A World Cruise, A War & the Book He Never Planned to Write
The Benjamins were six weeks into their trip of a lifetime, enjoying a quiet shipboard day crossing the Tasman Sea, when news flashed on the TV screen: ‘War in the Middle East!’ Suddenly, their next four months circling the world had become totally uncertain.
Milton and his wife, Tina, had left Fort Lauderdale in January 2026 on a planned five-month circumnavigation that would carry them across the Pacific, through Asia and the Middle East, and eventually back to the United States. Rather than select one itinerary aboard one ship, their world cruise combined the best segments of the 2026 world cruises of Silver Dawn, Crystal Serenity, and Seven Seas Mariner.
“The first six weeks of the trip had gone pretty much as planned,” Milton Benjamin said. “But after the war broke out, we suddenly had to focus on how this was going to affect our trip, as well as how it’s going to affect the world.”
Those experiences became the foundation of Benjamin’s new book, Circumnavigating A World At War. What began as a narrative memoir, with practical guidance for prospective travelers who are planning, preparing for, and taking a world cruise, developed into a day-by-day account of a 158-day journey that was repeatedly reshaped by events beyond the ships.
Along the way, Milton and Tina fulfilled long-held travel ambitions, including dining at one of the world’s top restaurants in Lima, staying in an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora, and exploring a nearly 1,000-year-old temple complex in Cambodia.
When they set off on this trip, they had not expected that their global trek would take them to the edge of a war zone, where authorities would detain them.
A Journalist & Traveler
Benjamin had already spent much of his life seeing the world. He has visited more than 130 countries across all seven continents and taken more than 140 cruises.
Born in Boston in 1942, Benjamin grew up reading newspapers, and magazines like Life and National Geographic. His parents regularly took the family on road trips.
“It was clearly from my parents that I inherited my wanderlust, and my desire and determination to see the world,” he wrote.
Journalism gave that curiosity a professional direction.
Benjamin began his journalism career as a reporter and editor for United Press International before becoming chief foreign correspondent for the Voice of America. He later worked on the foreign staff of The Washington Post and as a foreign editor at Newsweek.
His assignments included the turbulent Middle East, and he interviewed Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat. In the mid-1970s, The Post sent him around the world to report on nuclear programs in countries that ironically included Iran, on the eve of the revolution that brought the current regime to power.
Work also brought him to Europe, where he met Tina. She was based in Munich as a Foreign Service staffer with the U.S. Information Agency when the city was an important East-West crossroads during the Cold War.
For much of the following year, Benjamin traveled regularly from Washington to London, while Tina flew from continental Europe to join him.
After Benjamin left The Post and the couple moved to Florida in the 1990s, they began exploring the world together by ship.
“Over the years, we decided that traveling by cruise ship is far and away the best way to see the world,” Benjamin said.
“This trip certainly tested that belief.”
A Pacific Passage
Milton and Tina began their world cruise aboard Silversea’s Silver Dawn. The itinerary passed through the Panama Canal before continuing to Peru, Easter Island, the South Pacific, and Australia.
In Lima, the couple had hoped to dine at Central, named the world’s best restaurant in 2023.
“We actually did go there,” Benjamin said. “We had a meal that was really quite amazing.”
When high seas caused an unexpected overnight in Bora Bora, the Benjamins took the opportunity to spend it in a luxurious overwater bungalow ashore.
“We had never done that.”
After New Zealand, the ship traced a route along southern Australia.
Along that stretch, Benjamin began focusing on how the flare-up in the Middle East could affect what came next.
The Voyage Changes Course
Milton and Tina disembarked Silver Dawn in Singapore before boarding Crystal Serenity for the next leg.
“Our idea originally was that Crystal was going to take us up through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and all the way up into the Mediterranean,” Benjamin said. “And after Crystal decided to shorten their World Cruise, their plan was to at least take passengers to Dubai. In the end, Crystal Serenity put all of us off in Mumbai.”
The ship was to reposition through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean with a skeleton crew only.
“As I put more of those pieces together and learned from some crew people what they were going to do, I tried to talk them into letting my wife and me sail with the ship up through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal,” he said.
“I was not successful.”
“I thought that would make just a tremendous story,” the life-long journalist added wistfully. “I wish I had somehow been slightly more persuasive.”
Instead, Crystal agreed to let the Benjamin’s larger pieces of luggage travel with Serenity through the Canal, while Milton and Tina continued independently through Oman and the Emirates.
Finding Another Way
“We decided that we were going to go and spend some time on the Arabian Peninsula, war or no war,” Benjamin said.
He and Tina flew to Muscat.
“We actually loved Oman, which was one of the high points of the trip,” he said.
Their new two-week land journey also took them through the Emirates. But, the highlight for Benjamin was inspecting Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, which forms the southern shores of the Strait of Hormuz.
“It was all fascinating,” Benjamin said. “We kind of saw the edge of the war up there.”
After that, Milton and Tina successfully rejoined Crystal Serenity in Athens. Eventually they reached Portugal, where they boarded Seven Seas Mariner for the return to Miami on June 13.
The Book the Journey Became
Circumnavigating A World At War retains Benjamin’s original interest in helping travelers understand world-cruise planning.
“There are parts of it that go into a lot of detail about how you put this together, and the things you have to think about and the things you have to do,” he said. “There are things in it for a variety of readers.”
The book follows the journey Milton and Tina intended to take, the changes they encountered, and the places they reached by finding another way forward.
For many travelers, an experience like theirs might give pause before planning another journey.
But Benjamin remains undeterred.
“I’m trying to figure out now whether there’s one more long trip,” he said, “and if so, where that one will take me.”
As for being detained by authorities while trying to photograph the aftermath of a drone strike? Readers will have to turn to Circumnavigating A World At War to learn what happened next.
Milton Benjamin’s new book is available now through retailers including Amazon.
