Plans afoot

Much progress. We have a first stab at an itinerary and I have new boots! We've based the trip on the OneWorld Explorer ticket that allows us 4 flights within each continent and charges us for the number of continents we visit. This seems the best bet considering we're not going to Asia and the alliance includes LAN for getting around South America. Other options included a ticket that allows up to 7 stops and charges on a mileage basis. I'm still not convinced the OneWorld is the right way to go as it is sort of forcing us to take internal flights we might otherwise not bother with. For example - one flight in and out of NZ would do us. Instead we're looking at where we could go in Aus just to use up the flight allowance. Given there's no price difference between this and mileage based ticket, we shouldn't feel obliged to use all the flights I know, but it goes against the grain.

So - rough itinerary is as follows:

London - Rome - Madrid - Rio - Buenos Aires - Lima - Santiago - Auckland - Queenstown - Sydney - Cairns - Perth - Jo'burg - Cape Town - Vic Falls - Nairobi - London

How we're going to fit all that in I don't know.

There's a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and back-tracking to Jo'burg in amongst all that, plus no connections to Nairobi - so we'll have to get ourselves there from SA. We may decide to ditch some of the flights in favour of more exploration overland in general rather than having to get back to the major cities the whole time. We may simplify it a lot and decide to go for the mileage based ticket so we could go to NZ via Fiji, but at least we're starting to get a better idea for what's possible.

The main aim is to be in Tanzania in December, climb Kilimanjaro for Christmas and spend New Year on the beach in Zanzibar. Nice.