'Oh, you have to go to Vietnam!' they'd say. Vietnam was a favorite of the beraters.

Whatever anxiety people suffered over having not yet visited that nation themselves erupted into disgust when they considered my potential slight of omission.

        'Oh, you must go to Iran!' said someone who had firsthand knowledge of someone who'd been to Iran.

        'Oh, something spectacular will happen!' a friend of my parents' promised. By way of example, she added cheerfully: 'My father took a trip around the world and his plane crash-landed in the Sahara!'

    One thing never spoken of in all the scheming and exclamations but worth noting, as I believe it to be almost as universal as a sworn eagerness to visit Vietnam—next trip, I promise—is that all-important moment when you completely lose your mind. I don't mean the little mood meltdowns and nerve flare-ups, those standard speed bumps of the traveling life. I mean the bit where you find yourself hurtling round the earthly bend and, taking one turn a little too quickly, you kind of fall off the world for a while. The body is in orbit, the mind in free fall.

    I know where it happened to me. It was 49,000 miles into my wonderful, lunatic, delirious, mostly nonstop world tour when I lost it. I'd been on the move for a month and a half. My sleep was irregular. I wasn't aware of time in the normal way, wasn't impressed with great distances. So when we touched down on my sixth and final continent, South America—having begun the day in New Zealand—my first thought was: Keep going.

    Bright sun was bouncing off the hills behind the Santiago airport—pretty enough, but I wasn't in a city mood. I went directly to the ticket counter of LanChile, a member of the OneWorld airline alliance whose crazy round-the-world ticket I was joyriding on, and asked to be placed on the next flight to Easter Island. Called Isla de Pascua by Chileans, and Rapa Nui by those who live on it, Easter Island was known to me then, informally, as the Land of Giant Stone Men I Just Realized I Could Connect to While Perusing an In-flight Magazine on the Way Over from Australasia. I was vaguely aware that Chile 'owned' Easter Island, and thought it would be nice to pop off the coast for a little rest and relaxation. I was rather more vague as to how far off the coast Easter Island really is—almost 2,300 miles, as it turns out.

    Having already crossed the Pacific once that day, I'd announced my desire to backtrack over half of it to reach one of the world's most remote inhabited islands—located at the southeastern tip of Polynesia and accessible only by a plane flown thrice weekly in high season by LanChile, whose representatives were now curiously inspecting not just my ticket but me. Pleading like a junkie to get back on a plane before I'd even set foot outside the terminal, I realized that my mad dash around the world had left me more mad than dashing. I'd taken 23 flights to arrive in Santiago—precisely 45,597 miles in a plane. And that didn't include the 1,100 miles logged on a rental car in New Zealand. Or wrong-side-of-the-road trips through Australia and South Africa, two swift Swiss trains and two sluggish Australian ones, a Chunnel crossing and an open-air safari van in Kenya, a Scandinavian ferry and a Kiwi hydrofoil, a patient Egyptian horse and a lurching tuk-tuk in Bangkok traffic, or the many dozens of taxis taken in 16 countries en route to my meltdown.

    

     I didn't make that particular Easter Island flight, but neither did I settle for stasis. By early evening I was in Buenos Aires, reviving myself with deep sleep, long walks, and big steaks. Soon, the ticket was fixed and I was back in Santiago on my way to Rapa Nui. LanChile may have misplaced my bag, but I had my mind back. Now I knew exactly how far away the stone men lived. I had one week left on my trip and wanted to join them in their isolation. I had the feeling that time was running out, that gravity was pulling me home—an odd thought on an adventure that still had 14,000 miles to go.

     Madrid. I've been in Spain maybe an hour. I have a plate of ham in front of me, for it would be insulting to kingdom and visitor alike to go hamless here for longer than absolutely necessary. From the airport, I took a taxi through the night rain to the chic Hotel Bauza, on the Calle de Goya. From there, I came directly to this bar on Lagasca, a sloppy little well-lit place where the plate of ham is not so much a plate as a platter. The canas are perfect six-ounce shots of draft beer, the foam lopped off by a counterman using something like a butter knife in a quick side-to-side action, the way an expert would frost a cupcake.

     The jamon is my dinner, but it's also a tool for orientation. Less than a week into my splendid, insane, vastly underplanned world tour and already I'm having trouble keeping track of where I am. I flew from New York, my home, to Helsinki, a dark and snowy place I'd never seen before. There, I ate smoked and cured fishes and was pelted by freezing rain. Then to Stockholm—where I ate smoked and cured fishes and was pelted by normal rain. In between, I boarded a 16-hour overnight cruise across the Baltic—basically a massive floating smorgasbord with the distraction of deep sauna treatments that extracted bodily toxins I hadn't heard from since the Ford administration. On my Finnair flight from Stockholm to Madrid, I tried to visualize our southwesterly course, the continental shift from herring to pig.

    Anyway, the ham is good. Two women next to me admire the platter. I deliver the international open-palmed gesture that translates as 'I've ordered too much.' They're full of amusement—first at my ham, then at my itinerary. What was I doing in Scandinavia this morning, and why am I leaving for Cairo the day after next? One woman does most of the talking and translates for her friend. She asks what kind of man arrives alone in a suit but claims not to be here on business. We order more canas and share the remains of my pork rinds and croquettas, which I ordered before seeing the ham.

    I try to explain my many-splendored air ticket, thick as a rolled magic carpet, and my plan to see the world. Ahhh, says the one who does the translating, smiling but serious—she's figured it out. 'You are Thia?' Some moments of farcical charade and pantomime follow. She says it again, sounding it out: Thay Eee Ah?' Now it's my turn to flash a look of amused comprehension: CIA. Who would travel this way but a spy?

    My plan is to travel without much of a plan—which, not surprisingly, takes acute planning. Every traveler labors under some kind of financial, geographical, or time constraints, but the attraction of a round-the-world (RTW) ticket is that it allows you to pretend you don't.

There are many flavors of round-the-world tickets. (For some reason, everyone who sells them drops the A as if it were excess baggage.) What type of ticket appeals depends on whether you like to wake up knowing where you'll sleep that night and on how lucky you feel.

Among the airline alliances—OneWorld, StarAlliance, and looser affiliations such as Singapore/Air New Zealand/Virgin—there are two kinds of tickets: those with a mileage cap and those based on the number of continents visited. I wasn't interested in counting miles like calories and wanted to play it safe with an alliance, so I chose the package that I figured would fling me as far and as wide as possible: OneWorld's six-continent Explorer ticket.

The rules sounded simple enough: Fly between continents in a roughly east-west or west-east direction on any combination of OneWorld's eight carriers—Aer Lingus, American, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, LanChile, and Qantas; make up to four stops per continent, not including your flight in and out; reserve a seat or don't, with zero penalty for changing flights and only a nominal charge for switching or adding stops midtrip; and get home within a year of departure. In reality, the rules are arcane and complex and almost useless to summarize, since nothing will be clear until you call the airline to hash out a specific itinerary.

American Airlines and British Airways both run dedicated round-the-world desks staffed by agents with a knowledge of ticketing arcana and varying degrees of experience, ingenuity, and patience. Calling around to the various alliances, I got the sense that RTW tickets make money on the all-you-can-eat-buffet model: Most takers are merely grazers—people with meetings in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Paris, say, who find it economical to book an RTW ticket in place of three or four individual flights. Then there are gluttons like me who want to go everywhere, who have the time and patience to wear out even the most seasoned RTW booker.

I considered flight routes, real and ideal, narrowing my choices and tracing what I thought to be an informed preliminary path. Within thirty seconds of my first conversation with an American Airlines RTW specialist, I'd scrapped that path (sorry, Canada). The call ended up taking more than two hours. So did the next one. And the one after that. Those marathon talks settled the basic bones of my trip (see 'Catch Me If You Can,' October 2003 Condé Nast Traveler, page 176) and revealed some odd rules: Cairo is part of Europe by OneWorld's reckoning, for instance, and although Qantas flies to Papeete, the route is off-limits to RTW ticket holders.

As with more prosaic forms of airline travel, the one truly terrible word to remember is . Look at the departures monitor at Heathrow: British Airways flies nearly everywhere in Europe and beyond, but notice how all those nice little flights originate or terminate in London? I do love gravlax—and I did think it manly to pack a single suitcase for both Arctic Circle freeze and Mediterranean sun—but the real reason I flew Finnair to Helsinki and then on to Madrid was to avoid those homesick B.A. flights. And Europe is the simplest continent to navigate since it's served by the most OneWorld carriers. Cathay Pacific covers most of Asia via Hong Kong, Qantas ser-vices Australia and the South Pacific by way of Sydney, and LanChile canvasses Latin America from its Santiago base. Then there's Africa, where London-based B.A. has a virtual lock but from which, apart from Egypt and Morocco, the Explorer ticket prohibits continental backtracking.

Once I'd settled on my cities, added an extra stop in Asia, and seen all the details sent to the pricing desk for tax and airport-fee tabulation, the thing was finally booked and bought. It contained more than 30 flights and cost $5,307.80—roughly the price of a single round-trip business-class fare between New York and Hong Kong. The ticket arrived via FedEx: a lovely, clunky anachronism in an era of paperless e-tickets. It was heavy, dozens of pages long, and festooned with numbers and letters—the secret code of the skies—much of it handwritten across thin wisps of red carbon paper. It was at once homely and exotic. So many of the six-continent negotiations had sounded theoretical or plain crazy: 'How many stops do I have left in Africa? Where should I go?' Pause. 'Where would you like to go, Mr. Sachs?' But the ticket was big and real and meant I was going.

The night of my first flight, I approached the Finnair desk. The woman, in a crisp Finnair outfit—she didn't wear the black assassin's gloves worn by the in-air 'Finn fatales,' as I came to admire them—asked for my documents. With some solemnity and pride, I removed my thick sheaf and handed it over. She flipped its pages to take in the scope of my as-yet-unbegun marathon—and burst out laughing. I took this as a good sign.

Cairo. It is nearly 3 a.m. by the time my Iberia flight finally finds its way there from Madrid. The taxi touts pounce before I clear customs, but I wait until I'm out in the hot night air to pick one, or let one pick me. He looks friendly enough and seems to know my hotel, the Mena House, in Giza. I throw my Prada in the Lada and off we go. Once we're at cruising speed—down the center of the highway, with lights off, naturally—the driver repeats the name of the hotel, turning the words over and over, trying out inflections like an actor searching for his motivation. 'Mena House? Okay. Mena—okay?—House. Okay! Meeeeen-a-house. Okayokayokay.' It is a remarkable performance, one that I know will lead to a small adjustment to the hastily agreed-upon fare.

We find the hotel, a giant century-old colonial hunting lodge in the manner of an Indian palace that would be hard not to find. Once upstairs, I am about to sleep in earnest when dawn sneaks up and turns the sky electric blue—revealing, directly outside the window of room 1208, the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The Pyramids are said to contain the Pharaoh's ka, or life force. Maybe there's enough to go around. It's almost 6 a.m., and there are no more thoughts of sleep, just my personal Pyramid and the awakening sky.

 

In Helsinki, people look both ways down the empty, frozen streets but do not move until the light and the clicking sound grant joint permission. In Stockholm, they look both ways, judge the distance and speed of the approaching Volvos, and formulate a rational decision about when it is safe to cross. In Madrid, they look with disdain and cross with bravado, taking back what some bastard would deny them. In Cairo, they look inside the onrushing cars to read the soul of the drivers. They wade into traffic as though it were a refreshing mountain stream. They are drawn to brush against and bond with the swerving, swarming tons of steel the way people at aquatic theme parks are drawn to brush against and bond with the trained dolphins. I meet my friend Lee Smith, a journalist from New York who has been in Cairo for a year studying and writing and learning to ride horses in the desert. In the Mena House cafe, we drink three double-espressos each and head toward the Sphinx and the Pyramids, walking down the middle of the street like locals.

  In the side streets off Pyramids Road, we step out of the way of some commuter camel traffic. I remark that the decorative, multicolored knots hanging from the camels' necks are the fuzzy dashboard dice of the desert. Four days in Cairo, Lee is convinced, will leave me with a clearer picture of the place than he has.

At any rate, it's first impressions that stick: the Pyramid at my window; walking the island neighborhood of Zamalek at hushed dusk—a rare Cairo quiet, everyone having scattered for an early dinner to break the Ramadan fast; a trip on horseback from Lee's riding academy out to the beginnings of the desert; the fact that deserts have visible beginnings and ends, and that this one has an on-ramp.

As the trip continues, the cultures piling on top of one another like anthropological layer cake, I begin to see myself as a collector of first impressions, a curator of anecdotal evidence about the world, of things left out of museums and guidebooks. I note that Spanish men are the world champions of brooding stylishly while walking with their hands in their pockets. That the 7-Elevens of Stockholm—and there are more than anyone is ready to admit—are clean, inviting social hubs, with blond bentwood furniture and lovely blond staff. That, of the precious little printed English in Tokyo Station, the most specific is found above the rental lockers: 'Non-acceptable Articles: Valuables, Explosives and Combustibles, Corpses, Arms and Swords, Animals, Dirt, Etc.' That pigeons and doughnuts are universal, the former grim and kickable and everywhere the same, the latter gloriously varied. That neither the jelly-curry nor the egg salad doughnuts offered by the Mister Donut outlet in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo taste like what they're called, although they taste good enough, and come in a bag neatly folded and sealed with a small sticker bearing the Mister Donut-endearing words 'Thank you, you beautiful people!' But I'm getting ahead of myself.

From Cairo, I catch a dawn flight to London, having stayed up all night in my room at the Mena House, saying good-bye to Cheops and going online to book a hotel room in Brompton Cross, which seems so far away as to be far-fetched.

Just one night in London. (Did I mention I've just flown in from Cairo?) Meet a friend at the Coach and Horses in Soho and promptly have a fight picked for me by a surly Brit who mistakes me for an ambassador to the Court of St. James. England is the only place in 20 countries where I am directly assaulted for being an American. However, the cantankerous welcome is sweet nostalgia: I lived in London during Gulf War I.

I make it to Paris despite a French strike—also nostalgia-inducing—that shuts down Charles de Gaulle, somehow coordinating to catch the Chunnel train with my wife, April, who arrived just this morning. We're meeting our friends Pete and Susan for a franco-phone Thanksgiving. This is my vacation from my vacation, a short reprieve from near-constant forward motion. We eat Alsatian and end the evening at an expat-packed Harry's American Bar, which feels thickly cinematic—St. Elmo's Fire as directed by Jean Renoir.

After a momentary dip into Switzerland—mountains! muesli! back on the train! —I leave April in Paris and return to London to catch a B.A. flight to Nairobi. Five days earlier, terrorists had struck at a hotel in Mombasa and had attempted to bring down a jet with a shoulder-launched missile. Before this trip, I'd weighed how to handle regional flare-ups—as though flare-ups are regional these days. In the end, I just push dumbly ahead. Partially, I'm ashamed to admit, because there aren't many other viable destinations in OneWorld-defined Africa. Can't waste a continent.

From Paris, I'd called to arrange a taxi-cum-safari pickup. I'd explained to the woman at Star Travel that I would be in the country for less than 24 hours. It was agreed, then, that I'd speed directly from the airport to Nairobi National Park on the outskirts of town, observe the wildlife, and then drive to Carnivore, a restaurant where you eat the same animals whose brethren you've just admired frolicking in the virtual veld.

And so it goes. At the park, the roof of the taxi van lifts and, jet-lagged and still wearing my suit jacket, I am driven among black rhinos and Cape buffalos, ostriches and giraffes. Two lions fairly ignore us. Certainly, this is safari lite—faux-fari—but the sun feels good and it is enough to stir an appetite.

At Carnivore, men in straw boaters and gravy-stained aprons bear skewers of zebra, hartebeest, crocodile, impala, and chicken that tastes like impala. This would be a tourist trap if there were any tourists around.

My ride to the airport the next morning is cloudy. I manage to miss both the last solar eclipse until 2030 and the news that the British are shutting their embassy here for fear of more terror attacks. The Americans are also flying out diplomatic staff that morning—security at the airport is particularly intense, but I don't discover why until I land in Johannesburg.

Johannesburg—well, let's skip Johannesburg. The trip is picking up speed now. I get an earlier-than-planned flight and, emerging into the warm light of Cape Town, know I've done the right thing. At the airport, I buy a book on restaurants, find one in a hotel on a beach, rent a car, and speed down the wrong side of the road to The Bay hotel in Camps Bay. If Miami's South Beach were strung out along California's Highway 1, it would approach the sparkle of this place. Confirming my good luck, my South African jazz hero, the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, is in town for a night, and I am present as he exercises his gentle genius in front of a hometown crowd.

Waiting to clear customs in Hong Kong the following morning, I call April in New York on my GSM cell phone and ask her to go online and book me a room at the Peninsula. I'm at the desk within an hour, and it's as though they've always been expecting me. Morning is spent walking and breathing in Kowloon, Central, and Wan Chai. I nap lightly on the Star Ferry back to the Peninsula, and then soundly there. In the evening, I pick up the thread of my Hong Kong ramble and can't put it down. By morning—and my next flight—I've covered many miles.

If something could be both cause of and cure for absolute exhaustion, it would be Tokyo. After a while, the RTW traveler feels he can get around; float into town and find the right hotel, get money, get food, get moving. But Tokyo defeats all my best instincts. The GSM phone doesn't work on the Japanese network. The ATMs don't put out for Cirrus or NYCE. The signage is stubbornly, admirably monolingual. Immediately upon landing, I complicate things by taking my Hermès travel wallet, full of its precious handwritten documents, and put it . . . somewhere. An angel I meet on the Narita Express (actually, an ANA flight attendant) disembarks with me at Tokyo Station, spends an hour calling lost-and-found desks, and somehow saves me: A Mr. Tanaka of airport lost and found has my ticket.

I observe the crowds in Ginza, am swept up by them in Shibuya. I stay up all night to watch the dawn tuna auctions at Tsukiji, followed by a fishmonger's breakfast of sushi and beer in the little stalls off the world's largest fish market.

A snafu with a planned flight to Delhi and the help of a creative Cathay Pacific agent leave me with 17 hours in Singapore—the hangover lasts longer—followed by the proverbial one night in Bangkok. Then Australia. Not all of it, but a lot. Sydney. A dusty wine trail in Bendigo on the bush's edge. In Adelaide I go to see a winemaker I admire, walk his olive groves, and feel I've fallen down a rabbit hole to Tuscany. From Adelaide I drive over to the Barossa Valley, where I find sparkling shiraz and port and a field of palm trees. The following morning I am on a plane over the Tasman Sea, eating Anzac biscuits and watching Sweet Home Alabama for the hundred millionth time. I have no idea what to expect of Christchurch and the drive north to Auckland—only that there will be movement, to which I've become addicted.

 

Santiago was not my first run-in with LanChile. According to the route I've chosen and the rules of the Explorer ticket, the only way I can get from Austral-asia to South America and then home is on the Auckland-Santiago flight. It's a popular route. Once I have secured a seat, I think I am in the clear. But something happens between reservation and purchase: LanChile takes my seat away. There are no openings for the remainder of the month, so I take a chance, setting off with the hope that by the end of my allotted stopover in New Zealand there will be a cancellation and I can continue on. But that is before I see New Zealand. All along my journey, the space between the thrill of arrival and the sorrow of leaving has been collapsed into a kind of constant emotional overlap. I know I am missing much—an index of regret to add to the mental atlas. On the roads of New Zealand, though, I experience something like pure joy. To drive here is to inhabit a car commercial that never ends.

From Christchurch, I reach the Marlborough Valley via skyward slalom roads. Marlborough is famous for its sauvignon blancs, and St. Clair Estate Wines produces some of the best. Its small run of delicious Noble Riesling is available only at the cellar door—reason enough to construct an RTW trajectory leading here. Dinner is served at the nearby Herzog winery, followed by a walk from the vineyard to the moonlit lemon and olive groves of the Antares Homestay, a bed-and-breakfast.

The car radio brings an interview with a surviving rider of the New Zealand Pony Express, a voice from a time when the roads of this young colony were not yet built. Then the signal is lost up around Lake Taupo until faint, funny voices come in: a dramatic reading of Lord of the Rings, smack in the center of Middle-earth itself.

From Wellington I drive over craggy cliffs, through farm towns and ghost towns. The city of Napier, on the mideast coast of the North Island, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1931. It was rebuilt in the Art Deco style of the day and survives as a kind of architectural time capsule. In front of the Deco McDonald's, I drive slow enough to take a picture. When word comes that there is an opening to Santiago, I can't remember why I am rushing forward.

Sad as I am to leave, there is happiness in the going itself. I am on a velocity binge. The concierge at the sleek Auckland Hilton, suited up in gray like a space-age janitor, takes a box of mine to ship: five-dollar Thai whiskey, an umbrella bought in a flash Stockholm downpour, squid jerky from a kiosk in Tokyo Station, bottles of peppery Australian olive oil lovingly swaddled in sweaters unsuitable for the southern hemisphere's January summertime. I eye the packed box and think: I'll race you home.

 

The first time you see the 15 stone moias of Tongariki, you utter an expletive. They sincerely take you aback. I am climbing up the hill toward Rano Raraku, the quarry from which Easter Island's ancient men were cut and—somehow—carried. I look back over my shoulder: Fifteen stone figures stand in a line, facing inward from an endless ocean. What I mutter is unprintable, but the thoughts are loftier, because seeing them fills you with something like holy awe. I go down to have a closer look. People ask of the statues: What were they for? Why would a civilization kill itself off, exhaust every available resource for the hobby of standing stone men by the shore of an infinite sea? But one look answers everything. The questions sound as dumb as wondering what jazz is for. They're beautiful. Electric and elemental, they seem more alive than the modern wonders of New York or Tokyo. Now imagine them as novelties set against profound isolation. Imagine living on this island the day someone came up with the loony, intoxicating dream of making these things. You'd do it too—do it until extinction curbed your enthusiasm. There is still more to see. In Rio, there is feijoada at the Copacabana Palace and Brazil's own striking figures on the beach. In Miami, there is a failed delicatessen run during a 55-minute layover between flights. And in Anguilla, there is yet another beach—and a villa to go with it. But on Easter Island I know that I can go home.

Around-the-world travel has made a quaint thing of isolation. But we go looking for it just the same. The lure of a nearly unrestricted ticket is that it brings all places closer. The great payoff is that one of those places might turn out to be Rapa Nui, where you can genuinely feel how far you've come.

Pausing alongside the stone men, I admire the vastness of things. I feel distance the way you feel gravity while standing on a high diving board—but don't while sitting on a soaring plane. After Easter Island, I am convinced I've been around the world. I'll go back around—next time with my miles.

 

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