Dear Readers, Family, and Friends,
This is the first of hopefully many posts that will hopefully help other graduates through their way around the world. After successfully completing our senior years at Princeton University, Joe Rokicki and I, Namita Bisaria, plan to set off "adventuring" this next year around the world! It all sounds very grand, but as we are in the planning period of our adventures we are running into a few ruts here in there in terms of logistics and money.
To begin, it is important that we lay out the premise and history of our travel. Joe and I met in our integrated science coursework together, he is an electrical engineer and I am a molecular biologist. We are both going to graduate school following our "gap year" and he is studying synthetic biology and I am doing "systems" biology ( which I don't even know what exactly that entails). We have been backpacking, naively so, to the Yucatan region of Mexico and the Southern part of Peru. Both of these incredible trips showed us that we work well together as traveling companions and have a miraculous "magic" about our journeys such that everything always works out no matter what ridiculous thing we attempt. It might be that we are incredibly optimistic such that the most dismal of situations can have a hidden upside that we find (like the freezing night I spent on a beach in a blanket but got to see the sunrise). Who knows.
It is important to note for various reasons that Joe and I are NOT romantically involved and will never be for the remainder of our traveling relationship. This is an important factor to our dynamic and moreover for our family and significant others.
Our motivation to travel is as most backpacker's motivation: to see the world and learn the local language, colors, customs, and cultures of the places we visit. We want to travel light and live off of our ability to talk to people and make connections. Rather than jump from hostel to hostel, we want to stay in a place and learn and contribute to the landscape there, whether it be working on an organic farm, joining an local arts, health, or education organization, or playing and organizing soccer. There are a couple of organizations we have been in contact with or researched for our trip: World Wide Opportunities for Organic Farming (WWOOF), World of Good Fair Wage Fellowship, Grassroots Soccer in Africa, and Sarala micro-financing institution in West Bengal/Calcutta regions. We are also going to visit some of our much cooler and more organized friends who have received fellowships to do humanitarian projects abroad, such as our friend Katy Digovich who won the Compton Fellowship to setup an AIDS adherence program through text-messaging in Botswana, and Emmie (I don't know her last name Joe), who received a Fulbright to teach English at a school in Indonesia. If anyone who reads this has other organizations that need volunteers and moreover will GIVE MONEY for us to travel please post!
Our current status is as follows: We need funds to travel. We estimate right now that it will take over 9,000 dollars to travel for a year comfortably. Who wants to travel comfortably? We will need ~ 4,000 dollars to pay for the RTW airfare alone (see Star Alliance RTW trip fares). We have some idea of where we want to go but it isn't definite. A potenial trajectory goes: US-->Brazil--> Argentina-->Italy?-->South Africa-->Botswana-->Mauritas-->India-->Signapore (with other parts of SE Asia)-->Indonesia-->Japan-->New Zealand-->US. Those are at least the places that we have talked about going. Who knows at this point, it really all depend on getting contacts and money.
Finally, we will be updating a traveling "Manifesto," contributed to by Joe and I, in order to keep our relationship and motivation during travels safe.
Thank you for reading!
Namita Bisaria
Joe Rokicki
