IN A STRANGE TOWN.

Our itinerary has traveled nearly as far as we plan to. This is as it should be. You begin by picking a region, or a country, or perhaps just the location of an intriguing photograph or an unusually named town. With a conspiracy of destinations in hand, a plot must be suitably arranged. Arrive in each when the weather is temperate and dry. Travel overland if possible, by nonstop flight if not. Ensure the roads on a map are not jungle paths on the ground - again, if possible. Check where visas can be acquired along the way. Arrive in a town just before its best festival, or its juiciest harvest.

Project your future mental state. After three weeks of hard desert travel, a beach resort will be needed. After seeing the Turkic stones of Central Asia, the splendors of Istanbul are magnified. Lengthy road trips ought to be followed by languor.

It is no simple task, the planning, and yet it is often the most fun. When a journey is only lines on a notepad, everything is possible. Papua New Guinea, then Timbuktu! The Rub al-Khali, then deep up the Congo River! These dreams must eventually face constraints. Yet as the itinerary solidifies, it does not ossify. Spreadsheets and plane tickets can, and should, change while on the road. A place that deserved a week may turn out to need only a day, while those unknown during planning can surprise.

This combination of lush dreaming and dependable planning, retaining some flexibility without succumbing to chaos, is the usual method of creating a round-the-world plan. Of course, there is something foolhardy about setting one at all when Covid has made borders so viscous. What is open today may not be next year; what is closed today may reopen tomorrow. Even more than usual, our route is, can only be, and should only be provisional.

We have chosen five broad regions: Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, West Africa, the Andean Highlands, and the American Southwest. Why these? With a year to see what we like, we wanted to see places that are both harder to visit when we're older or more constrained, and places which themselves might change before we do. We will generally be on the road, aside from two months in Dakar where we will relax, write, and teach.

August 2021: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Turkey
September 2021: The American Southwest
October 2021: DR Congo, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal
November 2021: Senegal
December 2021: Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde
January 2022: Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, CAR, Congo, Gabon
February 2022: Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone
March 2022: Guinea, Mali, Namibia, South Africa
April 2022: Comoros, Madagascar, Reunion, Mauritius, Bhutan
May 2022: Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan
June 2022: Kazakhstan, Russia, Uruguay
July 2022: Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru