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Outside Magazine's 2002 Family Travel Guide

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Roam Schooling (Cont.)

Our round-the-world adventure was born out of loss and grief. In a perverse cosmic joke, my older brother Bob died of breast cancer a year to the day after my divorce was final and my ex-wife moved out of state to go back to school. My children and I were recovering from these dual January shocks when I saw a story in The New York Times proclaiming that nearly half of the world's coral reefs could be dead within my lifetime. The headline underscored what I already knew: Life-forms were disappearing from this planet faster than you can say E. O. Wilson. In that moment, tragedy mixed with promise, and I decided it was time to take the kids to see some of these wonders before they were all gone.

"Before it's gone" became a mantra for the trip, with a triple entendre. The first, literal meaning was to see some of these amazing critters and environments before overpopulation and poverty and global climate change and pollution and development maimed or destroyed them. The second was to seize the opportunity to really spend time with my kids before they left my reconfigured single-father's nest. Kolya would be starting eighth grade, and Zoe fourth, and already I could tell they would be out of the house too soon. Lastly, the big "before it's gone" loomed especially large: my own mortality. After witnessing my brother's untimely death at 48, I knew viscerally there were no guarantees about how long any of us would be around. It was time to do something drastic: I nominated an epic road trip.

I broached the subject with the kids in February, and Zoe was immediately enthusiastic. Kolya began negotiating: Could we go surfing someplace along the way? "Why not?" I replied. Could he take his skateboard? "Sure." They'd have to miss some school, of course. Not a problem, or as we would say later, "No worries." Did they want to do an Australia-Southeast Asia-Japan swing, or maybe go all the way around the world? Around the world it was.

By mid-March, the idea had taken firm hold. I investigated plane tickets, researched ecological case studies, became a walking "to do" list: rent the house, get immunizations, and arrange to pay all my bills online from Internet cafes in Sydney, Singapore, Kathmandu, and elsewhere. By the end of June, we were on a plane heading west.

I had planned for our first leg, Australia, to be a gentle introduction to the traveler's way—and it was. We rented a camper van, our little tortoise shell on wheels, and traveled among people who spoke English (okay, Australian). We saw kangaroo roadkill and wallabies by our campsite and ate sausage rolls and fish and chips. We spent most of our time in Queensland, exploring the environmental issues of the Great Barrier Reef. Kolya learned to drive the right-hand-drive camper van on outback roads (another promise he had extracted), and we backpacked through virgin rainforests in Hinchinbrook Island National Park.

By the time we reached Bali five weeks later, the kids were primed to settle into Asian travel. With my girlfriend, Tory, who joined us for five weeks of the trip, we rented a car and almost circumnavigated the island over the next couple of weeks. We climbed Mount Agung, a 10,308-foot volcano, after dragging the kids out of bed at 2 a.m. and ascending with flashlights to make the summit by dawn. We spent several days in the town of Ubud, watching Balinese dance and shadowpuppet performances. We snorkeled off of Menjangan Island and spent some time in Amed, a fishing village with great snorkeling and beach massages.

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