Around the World in Eighty Days was a tall tale when Jules Verne published it in 1872. Today it reads almost like a leisurely itinerary: with the right connections you could ring the planet in something like eighty hours rather than eighty days. The more interesting question is what state you’d be in when you got home.
Verne knew that travel is really a story about time. Phileas Fogg wins his wager only because, racing eastward around the globe, he unknowingly gains a day crossing what we now call the International Date Line — a twist that still catches readers out. And the eighty days did not stay fictional for long.
In 1889 the American journalist Nellie Bly set out to beat Fogg’s imaginary record for real — and did it in seventy-two days. Her own newspaper’s rival, Elizabeth Bisland, raced her around the world in the opposite direction. The wager had leapt off the page and into the timetables.
Round-the-world air tickets are the modern version of that wager. The big alliances — oneworld, Star Alliance — will sell you one, but they come with conditions: you generally keep travelling in a single direction and close the full loop, Europe to the Americas and home across the Pacific. They reward the patient, and a trip can run from a few days to a whole year. The catch is that the stopovers stack up in cost, and the jet lag stacks up in the body. One long-haul flight is enough to unpick my sleep for days; string several together and the sightseeing is the thing that suffers.
So our plan is deliberately unromantic: reach Australia as directly as we can, then slow right down. Four weeks there, three in New Zealand, and the better part of a month in Hong Kong. Added together it comes to roughly Fogg’s eighty days — but without the bet, and without the sprint. We’re going to see friends and family, to stand in places we’ve never stood, to take in unfamiliar sights and sounds and let them shift us a little. Nothing to win on the clock; just a collection of memories and stories to carry home.
The difference from Fogg is that you won’t have to wait for our return to hear how it goes. I’ll be posting as we travel — regularly, and close to real time, as the journey unfolds.
Further reading: Nellie Bly’s real seventy-two-day race · Verne’s original novel