We officially started saving in January 2014, but at this point our trip seemed like a pipe dream and too far off in the future to be a reality. For the next few months we spent much of our free time learning about Southern Africa. A lot of time was spent watching wild life and travel shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime. This time was also spent enjoying some of our local favorite ‘China Wok’.  As if we didn’t need any more convincing that this trip was a good idea, a power far beyond our control chimed in. Our large order of Beef and Broccoli always came with two fortune cookies. It was quite possibly in the same meal that we received concurrence from the far far east. Kara cracked open her fortune cookie and read the words  ‘You will be traveling and coming into fortune 🙂 ‘. Agh! are you joking with me?!

On a separate occasion, we were about to cycle through the available list of Africa travel videos, or my favorite Blood Diamond, which always made it to the request line. It was my turn to choose. I was less interested in the fortune than the bland flavored, but necessarily traditional cookie, so I cracked it and started to eat. Glancing at the fortune I read “Traveling to the south will bring you unexpected happiness.”  We’ll I’ll be damned… This meant that it had to be real. We taped them on the fridge for remembrance.

The China Wok Fortunes on our Fridge

We were hoping for the fortune, but didn’t have it yet. Travel funds were an issue so creative ways to save money is how we needed to get there, which is when we started to get smart with some travel hacking. First up: those damn expensive international flights! They were eating our budget. This was originally Kara’s idea because I didn’t want to do it for credit reasons. Eventually I came around and realized that this was something we should do. Travel hacking is the art of amassing airline & hotel points from strategically signing up for the introductory bonuses that many credit cards offer. We decided the benefits of essentially free flights far outweighed any hits on our credit. Using two credit cards we were able to collect 110,000 points just in bonuses. We added rent and our monthly groceries to the cards and that helped us average 3500 miles per month for 12 months that is an additional 42,000 points. 160,000 points gets us both round trip from the United States to South Africa. Things were looking good for budget-efficient travel!