30 Days To Go

At the risk of showing off… Oh my word, this is where I’ll be for Christmas this year! Suddenly sooooo excited!

Aitutaki

Castro Causing Problems Again

With our strange and twisted travelathon route mostly all sorted by STA we just had to plan how to get from Bermuda to Cuba. Having checked out a huge array of around the world tickets in the STA office none of them would go anywhere near Cuba! Disappointing, but no problem we thought, we’ll just book that bit on line ourselves, how hard could it be in this day and age!

I was assigned the task, my wonderful girlfriend having taken the brunt of the planning so far! So I sat down, and fired up Wikipedia (now Wikipedia is my top top tip for anything and definitely for travelling). Wikipedia perhaps doesn’t immediately spring to mind when it comes to travelling and booking flights but do a Google search for “Flight to so and so” and you end up using valuable clicking time being lead of on a wild flight chase to all sorts of places. My top tip is to search for the airport you are leaving from. They’re all on there (bet you a pint you can’t fox it!*) even tiny Aitutaki Airport, one of our stops in the Cook Islands. Find the airport on Wikipedia and go to the section “Airlines and Destinations”, they all have this section too. There you can see every airline that goes to the place you wanna get to (or you can easily find out if you’re stuck with no direct flights) and wikipedia even links off to every one of their websites. Just go to each and compare the schedule\price yourself. Brilliant. Also you get to familiarise yourself with the airport with pictures maps etc, scary statistics like how many crashes they’ve had etc etc! Even better!

Back to Cuba, it seamed Castro was getting in my way from the grave, the US embargo was working ruthlessly well! Go into any travel agent in the UK and I bet there will be glossy adverts for any kind of adventure in Cuba, indeed, try and book a flight from the UK to Cuba and you’ll be welcomed with open arms. Now try and book one from Bermuda to Cuba! Or, as the only way on or off Bermuda is via Europe or the USA, try booking one from the USA to Cuba. It’s just not possible. The USA trade embargo on Cuba is soo tight, you just can’t do it. After a lengthy search we were either going to have row the few thousand miles after stealing some unfortunate persons rowing boat or do what the Americans do and sneakily go to Mexico and buy a flight there for cash.

That just can’t be right I thought, I’m not American and don’t live in American surely I can buy a flight on line between Mexico and Cuba? Wikipedia told me what airlines fly between Mexico City and Havana, it looked like it was just Mexicana Airlines. Off I went to their website, brilliant I could select Mexico City and Havana, submitted the search got the price and then, doh! You can’t book that flight without a Mexican Credit card “call customer services for more info”. The number was Mexican. Having no Spanish I was bit apprehensive about calling Mexico. A big Google search for alternatives later and no joy. I called Mexico. Not a good start, the automated menu thing was only in Spanish. I assumed Sales would be number one so pressed one, a second later and I had the embarrassing moment where you start the converstion straight away with a slow “Do you Speak English”. So uncultured! Might have managed a solitary “Hola” maybe. I forget. The person on the phone could kind of speak English which was more than I could do with Spanish of course and we tried hard to work it out, we got the right flights, the times and dates OK then the card number then came the address and email. That just didn’t go well at all. I wasn’t convinced we’ got the names or address right and my attempt to spell these just wasn’t working at all. I put the phone down not expecting anything good to happen. I attempted to email the airline to confirm what I had said but no email address. Then I found an American office for the airline and called them right away, all very good until I mentioned Havana at which point I was swiftly directed back the Mexican office. They couldn’t even look up any booking made to Havana. OK I’ll wait a few days and see if I get charged. Nothing came through. Called them up, no record of the purchase, hmmm, no email address to send to either.

Plan B: what was I thinking? I work in a place where pretty much every language under the sun is spoken, I’ll get a Spanish speaker on the job. The lovely Teresa offered to help and we called Mexico again. Booked the flights and gave the card details and address, great, I’ll wait for the confirmation, no problem. Few days later and nothing not a sausage!

Plan C: OK, I’ve got this fancy American express card that’s supposed to be able to get me out of anything, let’s give it a go. OK they found the flight, and the flight on the right date and time, great, but doh! They can’t book it. Now I’m v concerned. They go off for a while and come back. I could call the Amex office in Mexico City and they might be able to do it for me, could transfer some funds or something or go down the road and buy me the tickets for cash? I shy away from calling them up and trying to explain that all over again. Kinda too frustrated for that kind of thing right now.

Throughout this I hadn’t really considered calling STA again first because Cuba was a such a no-no on the around the world tickets and second it just didn’t seem possible if you weren’t in Mexico physically. I even did a quick tour of local travel agents and basically got told (with a smirk sometimes) that as I hadn’t booked the whole trip with them they wouldn’t help (even after what I thought was some very reasoned debate on my part sometimes). That really was the last straw. Wait till the recession hits them! Then they’ll want my money!

Hmmm sooo maybe as these agents weren’t saying they couldn’t do it, the one that booked our trip could? Bizarrely only now did I pick up the phone to Julia at STA in Brighton and pop the question. She’d call me back. I called her back, she was with a customer as usual! She called back late in the day with good (ish) news. They could get the flights! Not quite the same flights but near enough, we’d have to rearrange our itinerary and spend much more time than we wanted in airports but hey! We were going on Holiday! I jumped at the tickets and all was set. Feeling rather happy I went off home with the good news. See… I could could sort travel plans out!

About 7pm the mobile went, it was Julia again, she’d found the exact flights I wanted originally, same prince, all sorted! I wasn’t expecting that!

PS. Still no being paid by STA, although it might look like it :-)

 

 

 

 

 

EeePC Here we come!

Right I’ve had enough, I’ve exhausted all possibilities, squinted at about a billion websites and had enough of confirming what I always reckoned. I want an EeePC! The ultimate travelling tool.

It’s a funny old process, trying to convince yourself of something you already made your mind up on ages ago but one I find myself doing a lot. Well now I have a mortgage anyway! There are probably tons of articles, reams of research and hundreds of psychology students out there studying this right now. A strange form of shopaholicism where you do absolutely everything not to buy something then buy it anyway. Well I’m off to do that right now with no guilt and a clear conscience that it’s the right tool for the job. I need one

Gadget Freak

About 10 years ago in-between University and getting a real job I had a plan. I bought a long wheelbase Landrover, loads of maps and drew loads of pictures and diagrams and started planning a trip around Africa. The problem of planning the actual trip through a strange and mysterious continent with various nasties trying to kill you of course took second place to planning what computers and gadgets I’d need, and the most important thing… what the website should look like. Trailing way behind that was the mysterious source of money needed to fund the whole thing. Not surprisingly that trip hasn’t happened so far! Yes, some might say I’m a bit of a gadget freak! I’ll take that as a good thing.39 days to go and I’m off around the world. This will be a pretty amazing trip (arranged with some serious time and energy expended by STA Travel here in Brighton – more on that later) starting off in Mexico, going back on ourselves to Bermuda (don’t ask) then off around South America and beyond ending up in Tibet. I’m going to leave out the full itinerary as only one person so far has managed to listen to the whole thing without changing the subject and I’d imagine the same kind of thing would happen here! (That one person was my sister by the way.) If you really want to know it’s on the itinerary page on this site and there might even be an interactive map later! Now that’s a good gadget!

Now all the plans are in place, the fights are all booked, bribes exchanged and visas on their way I reckon I’ve earned some time to get myself travel gadgeted up. A lot’s changed even in those 10 years from that heady, some would say foolhardy attempted Africa trip. We all know you can’t move for internet cafes in any discerning backpacker\tourist hot spot but get out of those places and your daily fix of facebook can be hard to come by. Here at home, mobile internet is everywhere and anyone can get a web phone and access for next to nothing. Outside your home country, it’s a very different matter with roaming data packages hugely expensive for long trips and typing on a keyboard ment to send “u r gr8 txt me l8r” and “lol” is just silly. iPhone\iPod Touch is a great invention but that wiley Mr Apple really doesn’t want his ipod\phone sales hitting his laptop sales so isn’t going anywhere near offering usb or keyboard connectivity – although we all know it’s so temptingly possible. I’ve searched high and low and even read some blogs about that debate! In the next few days I’m going to try to put together what I’ve found from some pretty extensive research on loads of things from connectivity and power to cameras and computery things. For those of us wanting to send that video you took of meeting Britney on the top of Mount Everest back to base camp before that paparazzi’s huskies get him back to the local Starbucks or for those of us just wanting to use those long bus journeys getting your latest blog or photos ready for upload. I’ll see what I can do!

 

39 Days To Go

39 Days to go

Before I said yes to this strange and new assignment I thought what on earth could be said that hadn’t been said before and why on earth would anyone want to read someone else’s travel ramblings. Reading about how amazing a time some tanned stranger was having getting in touch with themselves in a zorb or how the local yaks were so accommodating and spiritual up some misty mountain somewhere didn’t seem like much fun to me. Could I write anything that anyone would find vaguely interesting? Would anyone sign up after I exhausted my yahoo address book? How embarrassing if no one I knew wanted to know. To get around all these uncomfortables I thought I’d write a private blog just for me. I guess that’s what they used to call a diary back then. I’ve never had one of those either.

Then STA Exporers came along, alright I admit it, the offer of an audience was all it took! So here is my second first post (actually this is probably about the 6th go, lets just say the other unpublished versions were a bit “out there”, “ravings of a lunatic” spring to mind. OK I’m just getting the hang of this alright! Glad I didn’t press that publish button. Hope I didn’t anyway!)

So what am I gonna ramble about? Well the first thing I thought of when STA Contacted me was probably, “Brilliant I need a massive load of toys to do this, what toys are they gonna give me?” The second thing was probably ”Wow I know, I can write about toys”. Unfortunately the answer to the question about what toys are they gonna give me was “nothing”, not a sausage. So with 39 days to go before we’re off on the travels and not even a sausage to help me, I will be writing about essential (\not really essential at all) techno toys for travelling including shiny flashy things that go beep, websites and other mumbo jumbo. Then hopefully I will have learnt how to type, use the spell checker and not use so many exclamation marks and will start writing about more interesting things using my new toys! Brilliant!

Ready for the off

That’s me there although I’m usually much bigger. Sooo many beautiful places out there in the world and I’m off see a tiny few of them thanks to some pretty hardcore booking from Julia at STA Travel Brighton (note first plug there ) I think that first booking marathon must have lasted a good full three Weetabix (or about 4 hours in real time). The array of around the world tickets is pretty amazing and I can see why they are not that easy to find yourself on the old interweb. Think I’ll post a bit about that in bit.

Yup, got my embarrassing passport, been stuck with them needles (at great personal peril) and wangled 8 months off work. 40 ish days and counting till the big day! That sounds like a lot but 6 months sounded like a lot way back then.

This is a little pic of Skogarfoss, a waterfall in Southern Iceland. An amazing country I’ve just come back from. Can’t wait for more!