T-153: Unveiling of the trip

X and our Itinerary Cake

 Hello!  It's been a while since I've blogged here!  I've been busy planning for my 40th birthday party (also known as the 20x2 party) which doubled as our announcement to the world about our trip!

To introduce everyone to the round the world concept, we had our amazing cake making friend Chad Orlando from Hey Sugar! Bakery create our itinerary all in cake!  It was German chocolate and vanilla bean.  Only Australia survived the night.

Everyone loves to play dressup 

Several of our NYC friends made the trek to South Jersey to join Christian's 50+ family members for our star studded affair.. good times were had by all.  Especially after the bar had been open for a few hours.

So now Christian's 40 (but you'd never know!) and all of our family and friends know all about our trip.  As the days tick by and the trip grows closer and closer.. everything is starting to become more and more real.

T-166: Cuzco & Machu Picchu

Cuzco

Machu Picchu

Happy Valentine's Day.

Today we planned & booked the Cuzco and Machu Picchu portions of the trip.

After flying 1 1/2 hours from Lima, one gets to the beautiful original capital city of the Incans, Cuzco.  From our starting point at JFK (elevation: 14 ft) then Lima (354 ft), the rapid ascent to Cuzco (elevation 10,912 ft) carries some risk of altitude sickness -- which can start being a problem at 8,000 feet.  Interestingly, many of the hotels provide free oxygen to their guests on arrival.  We'll spend a total of 2 nights in Cuzco (July 31 & August 1)

Cuzco Main Square

After looking through the highlights of Cuzco on Tripadvisor and checking out the highest rated hotels, we decided on the Tierra Viva Cusco Plaza because of its proximity to the main square and its great reviews.  Unless one is willing to spend a fortune staying at the Hotel Monestario, a beautiful and famous converted monastery (where extra oxygen is pumped in to every room!),  this hotel appears to be the next best thing.    Not quite as much wow factor but safe & clean with our minimum feature set (WiFi, bathroom, good reviews)

Once one gets to Cuzco, getting to Machu Picchu involves either a 5 day hike on the Inca Trail, a 2 hour train ride and 1 hour car ride followed by 1 day hike on the Inca trail, or a 3.5 hour train ride and a 30 minute bus ride.   Those who know us (especially me) will know that anything involving hiking was right out.  So I set about booking our train ride and Machu Pichu entrance tickets.

Peru Rail offers three classes of service from Cuzco down to Aqua Calientes (the small town at the base point of the 30 minute minibus ride to the gates): the Expedition (a no frills service, $112), the Vistadome (a glass roofed small frill service, $142), and the Hiram Bingham (an Orient Express train with lots of frills, $600).  Since driving to Aqua Calientes is impossible (there are no roads) and we're not really hikers, we had to pick one of these trains.  Much as I love luxury, I had trouble paying $600 for the same 6 hour train ride we could do for $142.. we went with the Vistadome.

Actual tickets to get in to Machu Piccu are only sold by the Peruvian government, are limited to 2,500 a day, and must always be purchased in advance.  There a great website that details the complex 3 step process to actually obtain the tickets you can see by clicking here.

So the Machu Picchu day is awake in Cuzco at 5 AM, Vistadome train from 6:40 AM until 11 AM.  Then a 30 minute minibus ride to the gates, an included lunch at the Sanctuary Lodge (the only hotel on Machu Picchu's grounds) then 5 hours exploring the ruins before heading back by bus and train to Cuzco and getting in around 10 PM.

Ok!  Now it's time to move out of South American and on to our next continent!

Thanks for reading!

E

T-167: Lima hotel

JFK-MEX-LIM  // AeroMexico (AM) 405/18 on July 29, 2012 // LIMA

We're in Lima 2 nights (7/29-7/31) then LIM-CUZCO on TACA 11

Two nights in Cuzco during which we'll do the Machu Piccu experience. (more on that later)

Then back CUZ-LIM on 8/2/12

One night in Lima and then board to our next destination late on the night of 8/3.

So, first, we wanted to find a reliable and nice place to stay in Lima..

Downtown Lima Areas

After doing some research on Tripadvisor, it wasn't very hard to decide that we preferred to stay in the waterside area of Miraflores with beautiful views, a large new underground shopping area with unique views of Lima Bay, and several large 4-5 star hotels.  Since we knew we would probably be leaving a chunk of luggage at the hotel while we went to Cuzco, we wanted to stay at a place that would safely do so for us.

Miraflores

After looking through Tripadvisor we realized from reviews that it seems like in Lima one gets something roughly proportional to what one pays for when it comes to location, safety, and services.  We have only a few days in Lima, so we wanted to be sure to hit all of the tourist hotspots, stay in a room with a view, and enjoy some nightlife if such a thing winds up being safely possible. To achieve this with the least work, we picked a 5-star US brand hotel.  We haven't contacted any of our friends who know Peru well yet, so we haven't gotten a good idea about whether Lima is a safe place to wander around aimlessly, or if something more organized would be a safer option.  In any regard, we selected the JW Marriott which is right on the water, connected to a casino, 5 star, and is across the street from the large underground shopping area.   If anyone has ideas/comments about other / better / different options, please feel free to comment.

JW Marriott LIMA

So now it's time to book our hotels in Cuzco, and the train and Machu Piccu experience..

Cya soon!
E

T-167: Welcome from Christian

Hello, my name is Christian (I'm the one in front and that's Eric behind me!) and welcome to our blog. I can't tell you how excited we are for this trip of a lifetime. Eric has been really been doing a great job in taking care of the details regarding this trip and let me tell you it's not easy. But half the fun is discovering and finding out the complexities of traveling around the world in a short amount of time and trying to fit as much as possible into the time we have. Hopefully you find this blog helpful and entertaining as we update it before our trip and while on it.

This is my first time blogging, and I have so much to learn. Feel free to leave comments, LIKE us on Facebook, and we'll go from there. See you guys soon and looking forward to reading some of your posts. So come on, let's go out there and see the world!

Who runs the world...?

Christian

T-168: Huge differences from carrier to carrier

Interesting Skyteam Data (from their website):

Destinations: 926
Countries: 173
Daily Departures: Approximately 14,500
Annual Passengers: 487 million
Frequent Flyer Members: 151 million
Number of Lounges: 490
Fleet: 2,431 mainline fleet (+1,111 from related carriers)
Year of Formation: 2000
Employees: 399,469

So today I decided to take on the mundane task of doing seat selection on our 19 flights on 9 airlines (none of which were on our booking carrier Delta by some odd chance). The Delta RTW desk staff (several of whom have been overwhelmingly helpful during my five 2+ hour phone calls with them) were able to do direct seat assignments for only the Air France flights. The agent sent a digital message to an Alaska Air agent while we were on the phone and Alaska assigned us seats without difficulty. For the remainder of our flights I was given 14 different reservation codes (one for each of us for each of the airlines) and 7 different 800 numbers.

You might wonder why I care about seat assignment.. The only reason I did was because in order to book two award tickets one must make two separate reservations which have no links to each other in the reservations systems.. In order to make sure we were issued seats together, I had to manually reserve them. The thought of flying 14 hours without Christian poking me in the side every 10 minutes is unacceptable so I took about dialing the 800 numbers...

Each airline has an amazingly different culture.
I first called AeroMexico and had to be transferred twice to get an English speaking reservations agent and even then I had to speak very slowly and mostly in Spanglish. 20 minutes, seats assigned. Not very helpful, but not rude.

Next I called Hawaiian and was obviously routed to the Philippines. As I have an unexplainable attraction to singsong accents and being called sir at least 4 times per sentence, this call was a pleasure. Seats assigned, no problems. And BOY do they appreciate our business!

From there on, not so good.
China Eastern: promptly answered but literally yelled at me for bothering them with such trivial matters. She decided to assign seats after telling me that the reservations number was for buying new tickets only. She then hung up on me.

China Southern? Reservations only open M-F 9-5 Pacific. No luck

Alitalia: on hold forever, agent with thick accent picked up but didn't say hello until finishing the conversation in Italian he was having with the person next to him. He eventually understood what I was asking for although he seemed befuddled by why I cared. He assigned us transatlantic seats but said that intra-Europe has to be assigned at the gate. Oh well.

So, why did I waste your time with this silliness (other than to try out the new blogging app I downloaded for my iPad)? Because I think something as simple as the attitude that each company exhibits through their customer "service" agents represents the overall travel experience that we will have with them. We'll see if my prediction turns out to be true.

In any case, this is the adventure of a lifetime and it's going to be exciting, challenging, and complex no matter what. Even if not a single thing works out the way we plan, I know that we will have the times of our lives!

Cya! E.

T minus 169 days: Welcome!

Welcome to my (our) first ever blog. 

I never really understood the urge to create a blog until I started planning our trip around the world in 40 (well, actually 42) days for Christian's 40th birthday.  Much of my online research brought me to other people's blogs about their trips which I found very interesting and useful in planning ours.  So, even though nobody but us (and some dedicated family probably) will ever read this, I'm going to do it.  It's a great way to keep track of what it is going to take to get where we're going and how incredible the experiences will be while we're there.

This week I finished booking the actual ticket with Delta.  This was no small task and I strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about doing a trip like this (on miles, in first class) -- you should be sure to get the ticketing part out of the way as far in advance as possible.  There are about 2 RTW mileage award seats on most planes and huge blackouts limit some airlines availability.  Skyteam's coverage of Asia and Australia is extremely limited.. especially since the main flight from LAX/SYD hasn't had an available RTW award seat since 1962. =)

Our current major stops are:

 Lima

 Macchu Pichu

 Portland (surprise!)

 Hawaii

 Sydney

 (? Cairns Australia)

 Bangkok

 South Africa

 Barcelona

Our ATW in 42 day Routing.. at least as of today.

The routing (pictured above) is creative (due to poor availability of flights even 175 days in advance).

JFK-MEX-LIM

LIM-CUZ-LIM

LIM-MEX-LAX-PDX

PDX-HNL

HNL-SYD

SYD-PVG-BKK

BKK-CAN-CDG-JNB

JNB-CPT-JNB

JNB-CDG-BCN

BCN-FCO-JFK

But at least now it's booked.  Now it's real.  And away we go!