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The Journey Begins For as long as I can remember I've loved to travel. That's probably because when I was young, my father would pile my whole family – my mom, four siblings and myself – into our Dodge station wagon each summer and we'd go traveling for several weeks, if not months, across America. My love of traveling, and a related and logical love of maps, are the main reasons that I decided to study geography in college and why I now do GIS (i.e., computer mapping) for a living.
And as a traveler, geographer and self-admitted map-lover, one of my lifelong goals has been to travel completely around the world someday. That fascination began when I was 10 years old and read Jules Verne's 1872 novel, "Around the World in Eighty Days," a book that's still one of my favorites with its wondrous and inspiring tales of exotic and distant places.
The only person I've ever personally known who has traveled around the world was my dad, who was an educational planner and, during his work in the 1960s, circumnavigated the world twice (via Pan Am both times). For many years I've told myself that someday I was also going to travel around the world – if nothing else than to prove that it's really round. And this year it finally happened.
I've been doing computer mapping work in Portland, Oregon during the last few years for a mid-sized engineering consulting firm called Otak. A few months ago, Otak won a large mapping contract for the government of Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, to create the framework land-use plan for the entire emirate of Abu Dhabi. The U.A.E. is a small, bustling oil-rich country in the Middle East, probably best known for being the home of Dubai, a coastal city with a population of about two million. Abu Dhabi, with about a million people, is Dubai's smaller and quieter sister-city two hours south, and is something like a Portland to its larger and more cosmopolitan sister-city, Seattle.
As the lead computer mapper with Otak, my first task on this project was to visit Abu Dhabi, meet with the client and start collecting data. Otak had booked my travel arrangements for me, a round-trip plane ticket from Portland to Abu Dhabi via Europe, and then returning across Europe and back to Portland a week later. But my jaw dropped when I saw my ticket: my round-trip flight cost over $10,000. I've always traveled frugally and felt that any round trip plane ticket costing more than about $500 was expensive, so spending $10,000 for a plane ticket – any plane ticket – was just plain ridiculous and a waste of money. Heck, I wasn't worth that much and neither was anyone else.
Then I realized why my ticket was so expensive: they had booked me in Business Class, which apparently was the norm for such travel, since our client wanted to ensure that we traveled comfortably. That was a nice gesture for an 18-hour flight to Abu Dhabi (and 18 hours back to Portland) but I still thought it was a waste of money. What my company would be spending for my round-trip flight would be more than what most people in the world earn in an entire year, and to me that was ridiculous.
You might understand my minimalist mindset better if you knew that every day at work for the past five years, while my colleagues went out at lunch to eat at fancy restaurants, I brown-bagged it and ate at my desk. My lunch for the past five years has consisted of an apple and a bagel with a can of diet Pepsi. Well O.K., I confess that I started splurging a few years ago by adding a small dab of peanut butter to my bagel. As the joke goes, I'm not cheap, just thrifty. Well actually, I'm cheap, too.
But getting back to my story: I talked to my manager about the $10,000 plane ticket and asked him if, instead of flying in Business Class over and back via Europe, I could fly in Coach and fly around the world and stop overnight at any place I wanted. After explaining to him that it would cost less than $3,000 to do that instead of the $10,000 they were prepared to spend, my manager agreed. So that afternoon I pored over the Travelocity website, deciding where in the world I wanted to stop over for a night after working in Abu Dhabi, on my way back to Portland. Like I say, I'm a frugal traveler so looking at a map of the world and knowing that I could go anywhere was a very strange (yet pleasurable) feeling, and probably the only time in my life that I'll be able to "pick a destination, any destination."
I spent a couple hours doing research and thinking about where in the world I wanted to stop on my flight from Abu Dhabi around the other side of the world. I finally decided on – drum roll, please – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I'm not sure why I picked Kuala Lumpur, but its funny-sounding name that reminded me of a lumpy Koala bear probably had something to do with it. Also, I'd seen it featured on the CBS television show, "The Amazing Race" a few years earlier and remembered a place there where the contestants had raced, called the Batu Caves.
I looked at the price of my flight on Travelocity and realized that, even with an around-the-world ticket and an overnight stop in Malaysia, I'd still be saving my company over $7,000 compared to the original price of my ticket. The ever-thrifty Del strikes again!
A few weeks later I packed my bags and drove to the Portland airport. I had only eight days, not eighty, to circle the globe, but I was determined to make the most of it. My plane left Portland late on a Thursday afternoon and by 10 p.m. I was flying over eastern Canada.
By looking outside you couldn't tell that it was late at night, because this was June and the sun was still shining brightly at these high latitudes. Most of the other passengers were either dozing or watching movies, but like the true geographer that I am, I stared intently at the landscapes below and at one point could just make out the coast of Hudson Bay. A few hours later, at around midnight, I saw the ice-bound and craggy coast of Greenland, which was the highlight of my flight.
A few hours later we landed at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, in mid-morning local time. I had a three hour layover so I stocked up on Dutch chocolates and souvenirs in the airport gift shops. A few hours later – I think it was about noon but my internal clock was totally messed up by then – I boarded a plane for my eight-hour flight to the U.A.E. After a brief stop in neighboring Qatar, we landed in Abu Dhabi late at night. I had spent two full nights flying since leaving Portland and by now my head was both groggy and spinning.
I gathered my luggage, went through customs, walked outside the air-conditioned Abu Dhabi airport and instantly hit a brick wall. Even though it was late at night, it was 95 degrees outside and very humid. I gasped and then gasped again. Then I found a taxi, made my way into town, and settled in at the Otak apartment around 11 p.m. This was going to be an interesting trip. It already was.
Above left: Flying over Greenland with the moon in the distance and the wingtip illuminated by the midnight sun. Above right: This is the east coast of Greenland at midnight. Finally seeing Greenland – even at midnight – was one of the highlights of my around-the-world flight.
Above left: I spent four hours in Amsterdam, just enough time to load up on Dutch chocolate and souvenirs. Above right: And here's the next morning in Abu Dhabi. This is the "corniche," or waterfront.
 Above left: The United Arab Emirates is about the size of Indiana and has the sixth-largest reserves of oil in the world. The largest cities are the capital, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, both on the coast. Above right: Here are some historic photos of Abu Dhabi so you can see how much it's grown. This is Abu Dhabi in 1958, the year that oil was discovered here. Population then: about 5,000. Population now: over one million.
Above left: This is the Al Hosn Fort, the only historic building in Abu Dhabi that's been preserved. I believe this was taken in the 1950s. Above right: Here's the Al Hosn Fort today, totally surrounded by skyscrapers and developments. How oil changes everything.
Above left: The fort and "downtown" Abu Dhabi in the early 1960s. Above right: This is an undated photo of the Zayed Bridge, linking Abu Dhabi Island (left) with the mainland. Almost everything you see is now developed with resorts and high-rise buildings. The village of Abu Dhabi is on the far horizon at the end of the island. Today over a million people live on the island.
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