We went round the world in 23 days with three children. Here’s how we did it |


Five destinations — Cambodia, Kenya, Dubai (twice), Singapore and Zanzibar — in 23 days. With three young children. That’s not what we had planned for our round-the-world family adventure.

Before Covid, my wife Rebecca and I had organised a ten-week holiday of a lifetime for the middle of 2020 — a global tour we’d longed to take with our children, while they were still children, that would take in several continents and teach them about different cultures. It involved seeing wild animals (Kenya), visiting far-flung friends (Singapore) and ticking off some destinations we’d always longed to see (Cambodia) — with our house rented out to help pay for it. For obvious reasons that trip didn’t happen. Now, with new work and school commitments and less time and money, we had to work out how to do a condensed version — especially as some of our Covid-issued airline vouchers had expired, or were about to. We ditched some bits (Australia and the US), and shoehorned the rest into the school summer holidays.

Key targets: stagger the journey to give our body clocks time to adjust; keep the kids occupied; and maintain the “trip of a lifetime” feel.

The One&Only Royal Mirage, Dubai

The One&Only Royal Mirage, Dubai

Dubai wasn’t the top of our travel bucket list — I fretted about the migrant labour that built its skyscrapers and attractions — but it’s halfway to Asia and turned out to be an amazing sensory surprise. The One&Only Royal Mirage was a treat to start our trip, with astonishing service and the nicest hotel swimming pool we have ever been in. The Aquaventure — the world’s largest water park (atlantis.com) — was a huge hit with our children — Isobel, 12, Felix, 9, and Sebastian, 6, with plenty of shade (the air was 40C) and many cold-water pools. The number of rides was ridiculous, especially for a man who had grown up knowing only a rickety half-pipe flume at Gloucester leisure centre.

We experienced the extraordinary beauty of the Arabian desert, bombing up and down dunes in a four-wheel drive before stopping at a remote tented camp for an evening of starlit camel rides, belly dancers and shawarma kebabs. “Do explorers always get to eat kebabs?” Felix asked hopefully as we flew out and he gazed down at the miles of desert below.

Next was three nights in Singapore, staying at the Barracks Hotel on the island of Sentosa, a lush tropical oasis compared with Dubai’s desert. Today the island has countless attractions and cable cars to travel between them. The kids’ favourite was the Universal Studios theme park but for the adults it was the historic hotel, originally built to house British troops stationed there. The complimentary afternoon tea, followed by a dip in the pool, however, was a hit with everyone.

Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia

Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia

ALAMY

Lesson No 1: express passes for theme parks and water parks may be expensive but they are worth every penny, especially in the heat.

Cambodia, a two-hour flight, followed. By the time we landed in Siem Reap we were seven hours ahead of London but didn’t feel jet lagged. Instead, it was the culture shock that hit us. Cambodia is chaos to Singapore’s order, mess to its tidy. Yet the city made up for that in…



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We went round the world in 23 days with three children. Here’s how we did it |

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