Thank you very much everyone for the helpful responses. I do have overseas experience, spending a year during university living in India and Thailand and traveling extensively. What you should be warning me about is the fact that I have 0 flight hours, I'm going to be working teaching English for a couple years to save enough to start flight school and my goal is to get to Africa as soon as possible, so this thread has helped me realize how much money I will need to put together to get enough hours to do that.
I would just take out a big fat loan now if I could but with the economy how it is I suspect the APR would be horrible if any bank was dumb enough to give me $30k, so I'm going to wait it out.