Nat Geo Round the World
by Private Jet
November 1 - 23, 2019
Since my visitors would like to see the destination pages I have reserved my bloviating until the end.
As we learned National Geographic Expeditions is part of National Geographic Partners a separate company from the National Geographic Society. The Society remains a charity that supports exploration. Nat Geo Partners is now owned in part by Disney.
Our expedition was operated by TCS.
We have received brochures for the Nat Geo Round the World by Private Jet for some time. As folks who have travelled extensively the past tours were mostly to places where we had been. In September of 2018 we received a brochure for the 2019 trips. The stop in Lhasa, Tibet immediately caught my eye. Other stops were a bucket list of the most iconic travel destinations in the world. Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, and Petra. Others on the list overlapped previous trips to varying degrees, but alternative trips that did not overlap were available everywhere except Easter Island. So we signed up.
The secret sauce for this trip was the plane. I appreciated that not having to deal with commercial transport would have advantages. I did not fully appreciate how much it would help. In most places we alternated between travel days and tour days. A typical travel day would start with an early "bags ready inside the door". On days where we had an early departure we would head directly to the airport. Tanzania and Tibet required travel to a nearby airport and a shuttle plane flight before we could board our plane. Where we had the time we did a morning tour or two and then headed to the airport. At the airport we would do outgoing immigration and security. Once checked in we would either be bussed or walk to the plane and board via a stairs. Fifteen minutes or so more we would be on our way. The next day would be a full day of tours. The day after would be another travel day.
This turned out to be very efficient in time also. To visit each of these sites individually would require incorporating them in a larger trip. Thus I could have been in India in that crummy air for a week just to get my morning visiting the Taj. There was no place we went (except Easter Island) where a longer visit would give one a better view of the object of our visit. In the case of Easter Island we had already been there on a long stay so this trip was visiting old friends.
I must say that this TCS operated trip was the best run of any I have ever done.
Here is some more info on the hotels we stayed at hotels
Here is some more info on the the plane
One surprise on the trip was temperature. We travelled to many tropical places and were expecting heat. The reality was we had very pleasant weather during the entire trip (not including rain or the threat thereof in some places).
I should not show
For those not familiar with my website here some conventions I use. Anything with a colored border is clickable. Red borders mean a movie. Blue borders open a higher resolution image full frame. Teal borders open a browsable gallery (on which you can click for higher resolution). Most of the pictures are location stamped so you can see where they were taken.