Unless you have more money than you know what to do with or the Bhutan government changes its tourism laws, you may need to scrap that off your list. They have a rule which means you are required to spend a minimum of $200USD a day during your stay! A better option would be Myanmar which is a very nice country to visit and doesn't have as restrictive rules (although you would want to get a tour whilst there to save yourself a lot of hassels getting to places). I did a tour there recently and the internal flights were a bit expensive, but overall the rest of the tour was very cheap and totally hassel free unlike a lot of Asian countries.
Alaska is not a seperate country it is a state of the USA.
As for you just wanting to wing it a bit, that will usually cost you thousands more especially given your itinerary. As for flights costing too much money, what do you expect to do to get to the USA? Do you expect to canoe, row a boat, swim..... of course you need to get at least a couple of flights and it would be stupid to consider doing most of it overland. You waste weeks of your life going overland when you could spend those weeks having a much greater time in a place rather than getting between places. You would want to add Australia in there to complete a rtw trip as you will probably spend way more on flights if you don't and miss one of the best countries in the world.
The way to avoid the running out of money (or at least minimise it) is by purchasing a round the world ticket to begin with. By doing that, it takes care of all the majorly expensive flights up front so then you can easily watch your money the rest of your time. It will also mean if you do run low and need to head home quicker it will be easier to do because you wont have to worry about last minute flight prices which can be thousands of dollars more than when booked well in advance. The only problems you might encounter on a RTW ticket are the European and Egypt areas as the rules aren't very good for visiting places in the continent of departure. Also Alaska is not all that easy to get to on a RTW ticket so you might need to settle for somewhere like Seattle and then go overland to Alaska.
If you want to work and do not want to get arrested and thrown in a cell somewhere, the best places would be Australia and New Zealand as you can get a working visa easily. If you did this then a rtw ticket might be out of the question unless you can plan it very well.
How much you need in money could vary huge amounts depending on how long you spend in each country, what sorts of things you do in each country, how often you go out drinking etc etc. Nobody could give you a certain answer. As a rough (and I mean rough) estimate you could say average $25USD a day in Asia except Japan which would be $40-50USD a day (as long as you scrap Bhutan), $30-40USD a day in Egypt, $50-60USD a day to live very cheaply in the US and a minimum of 50Euro a day for Russia. This is very rough so you could easily go through more than that if you drink alcohol and you could get by on less if you stayed put in places for a few days. This is all assuming you stay in hostels in the cheap dorm rooms.
[ Edit: Edited on 02-Oct-2009, at 21:58 by aharrold45 ]
