Preparing for the Voyage

Passport and Visas

You need a LOT of empty pages!

Your passport must have an expiration date that is at least 90 days from when you plan to return to the US. It must also have enough empty pages to hold all the entry visas and exit stamps for each country on your itinerary. If you’re getting a new passport, pay extra for extra pages. If your old passport doesn’t have enough pages (check with SAS), then you will need a new one. 

SAS will work with you to obtain entry visas for all the countries on our itinerary. 

Medical preparation

You will need a bunch of vaccinations, prescriptions for malaria pills and scopolamine patches for seasickness. SAS will provide specific guidance about which vaccinations and how many malaria pills, and then you must visit your physician to get shots and prescriptions. There are multiple meds for malaria with different tradeoffs and side effects. People my age frequently get prescriptions for Azithromycin (Z-pak), a super strong antibiotic that you can take in the event you get very severe traveler’s diarrhea.

You’ll need a medical certification that you are fit to travel. SAS provides a form for your doctor to fill out. If you’re over 60, you’ll need an EKG that your doctor will send to SAS medical staff. 

How many pills for 105 days?


Pack enough of your medications to last for 4 months. It’s quite hard to get prescription meds while you’re overseas. It’s probably possible but pretty complicated to have stuff shipped to you at a port of call. It’s worth the trouble to actually stockpile all those damned bottles and pack them in your checked baggage.

Insurance companies sometimes balk at paying for so much prescription medication ahead of time and it takes a bunch of back-and-forth to convince docs, insurance companies, and pharmacists that they really should provide huge numbers of pills. If you need special medical equipment or test kits, be sure you can get them ahead of time. You can check with the SAS medical staff about what services and testing are available on the ship and which ones are not.

Mmmm GOOD!

You’re also going to want to buy and pack all your over-the-counter meds before you leave the US. I’d strongly recommend that you pack ample supplies of: 

  • Ibuprofen or Tylenol 
  • Pepto Bismol
  • Immodium
  • Antacids like Omeprazole
  • Melatonin if you want it for sleeplessness

SAS provides international health insurance for every voyager through CISI. It seems pretty good. It covers you everywhere, although you may have to pay out of pocket and then submit receipts for reimbursement. 

Quoting from their website: “Not only does the plan provide accident and sickness insurance, it also covers medical evacuation and repatriation as well as security evacuations should they become necessary. And unlike many domestic insurance plans, the CISI plan will pay 100% of covered expenses without requiring a deductible.”

If you anticipate significant medical expenses during our voyage, you need to discuss this with your physician and with CISI ahead of time.

We had a shipmate who suffered retinal detachment during our 2023 voyage. The ship turned around in the middle of the Indian Ocean and brought him back to India for surgery at a cost of nearly three days delay to our itinerary. SAS also provided a medical professional to accompany the patient for several weeks and serve as liaison between the SAS Home Office and the hospital in Mumbai. Both the patient and liaison rejoined our voyage a month later in Europe.

Research and Education

I recommend that you do some research about the countries that we plan to visit beforehand. Read some books, watch some documentaries, take some online courses! Travel books like Lonely Planet Guides are fun and are also becoming kind of obsolete in the age of the internet. We really enjoyed learning about the history of India, Buddhism, Hinduism, Africa, and Islam through The Great Courses.

HERE’S A CURATED LIST OF BOOKS, FILMS, and WEBSITES I MADE FOR YOU

Learn about the Indian Ocean Trade of the late Roman Empire and the “Golden Road of the Indosphere” during the Middle Ages. Learn about the Spice trade and its role in Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch influence in southeast Asia. Learn about the history of European “exploration,” conquest, colonialism, and imperialism. Learn how countries in Asia and Africa became pawns in the Great Power conflicts of the 19th Century. Learn about the partition of India in 1947, decolonization in the mid-20thCentury, and the emerging political issues of the Global South in the 21st Century.

Here are some books related to our voyage that I strongly recommend:

An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi SPICE: The 16th Century Conflict that Shaped the Modern World, by Roger Crowley
The Slave Trade: Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870, by Hugh Thomas 
The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean, by Raoul McLaughlin
Decolonization and its Impact, by Martin Shipway
Communicating the Other Across Cultures, by Julia Khrebtan-Horhager

There’s no way you’re going to read all these! But if you read one or two you’ll appreciate our voyage on a deeper level than if you don’t.

Here are some movies relevant to our itinerary:

Other Recommendations (compiled from the internet)
I have many, many suggestions!