Another tale of the internet turning out to be quite a useful tool, although in this case, the person on the other end of the email did not need to be berated to receive something more than expected. In fact, it came as a rather large surprise to us. We are members of the Friends Of The Zoo (FOTZ) at Melbourne Zoo. Basically, for a total cost of $80 per year (total for both of us), we can go to a number of zoos around the country either absolutely free or at 50% off as many times as we want for a year. Since our flat is so close to the zoo, it’s possible to go for a morning stroll around the park, and through the zoo. Not that many people can claim to be getting fit, enjoying a nice walk past crocodiles, buffalo, giraffes, kangaroos and elephants if they want.

Since we will be getting about all over the USA, it seemed wise to check to see if there was a similar scheme, since it would save us a lot of money in the long run. Melbourne Zoo, for example, would cost us $26 to go for the day. For only $80, we can go every day of the year, plus get into other zoos like Taronga in Sydney, as we did earlier in the year. Taronga Zoo would have cost us $21 each to get in, so we were much better off having the FOTZ pass.

It turns out that there are various reciprocal programs in the US zoo system, with one pass being the Friends Of National Zoo (FONZ) which costs $42USD to buy, and provides entry to about 100 zoos across the US and Canada. When you consider that it would cost us $34USD to get into San Francisco Zoo for one day, it makes far more sense to get the FONZ card. While doing my searching though, I turned up the San Francisco Zoo website first, and emailed them for further information regarding the list of zoos offering reciprocal entry, as to how many were free entry and how many were discount entry.

A very helpful person there responded and explained the answer we were looking for clearly, and then, as a bonus, offered us two free tickets to get into the San Francisco Zoo. No particular reason that we could discern, and I imagine it is not an offer made to everyone who writes an email to them (so don’t get all excited if you’re reading this and thinking you’ve just found a guaranteed free entry pass), but definitely very appreciated.

The zoo tickets were popped into the mail, and sent on to a friend’s house, and are already waiting for us to pick them up when we go to Idaho. So there you go - yesterday’s tale involved grr’ing at someone, and getting more than we expected. Today’s tale involved asking politely about a topic, and getting more than we expected.

Life is good.

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The internet turns out to be very useful again. A couple of months back, I got an email from a newsletter source I am subscribed to, offering me the chance to look at a new site in beta mode, on the grounds that they would send me a survey to fill in some time after that, and I’d have the chance to either choose to fill in or ignore the survey. Seemed like a pretty good deal to me, so I went over to have a look at the site.

A few weeks later, as promised, a survey appeared in my email, asking me to go to a website and fill in the details and opinions I had on the beta site. I went to the survey and filled it in, on the grounds that (1) I’ve done market research and it’s hard to get responses, (2) I had some opinions on how to improve the site design, and (3) they were offering a $10USD Amazon gift voucher to those people who filled in the survey. I was after a book worth ~$24USD so the chance to get it for $10USD less was a good opportunity.

I filled in the survey, and waited for the certificate to arrive by mail. It never did. After a few weeks, I emailed the people who did the survey and asked when the certificates were to be sent out. Apparently, according to my first contact, I should have received the certificate immediately. This did not obviously happen, so I was promised it would be looked into.

Four weeks later, no response had ever come from it, and I was irritated to think that I’d been duped into giving my answers under the pretext of getting a gift certificate when, it appeared to me, there was no certificate forthcoming. I sent another response, thanking them for opening my eyes to the way their company did business, and that it was the sort of thing that gave market research a bad name. I also sent an email to the people who were launching the site, since the people doing the market research and the people launching the site were two different organisations, asking to be removed from their mailing lists, and my records removed from their database since the company they employed to do research for them had sullied their reputation also.

A few hours later, I received another response saying it had been passed along to someone else to take care of, that my original contact thought it had been resolved, and she was terribly sorry about the inconvenience.

A few hours after that, I received another response from - presumably - the person who was supposed to have taken care of it, with a gift voucher to the value of $20USD instead of $10USD to make up for the delay. I was mollified by this gesture, and figured I’d take care of it in a day or two to order the book I wanted.

Two days later, another email arrived from someone else in the same market research firm with another gift certificate for $10USD attached. It appeared to be an entirely different response, from a person unaware that there was already a $20USD certificate given to me. A question of morals for me then arose - should I write back to this person, thanking for their efforts, but that I had already received a gift certificate, or just use it? If I wrote back, they might take it back off me. On the other hand, they might be embarrassed and just let me keep it, relieving my guilt, but leaving me with the money.

I thought about it for four more days, allowing them time to realise their mistake if they wanted, and then figured that I was entitled to the second gift voucher as well, on the grounds that (1) it was their fault I had not simply received the $10USD voucher straight away when I did the survey, (2) it was their fault for not consulting within the company before authorising the sending of another gift voucher, and (3) my opinion is worth three times that of any other person. Okay, so the last one is a bit of a stretch, but it helped to alleviate my guilty feeling, so it counts…*grin*

The long and the short of it is that I was able to purchase my book through Amazon, paying for the product and posting with the gift vouchers, and still had money to spare. Considering the book would have cost me $50AUD to purchase before I went, and taken three weeks to get in, a little bit of waiting, and a slightly irked tone in an email has ultimately netted me a free book, and saved us a substantial amount of money.

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A nice short update today, which should make a few of you sigh in relief that it’s not another long-winded ramble. I was rather stunned today to find out that with all my expertise in the growing of grass, I was still not near the top of the food chain when it came to pricing.

I’ve probably dealt with more grass already than most people do in a lifetime, but still, when enquiring about rates at a campground in New Orleans, we found they are charging $40USD per night for a piece of turf on which to erect a tent. Oh, and it has to be for five consecutive nights to get that rate. Let me think now - 5 nights @ $40USD per night with exchange rate of 0.52 = $384 AUD for that period. Not likely to pay that (ie: can’t afford to pay that) so will most likely stay out of New Orleans for most of the Mardi Gras, and go in for specific events instead.

If only I could transport a whole paddock over there - I’d be able to retire after the last week of Mardi Gras…

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The tickets are booked. The tickets are finalised. The tickets are paid for. There’s no going back now. The final itinerary went through more changes than a month-old baby, and was only slightly more difficult to work out than who won the US Presidential elections. However, the finalised itinerary is now as follows:

• Melbourne - Los Angeles - Fort Worth, Texas - Sao Paulo
• Sao Paulo - Fort Worth, Texas - New Orleans

surface to Los Angeles

• Los Angeles - Chicago - New York
• New York - Los Angeles

surface to New York

• New York - Barcelona
• Barcelona - Rome
• Rome - London

surface to Paris

• Paris - Hong Kong
• Hong Kong - Bangkok
• Bangkok - Singapore
• Singapore - Perth
• Perth - Melbourne

As you can see, we ditched the Boston - Halifax return flights, and replaced them with the LA - NY return flights instead. This will be compensated for, because now we’re intending to drive to Halifax anyway. We figured that if we went to Halifax, we’d want a car to get around, and since we would have left it back in Boston, that made things difficult. Therefore, it made more sense to not have a car in a major city where we would not want a car anyway. We decided on New York, as it allowed us to see it twice, in two different seasons.

There were a few more kerfuffles in the Asian portion of the trip, trying to get around maximum sector and stopover rules, but they were sorted out ultimately. We are going to be using Qantas, American Airlines, Iberia, British Airways and Cathay Pacific flights to get through the trip, so there are still a few oneworld partner airlines we don’t utilise, but such is life. Aer Lingus, LanChile and Finnair will just have to deal with their loss.

The visa applications are all essentially taken care of, except the major ones - Brazil, USA and Canada. We have to wait for the Canadian working visas to become available for application (January 2nd, 2001) since there are a limited number, and they’re all gone for 2000. The US visa is slowly being taken care of - still locating all the required documents. The Brazilians - oh, those funny Brazilians - are leaving a sour taste in our mouths with their costs.

We will be in Brazil from 10th - 21st Feb only, and yet, they require us to pay an entry visa fee of $112.50 each. That’s about $10 per day just to be there! Every single person at the IGC has to pay for it too, which is very frustrating. Brazil also wins the “pay until you bleed” prize for having the highest airport departure taxes in any of the countries we fly out of - $67.70 per person. Gee, what with the high crime rate in the major cities, the high cost of getting into the country and the high cost of getting out of the country, what does Brazil have going for it?

Considering we’re going to be spending our days between 8am-6pm locked in conference rooms and lecture theatres, it seems a bit steep. We were also delighted to find, as you might imagine, that our originally booked hotel was charging $30USD per day. Then, it seems they realised they could charge a little bit more, and jacked the price up to $45USD per day to take advantage of the captive market. Our problem was that the original booking with the congress-approved travel agency was lost in transit on the internet. They got enough information (ie: name, contact details, country of origin, preferred hotel) to get in touch with me but not enough to actually make the booking at the hotel before the rates increased to 150% of what they were when we pressed “confirm booking”.

As a result, we’ve ended up not at the Port Logan Hotel, but the Nacional Inn which has less facilities but is more in our price range. Even they increased their prices by 10% after the booking period opened, which seems a little wrong to me, but then, it’s a country where evidently one plays “rip off the incoming people”.

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After all the dealings and hassles with the tickets, we’re going to need to have a break. We thought we’d figured it out, and were going to be able to include Anchorage, Alaska in the itinerary, since we had extra sectors in North America left, but that did not work because none of the airlines in the oneworld alliance flies to Anchorage. This, despite the fact there is a dot in Anchorage signifying it as a oneworld destination.

“Yes, but that was back when Canadian Airlines was part of the alliance” says one Qantas phone centre employee. And how long ago was that? Oh, about 18 months at least. So why does our June 2000 map show the dot to be still on the map? “Guess they must have overlooked it - we hate these oneworld fares because they never go where people want them to”. Hmmm… At least even Qantas employees realise how bad the restrictions are.

Okay, so we can’t go to Alaska with our extra flights. This is a week or so after we’d found out that we could not fly into Beijing unless we wanted to either use it as a fuel stop or fly nowhere else in Asia. Apparently no oneworld partners fly from Beijing to anywhere else but Melbourne. Right, well, there go two destinations out the window.

Aha. Hawaii. It’s part of North America. We have four sectors each left. If we fly Los Angeles - Honolulu - Hilo (Big Island) return, then we only use four sectors, plus get to see all the volcanic activity. Fantastic. No. Wait. Don’t get too excited. We’re not allowed to backtrack, and that is 2500 miles off the west coast. Let’s check the rules again. Hmmm… According to the rules we’re able to read (oneworld does not publish the rules for the general public, even on the website), it would be okay. Not considered backtracking since we are not leaving a continental zone, and we’re not doing a crossing that goes from one coast to the other. Wonderful. We can go to Hawaii then.

Now, let’s check to see if there is a partner that flies there. Yes! American Airlines does. This is going very well indeed. We can go to Hawaii, get within 50 feet of flowing lava, get the sulfur steam in our noses, observe the old lava flows, visit the largest cattle ranch in the US (who would have thought it’d be on Hawaii?) and generally have a good time. I guess this is going too well. We should ring Qantas again.

No. We can’t go to Hawaii. Why not? It’s not backtracking, is it? We are staying within a continental zone and not going from the east coast to the west coast. Ah, backtracking within a continent is permitted. Except for Hawaii and Alaska since you leave the US mainland. So, can we fly to Canada? Yes, even though that leaves the US mainland. So why not Alaska or Hawaii? They’re exceptions to the rule. Bugger. The only way to get to Hawaii is to go there first, which we can’t do due to time and the fact we won’t have all our camping equipment (some sent by mail).

Oh, and we do like the rule prohibiting people from flying to Alaska and back when you can’t fly to Alaska and back anyway. It’s all very frustrating. We have not even gotten on the planes yet - we’re dreading the fun and games that will be “lost luggage” issues at some point in the trip. Probably a restriction on that too, such as “your luggage is not lost so long as there is oxygen in the atmosphere” or at least “we are not responsible for anything that goes in our planes, despite the fact you are paying us to take you and your luggage to the same destination”.

*mutter mutter mutter*

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In the last update, I neglected to mention a few things that were important, since they were involved with purchasing the ticket.

Firstly, the price of the ticket was given in $AUD, not $USD. I am still working in AUD, and not quite sure what will happen after several months of dealing with $USD, I might find it easier to think that way. For the moment though, take all prices to be in $AUD. In fact, any price that does not have a foreign currency notation after it like “USD” or “pounds” or “lira” or “Real” to be Australian. There you go…

Secondly, since some people have joined the list since the email about the $1000 travel prize went out, I thought I should mention that the value of the prize has reduced the ticket price substantially for us, as you might imagine.

Thirdly, since there is funding for Trav to get to Brazil and back for the conference, and the value of a ticket from Melbourne to Sao Paulo to Melbourne is within a few hundred of a OneWorld RTW fare, we’re basically getting one ticket free, and discount off the other.

The final cost should therefore be $1129.50 ($587.34 USD) per ticket, with all the decreases in price.

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The arrangements have been made, the itinerary settled, and the world is starting to look a lot closer all of a sudden. Due to the inclusion of South America in the itinerary, we basically exceeded all the limits on the various round the world (RTW) tickets that were based on mileage. That left us to play with the fun and games that is the Oneworld Explorer fare. This is a group of airlines (Aer Lingus, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, LanChile and Qantas) that have banded together to let travellers use the various networks to travel over the globe.

The first thing that should be noted about this fare is that it has a lovely purple coloured brochure which has various snippets of information to get you interested in using that fare. One of these points says “easy to plan and flexible to use”. Manure. Loads and loads of big steaming manure. This is one of the nastiest outright lies I’ve ever seen in a brochure and I’m going to make you all aware of that right now, so you don’t fall into the trap we did, of thinking it would be easy to map out an itinerary.

You have your choice of 3, 4, 5, or 6 continental zones that you can choose from, with the price increasing with the more continents you choose, obviously. We decided that we would go the 3 continent fare, since we wanted to go from Australia to South America to North America to Australia. No big deal. The pretty map included in the pretty brochure showed a similar sort of flight path, going Australia - Asia - Africa - Australia, so we could not see the problem.

Only one crossing of the Pacific ocean allowed.

Oh. Well, there goes *that* plan. Right, then we’ll make it a 4 continent fare, come back through Europe, visit a couple of people, then fly direct from London to Australia. No worries, we figured. Wrong.

If you go to Europe, you have to come back via Asia to refuel.

This is where it starts to get nasty. If, as we are doing, we fly from Australia to South America via North America (Melbourne - Los Angeles - Fort Worth, Texas - Sao Paulo), that is considered a direct flight from Australia to South America. This is because there is no direct flight that leaves Australia and lands in Brazil without touching down anywhere else, so they have to go that way and refuel. Well, okay, so there is another way to get there, but still, it is not a direct flight from point A to point B.

However, the route described, where you stop in North America for only a few hours before taking off again is considered a necessary stop, and therefore we, as passengers, do not have to count that in to the number of stops per continent we are allowed to have. Fair enough - if the airline cannot get us directly there, why should that be counted?

Now, on the way home, we have to fly to Singapore. We have no option at all about it. The plane flies from London to Singapore to Melbourne, refuelling at Singapore. Okay, so it’s a necessary stop, refuel only, no need to count it as a stop, right?

Wrong. Through the beauty of a bold-faced hypocrisy, the Oneworld fare makes Asia another whole continent and adds $450 per ticket onto the price. In other words, to get to Brazil, we can fly all over the place, but to get home from London, we have to pay Qantas an extra $900 between the two of us, just so we can sit on the tarmac, while they refuel their plane!

Exactly why this is the case is beyond us. The good folk at Qantas assured us that was the rule and they had to follow it, and that it was out of their hands. Trying to get them to explain how one is a non-counted stopover and one is a $900 stopover was impossible, with the woman at Qantas becoming quite irritated with me for bothering to find the answer.

Okay, so if we have to pay to go to Asia, and we get stopovers included in our price, we figured we’d make those mongrels have us in the air as much as bloody possible. Instead of now just refuelling in Singapore, we’re gadding about in South East Asia for a couple of weeks.

Therein lay another problem. Despite the fact that Cathay Pacific is one of the airlines involved in Oneworld, do you think we could get a flight to Beijing to go see the Great Wall? Not a chance. The only way we could get to Beijing was to fly British Airways direct from London, then direct to Melbourne, since there was no way to get to and from Beijing (using the Oneworld airlines) within the rest of Asia. Madness, I tell you, utter madness…

So, where are we going?

• Melbourne - Los Angeles - Fort Worth, Texas - Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Sao Paulo, Brazil - Rio de Janiero, Brazil
• Rio de Janiero, Brazil - Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Sao Paulo, Brazil - Fort Worth, Texas - New Orleans, Louisiana

buy vehicle, drive up east side of US

• Boston, Massachusetts - Halifax, Canada
• Halifax, Canada - Boston, Massachusetts

drive over top of US, down west coast, through centre

• New York - Barcelona
• Barcelona - Rome
• Rome - London

make way by surface to Paris

• Paris - Hong Kong
• Hong Kong - Bangkok
• Bangkok - Singapore
• Singapore - Perth
• Perth - Melbourne

By doing this, there is one obvious weird thing to happen, of course - we cross the date line, gain a day, but never cross back over it. This means we are either getting one more day of life, or one day closer to death. Neither of these is as important as the fact it means we have to way one day longer to our 26th birthdays. By doing this, ultimately it means that when we’re pushing 30, 40, 50 and all those other milestone ages, we’ve actually managed to cheat the system and get another day at 29, 39, 49, etc…

Not that it really matters - the effect will have been negated, since it took us almost an entire day on the phone to various travel agents trying to sort out the rules and regulations that were so restrictive on this “easy to plan and flexible to use” ticket.

Since it is the same ticket offered in different travel agents, it was possible to shop around. The prices we found were :

• Qantas - $2,869
• STA Travel - $2,869
• Flight Centre - $2,869
• Travelshop - $2,789
• www.travel.com.au - $2,746

Since we had the travel prize at Travelshop though, we went with them. Also, we had a long-suffering fellow there by the name of Cliff Taylor who did a marvellous job of working through the fare with us, and really took the time to make sure that we could organise the flights we wanted, and truly work the itinerary to what we wanted. Yay Cliff. I’ll make sure that beer is nice and cold for you when we ultimately get to Perth, mate.

Anyway, it seems to be all under control now, and we can get back to the more important stuff in life, like organising insurance and immunisations and visas and storage for our furniture and backpacks and equipment and international driving licences and insurance quotes and proof we exist and have a credit record and bank accounts and a bazillion other tasks, and somewhere in there, completing the thesis…

I thought I knew stressful conditions after the fun and games in the Creswick lab in February 2000. That was a breeze compared to the maniacal pace at the moment.

Trav.

PS: I have three problems I’ve not yet managed to find a solution for, and I’m looking for feedback. These three problems have names, and live in a 36cm wide x 46cm tall x 92cm long aquarium. If anyone has a brilliant idea on where my fun loving trio of axolotls - Itchy The Ichthyostega, Osteotagia and Pak’ma’ra - can live for a year while we’re away, we’d love to hear it. We considered donating the whole outfit to a kindergarten or primary school, but since there is nobody there over summer, that does not really solve the problem either. Suggestions gratefully appreciated.

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