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.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001