Planning travel to other hemispheres
When you’re planning to travel to another hemisphere a good starting place is to answer the question: What other hemisphere are we talking about? The world has two circles around it (not literally). One divides it in half horizontally and uses the equator to separate the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The other one is vertical and carves things up into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
Why hemispheres matter in travel planning
Hemispheres affect weather, light and dark, time and date. If you’re getting ready to spend your kid’s inheritance on a safari in Africa it makes a lot of sense to go when the animals you want to see will be present and the weather is favorable for outings.
If you live in New York and want to go to Sydney, Australia for a summer break to enjoy the beaches and you go in July you may be dismayed to find out you are visiting in their winter. (Don’t worry sharks still eat 100% of all tourists regardless of whether they go in the water or not.)
Also, you will be crossing the international date line so you “lose” a day going there and get it back when you return. (Brunette likes to think the day is stored in “the cloud” and that she plucks it back out on her return.) And you may be less than thrilled when sunset occurs at 5 p.m. You are on what we would call a “2 hemisphere trip” having gone from the Northern and Western Hemispheres to the Southern and Eastern ones.
In other words, hemispheres matter. (Size matters too but that’s a different post…about politicians’ hands.)
Things to consider when traveling to another hemisphere
Weather in other hemispheres
This can be tricky and the only good advice is to always do research before booking a trip. If you’re trying to save money and avoid crowds by traveling off-peak season be sure you know why it’s off-peak. It may be that it rains for hours every day (Costa Rica in October?) or it’s so hot that the people who live there all leave (think Dubai in July).
We use wunderground.com as a starting place for checking historical and current weather conditions. It’s a useful site because you can easily create custom reports for the data you’re seeking.
We have discovered another website we think has a lot of potential. It’s called “Google” and you can ask it questions! (Don’t tell too many people about this.) So if you type in “when is the rainy season in Costa Rica?” and choose wisely from the results you will find the answer to your question.
We also use TripAdvisor’s destination forums to get more details. The forums are useful for any travel questions. There are a number of pathologically helpful people who will provide you with information if you post a query. In many cases your question has been asked by someone else (sorry, this isn’t a comment on your originality) and you can find it in a search. Otherwise just post and wait for the answers.
And, just to make your life even easier, we suggest that our female readers head over to Travel Fashion Girl for good packing lists for wherever you are going whenever you are going. (We assume boys pack the same stuff no matter where they go.)
Hours of light and darkness in different hemispheres
This is another issue where travel to other hemispheres can throw your plans if you don’t do advance work. As you see in the very lousy picture above (one way to keep people from stealing them) Iceland in June has nearly 24 hours of light. This is great for sightseeing and hell for sleeping if you don’t have an eye mask and/or serious room-darkening shades.
It’s also a real fooler as it’s easy to be out in the middle of quite literally nowhere and decide at 10:00 p.m. that you would like to have dinner now. Bummer that the next town is 2 hours away and the restaurants closed at 9:00 p.m. Set timers on your phone if you’re driving to give yourself reminders so you don’t become one of the zero tourists who starve to death in Iceland annually due to this problem.
If instead of being in Iceland on June 13 we had been there on December 13 we would have had a day with only a little over 4 hours of daylight. That can be good for lower prices and photographing the Northern Lights but not so much for getting in your sightseeing. A good site (if a bit over-zealous in its degree of detail) for getting information about hours of dark and light before buying that airline ticket is TimeAndDate.com
Dates and times in other hemispheres matter for travel planning
The international date line loves to play havoc with travelers. (It’s also not a straight line as it zig zags around a bit to keep all of some countries, such as Fiji and Russia, on the same side of the line. We hate the damned thing.)
We are so bad at this that we have more than once had to book a “surprise” extra night when we have been in places such as Australia and Fiji. So our best advice is to find someone other than us for this advice.
Barring that, pay careful attention to the dates on your flight reservations and be sure you are covered.
Yes, that sounds ridiculous but when you see that you are getting home to say Boston on the afternoon of July 5 you may very well not realize that you will have already spent the night of July 5 in Sydney.
And when that happens you will be more sympathetic to our last minute scrambles to use points for an extra night here and there.
One final thing to check when traveling to different hemispheres
It can be easy to miss the fact that just because you are not traveling during school holiday times in “your” hemisphere it very well may be that time at your destination. Make your own decisions as to how that affects your travel planning but at least do a query on Google so you know what to expect.
Traveling to other hemispheres is fun (except for the whole jet lag thing) but it also tends to be expensive so merits extra time and thought in advance planning.
We would rather be surprised by how interesting Iceland’s landscape is than get there and realize we only have 4 hours a day when we can actually see it.
Like size, surprises matter.