Kindness of Strangers

Easter is a day for miracles.  It represents a time of hope and faith, of rebirth, of new beginnings.  It is only appropriate, then, that Easter Sunday became the day that we finally — yes, finally — purchased our round-the-world plane ticket. 

I was truly beginning to believe that this day would never come.  This week was one of extreme ups and downs in the world of trip planning, and I had all but lost my faith.  Last week, I pleaded for something to get me excited about this trip again, and by Wednesday I was feeling optimistic that the purchase of the UK-based ticket was imminent.  As I drove to work that day, Men At Work’s iconic, Land Down Under blasted from my AM/FM radio (no CD player, thank you very much).  It’s a song that makes you want to get up and dance.  I couldn’t help but smile as I sang along, and began dreaming about the Australia portion of our trip.  Kangaroos, shrimp on the barbie, koalas, bloomin’ onions, people calling me “mate” and admonishing me to have “no worries.”  If I could have transported myself to that faraway land on a magical boomerang in that moment, I would have. 

I listened to the lyrics and, as if hearing the song for the first time, I realized it’s a song about RTW travel.  Allow me to translate: 

“Traveling…on a hippie trail” (Goa, India)
“I met a strange lady, she made me nervous” (any given hostel situation)
“Buying bread from a man in Brussels” (all I will be able to afford)
“He smiled and gave me a vegamite sandwich” (typical backpacker fare)
“Lying in a den in Bombay, with a slack jaw and not much to say” (so tired that I will lay my head wherever)

Honestly, I have no idea what this song is about.  I am no good at figuring out the hidden meaning of song lyrics, but in that moment the song spoke to me.  I realized it could become my anthem, my rallying cry; not just when I’m exploring the land down under, but throughout the trip.  It got me excited about traveling again. 

A few hours later, my hopes were dashed (yet again) when we discovered that the cost of sending our money to the UK via a Western Union wire transfer would run $540.  In the end, we made the difficult decision to give up the ghost and eat the extra cost of purchasing our ticket from the US.  We gave it our best shot, but it just wasn’t meant to be. 

The good news, though, is that we have tickets!  We’re really going on this trip!  You can check out our Itinerary page for the final version.  You’ll see some changes from the previous itinerary.  We added some additional time to Portugal, India, Australia, and New Zealand, and deducted some time from Italy (mainly due to anticipated cost) and Easter Island (timing of flights).  We decided at the last minute to swap Japan for Jordan.  Our ticket requires us to pass through Amman (twice), so we figured, “Why not?”  Our main excursion here will be to Petra.  For any of you who are Indiana Jones fans, you will recall that the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade takes place at Petra, an ancient city carved into the rosy rock within a crescent-shaped canyon, where Indy finds the Holy Grail.  Aside from being a movie set, Petra is one of the “Forgotten” Wonders of the World.  We thought it was a good trade-off for Egypt, as it at least keeps us in the spirit of exploring the ancient world.  And, as a “culinary tourist” with a particular affinity for Middle Eastern fare, I was delighted to read that Amman is described as a culinary crossroads for such cuisine. 

The next post will feature the literary stylings of Maikael, our guest blogger.  As the person primarily responsible for the transportation portion of this trip, he will provide an in-depth look at all the gory details of the past three months leading up to today’s purchase. 

To celebrate closing this chapter of the trip planning process, we’ll be cracking open a bottle of wine from The Land Down Under over our Easter dinner tonight.  Onward and upward — and Happy Easter!

We thought we had the last laugh.

After deciding to purchase our RTW ticket through American Airlines’ One World Alliance, we began the arduous task of using their on-line, interactive map to plan our itinerary.  The One World program can be an excellent value, but it is mired in bureaucracy; I feel pretty confident that some government official created it.  What looks like planning a simple route soon becomes an exercise in artfully dodging red tape.  Ten hours later, you’re scratching your head, wondering how you’ll ever get from Europe to Asia using two of your twenty alloted legs (only 15 of which can be stopovers).  It is, quite simply, a logistical nightmare.  Hindsight is 20/20, and if we could do one thing over, it would be communicating with the airlines earlier in the process. 

But it’s more complex than that.  I am someone who hates to be told “no,” so I usually avoid tasks at which I think there is a good chance that I’ll be disappointed.  This, I believe, is the chief reason I didn’t want to call the airlines earlier.  I knew it would be complicated, and I knew they would take down each of our carefully crafted plans one by one, like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.  And they did.  We have created nearly 20 versions of our itinerary, and each one has contained a fatal flaw that catapults a wrench in the works, gumming up our plans and causing us to start all over again. 

We thought we had pulled the ultimate fast one over on American Airlines.  In becoming initmately involved with the ins and outs of the map, Maikael discovered what looked to be a direct route from Rome to Sydney.  While you, dear reader, may consider this an insignificant detail, it represented a major coup.  We are interested in the One World Explorer pass, which bases your ticket price on the number of continents visited — not on mileage, as is the case with the Global Explorer pass.  Therefore, in bypassing Asia completely, we could save nearly $800 per ticket, plus the cost differential between the two plans, of which the continent-based program is cheaper. 

We were practically dancing around the house singing, “This is it!”  We excitedly called American Airlines, who proceeded to dash our hopes and dreams.  They told us that there is a stopover in Hong Kong between Sydney and Rome.  And, because you are required to change planes and, therefore, set foot on Asian soil, it counts as a continent, as well as an additional leg. Have you ever heard the sound of American Airlines laughing at you?  It sounds like this. 

This seemingly minor issue kicked off a two-day process of revamping our itinerary, becoming way more familiar with the interactive map than we would care to admit.  By Saturday night we were haggard and embittered.  It was becoming clear that there was no ideal itinerary, and that we were going to have to make some difficult decisions.  Destinations had to be cut.  But how do you decide between the Galapagos and Easter Island, knowing the chances of ever seeing either of those hard-to-reach locations is slim to none?  I had grown so tired of this planning process that I wasn’t even sure what I wanted anymore.  I couldn’t remember the places that had initially excited me.  I began to wonder:  at what point are you being flexible, and at what point are you giving up your original vision?  At this juncture I didn’t even know what my vision was, and I wanted to bag the trip completely.

We decided to clear our heads over Chinese.  At the end of the meal I cracked open my fortune cookie to reveal the following message:  “One always regrets what one should have done.  Remember that next time.”  It was a message from the universe, albeit in cookie form.  I would be more likely to regret not going on this trip than making a few compromises.  In the end, the things that were dragging me down were just details:  stone heads instead of blue-footed boobies. 

We went home and, pumped full of MSG, cranked out our best itinerary yet.  We called American Airlines this morning with the final three versions of our itinerary, and for the first time they didn’t shoot down each one like clay pigeons.  We may still have the last laugh. 

Perhaps I am revealing my travel ignorance here, but there are a lot of wacky airlines that I never knew existed.  However, thanks to my friend, Amanda, I have been enlightened.  As a resident of Bangalore, India, Amanda has been helping us to explore the many budget, regional carriers that serve Asia.  There is Yatra, Jet Star, Tiger Air.  Yesterday I discovered Air India, whose website is described as, “the entity into which Air India and erstwhile Indian [Airlines] have been amalgamated.” Erstwhile:  not a word you use every day. 

But my hands-down favorite low-cost carrier is Thailand’s Nok Air. The reasons are numerous. First, their mascot is a beak. Not a chicken. A beak.  While this provides the perfect canvas for the nose of their aircrafts, I can’t think of many airlines who choose a body part as their totem.  Secondly, you can visit the Smile Shop for your buying pleasure. Here you can purchase Nok Air promotional items, including inflatable Nok airplanes, bizarre watches, and clothing emblazoned with the tell-tale beak.  Third, their flight attendants are dressed like a cute, NASCAR pit crew, with their jaunty crimson ball caps and matching zip-up jackets.  What’s not to love?

Round-the-world travel is a complete subculture.  It even has its own name:  RTW.  In our research, we discovered that there exists a whole brand of travel agents who specialize in RTW airline tickets.  Like, seriously, that’s all they do all day:  book tickets for people like us.  Being a career counselor I find this fascinating, and can’t help but wonder who ends up pursuing that line of work.  As someone who can barely use Orbitz to find a simple airfare from Albuquerque to Phoenix, this job is my worst nightmare.  I imagine ex-backpackers, hopped up on caffeine, furiously chewing gum and typing madly, smoke whisping from their fingers.  They know all the airline abbreviations.  They know the quickest way to get from Brisbane to Timbuktu, and can list, in alphabetical order, the airlines that serve the Kathmandu airport.  They are the gurus of the RTW world.

After last Sunday’s disappointing call to the airlines, we decided to investigate the options available with RTW agents.  There are a number of outfits out there, most of them located in major metropolitan centers (read: not Albuquerque), so we sent out a slew of emails detailing our itinerary.  Within a few days we received our first response from Charlie, an agent with a brokerage firm in London.  Because we learned it’s dramatically cheaper to begin from Europe, we decided to research the option of beginning our RTW ticket there, and Charlie put together a pretty good itinerary.  The next day we received another response, which Maikael forwarded me.  “This is from the place in San Francisco,” he wrote.  The agent?  Charlie. 

I was confused.  Charlie isn’t a name you hear every day.  In fact, I know only one Charlie, and he goes by the name Charles.  What were the odds that there were two RTW travel agents named Charlie?  Convinced I had read the email wrong — it must have been another email from London Charlie — I scrolled back up to the top.  But no, it was definitely a different Charlie.  Or, as I now call him, San Francisco Charlie. 

San Francisco Charlie is from AirTreks, one of the largest firms in the RTW biz.  He offered us a pretty good itinerary, too, and I can’t help but wonder if, in a few weeks, there will be a bidding war between the two Charlies.  We will pit them against one other, Charlie to Charlie, driving the price of our RTW ticket down to cost.  I can hear the phone conversation now:  “Well, San Francisco Charlie said he could do it for $4,000.  Can you do any better, London Charlie?”  Maybe they will someday meet and write a travel book together, offering tips of the trade.  The title, of course, will be, “A Tale of Two Charlies.”  I am beginning to wonder if being named Charlie is a prerequisite for this job, the advertisment reading, ”Seeking RTW travel agent.  Must type 800+ WPM.  Those not named Charlie need not apply.” 

A few days later we receive a response from another San Francisco-based agent.  He says our itinerary is too complicated, and that he can’t do any better than the OneWorld Alliance.  I scroll down to the bottom of the email.  His name is Chris.  It never would have worked out anyway.

Teen Talk Barbie once said, “Math is hard!”  So is planning a trip about the world. 

It feels like such a bourgeois thing to moan about, but trying to work out the logistics of this trip has been one of the more challenging projects that we’ve tackled as a couple.  The fact is, I’m getting really, really tired of the planning phase.  If I could leave tomorrow, I would; but the sad fact remains that we’re nearly five months away from our departure date.  This doesn’t bode well. 

Most of my weeks are an emotional roller-coaster that have begun to take on an eerie sameness.  Sundays are trip planning days.  The work week has swallowed me whole, and by the time Sunday rolls around I’ve been thinking excitedly about all the things I want to accomplish today.  But after a few hours of research, we encounter some sort of a snag that discourages me thoroughly.  It’s usually nothing big but, because these inevitable disappointments occur week after week, the effect is cumulative.  If I read one more article about the weakened dollar, I think I’m going to die. 

The most difficult part of planning has been figuring out an itinerary.  Every time I think we’re close to finalizing it, we encounter some sort of  setback.  We have discovered that planning a round-the-world trip is a classic chicken-egg situation.  One part of the process is so dependent upon the others that it is often difficult to know what to tackle first.  But the general concensus seems to be that, once you’ve finalized your transportation plans, everything else falls into place.  Unfortunately, it is also the part of the process that makes you want to tear your hair out.  As Maikael said today, ”Buying this plane ticket is like buying a house:  you’ll promise yourself when you’re done that you’ll never do it again.”   

Last week, at the suggestion of our guide book, we consulted a local travel agent.  When we handed over our two-page itinerary, I could see the panic streak across her eyes.  “Have you ever helped anyone plan this kind of a trip before?” Maikael asked.  “Well, not exactly,” she replied.  “But I have helped people with international cruises.” 

Clearly, we were on our own.

Today we took the monumental step of calling American Airlines ourselves to inquire about their OneWorld program.  I’m not sure what we’ve been waiting for, but it felt like a big deal to acknowledge that we might be close to booking a ticket.  After an hour on the phone, the usual Sunday disappointment set in.  We learned what “stopovers” and “legs” really mean.  We discovered that the OneWorld Alliance no longer serves a route from Bali to Australia.  We learned that, if we purchased our tickets from France or England, they could be had for nearly $4,000 less. 

We’re not exactly back to square one, but it sure feels like it.