Travel Tips: Around-The-World Trip To A Changed Life

What would you do if someone handed you $8,500 and told you to go on a trip around the world?

Gabrielle Kleber, 21, of Clarkston, Mich., got that chance.

The Michigan State University junior spent three months this summer in Hawaii, Australia, the Maldives, South Africa, England, Wales and Iceland, circumnavigating westward.

She wasn't part of a study-abroad program. She went completely alone.

She didn't spend her time in crowded luxury cities. She went to out-of-the-way beaches, often staying with local people she contacted ahead of time or happened to meet.

She was a one-woman research project, analyzing and measuring trash on the beaches of the world. And she came back a changed person, not just because of her research, which will help her as a chemical/environmental scientist, but because of the experience of traveling alone, finding her way as she went, dealing with the complex logistics of the venture.

"What she's done is exactly what we hoped," says John Carroll, president of the Michigan Circumnavigator Club, whose members chose Kleber from 20 candidates for the prize. "Things like this do change people's lives."

The Circumnavigators Club is made up of people who have traveled around the world at least once. You don't have to have done it all in one trip, but you need to have traveled in one direction, even in segments, all the way around.

Every two years, the club awards a grant to a college junior for an around-the-world trip. Its next award will be in 2011. In exchange, grantees must write a 50-page paper, speak to the club and blog about the trip (Kleber's is at www.gkleber.blogspot.com).

Kleber's project, "Global View of Marine Debris," was unusual in that it took her to less touristy areas of the world, such as Male, the crowded capital of the Maldives, and Groote Eylandt, an island off the north coast of Australia.

Tall and blonde, Kleber attracted attention from local people wherever she went. They couldn't figure out in the Maldives why she was gathering trash on the beach, then recording and weighing it all before taking it to a dump.

"Some people thought I worked for the government. Some thought I was lost. One woman thought I was crazy," she said.

Because she once did an internship sponsored by the United Nations, her hosts in Wales kept introducing her as "Gabby from the United Nations."

She ate local food, even sea urchin, and camped a lot. She went scuba diving and snorkeling. Although she knew that an estimated 100,000 tons of trash are in the oceans, she was astonished at the story beaches told. The trash included shoes, a rifle, plastic bits, wrappers, diapers, old tangles of fishing net, bottles, a Barbie doll, a couch and more.

Mostly, she was astonished at how much she matured, even though she had done several study-abroad experiences before.

"I felt like the trash ambassador," Kleber says. "When you travel alone, you really grow."

And that, the Circumnavigator's Club members will attest to, is really the whole point.

To learn more about club membership or student grants, contact one of 11 U.S. chapters through the parent site www.circumnavigators.org.

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Ellen Creager: creagerfreepress.com