as a flight to Florence with the 1-2 unusable stopovers that would have been unavoidable anyway. Instead, I got to spend a couple extra days traveling to see my family as well as two cities/countries I hadn’t seen before. I wouldn’t want to do this sort of new-country-every-day traveling for long periods of time, but for 2-3 days here and there it can be a lot of fun.

Click to read more on unconventional travel tips and booking intentional layovers. 

Image of Amsterdam via Google Commons

Imagine a vast hall in Anglo-Saxon England, not long after the passing of King Arthur. It is the dead of winter and a fierce snowstorm rages outside, but a great fire fills the space within the hall with warmth and light. Now and then, a sparrow darts in for refuge from the weather. It appears as if from nowhere, flits about joyfully in the light, and then disappears again, and where it comes from and where it goes next in the stormy darkness, we do not know. 

Our lives are like that, suggests an old story in Bede’s medieval history of England. We spend our days in the familiar world of our five senses, but what lies beyond that, if anything, we have no idea. Those sparrows are hints of something more outside, a vast world, perhaps, waiting to be explored. But most of us our happy where we are. We may even be a bit afraid to venture into the unknown. What would be the point, we ask. Why should we leave the world we know?

Yet there are always a few who are not content to spend their lives indoors. Simply knowing there is something unknown beyond their reach makes them acutely restless. They have to see what lies outside — if only, as George Mallory said of Everest, “because its there.”

This is true of adventurers of every kind, but especially of those who seek to explore not mountains or jungles but consciousness itself: whose real drive, we might say, is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower. Such men and women can be found in every age and culture. While the rest of us stay put, they quietly slip out to see what lies beyond.

Via Eknath Easwaran’s translation of The Bhagavad Gita