T-95: South Africa Plans Confirmed

Our South Africa Flight Plans

As we approach 90 days prior to departure, planning is starting to heat up.  Our wonderful friend Martin has helped to start nailing down the South Africa portion of our itinerary.

Our friends Ryan & Jonathan will be celebrating their honeymoon by joining us in South Africa along with Mike & Deep, Calvin, and our wonderful host Martin.

We will be arriving into Johannesburg (JNB) on Friday, August 24 and flying directly to Cape Town (CPT) where we will be spending several days enjoying all the wonders that the Western Coast of South Africa has to offer.

Then on Tuesday, August 28 we will all be flying to Nelspruit, South Africa (MQP) just outside the Kruger National Park.  From there we will trek into the park for a three day safari before returning to Johannesburg for the flight to Paris and then Barcelona.

We are incredibly excited for this portion of our trip because we will be joined by our friends (we might be a little lonely after three weeks on the road!) and we will be exploring a part of the world that we have never seen.  The sample pictures that Martin has shown us of what is in store are enough to make anyone very excited.

This trip will be overwhelmingly exciting.  With just more than 90 days left to departure it's starting to become very, very real! (thanks to Martin for the following pictures!)

T-110 Surprise!! Research trip in May!

Surprise!! Since they decided to cancel the Paradise party in Hawaii in early May, we had some tickets that we had to use so we decided to go to Bangkok for an early research trip for our around the world extravaganza!

Thanks to Delta's very fair May pricing scheme we were able to get very affordable tickets to Bangkok.

After talking through our plans with our friends in Bangkok, we decided to go to Phuket, the beautiful beach destination; a place we have never been!

Options for pleasure include diving, snorkeling and don't forget the Full Moon festival.

While the exact details are still to be figured out, it's clear that we'll be in Thailand from May 8 until May 16.

Christian will be going back to the Philippines from Bangkok via Kuwait Airlines on 16 May and then will be returning to New York on 28 May just in time for Gay Days.

While we've never travelled on Kuwait Airlines before, their pricing scheme of $300 from Bangkok to Manila was difficult to beat.

So that's our plans. We dictated this entire blog entry on our new iPad three I hope to haven't been too many grammatical errors. ;)

Thank you and good night!!

Close Call! Crisis averted!!!

Just last week, Eric was trying to see if we could tweak our itinerary so we could have more time in Sydney cutting a few days out of the Hawaii leg. I love HI, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather spend a few days visiting the Great Barrier Reef! It's somewhere we haven't been and we've always wanted to visit this magnificent place. So he was talking to the RTW Delta agent and discussing things over when all of a sudden the agent told him that my ticket was in the process of being cancelled! And i was like, WTF!!! Now, how could that happen? I almost could not believe it! According to the agent, the process to cancel my RTW ticket started on March 23 and that someone actually called, spoke to an agent (they even have the call time stamped but forgot to get his name, figures right?!) and gave the agent my confirmation number! Now, who would do such a thing, I ask? Someone out there must not like me! And if it was a coincidence that some was legitimately canceling their trip and just was off a letter or number with their reservation, wouldn't the agent at least make sure it's the right reservation they are canceling? Talk about quality control!

Ok, now you have to understand that it took us forever to plot down and get our flight/trip itinerary and ultimately get ticketed, and for us to find out this way was to say the least too close for comfort! God knows its been a dream of mine to go around the world! Now I have my ticket back and I can continue daydreaming of all the places, cool experiences and fun times we are going to have!

FYI, March 23 was BP day and I was definitely somewhere where I couldn't have made a call...I was tied up or something that day! That's for sure!

T-118: I hear China is nice this time of year..

One of the hardest parts about creating our around the world routing was getting from the West coast of the US to Australia.  Delta only has one flight a day (which is almost never available on our ticket type according to the agents), and the European carriers don't have any routing.  That left our current routing via Hawaii on Alaska & Hawaiian Airlines.  Unfortunately, the routing involved a 20 hour pit stop in Portland and 3 days in Honolulu.  I wasn't too sad about the time in Hawaii, but it was a little frustrating to "lose" 4 days just getting from Lima to Sydney.  When I did the booking the agent reminded me that what we booked was our "worst case scenerio" and that I should call back often to see if a better routing has come available.  So, today I did so and found out that there was an option to go LAX-CAN-SYD that cut out Portland and Hawaii completely.  It would require a 12 hour layover at LAX but would allow us to leave Lima Saturday morning and arrive in Sydney Monday night.  Our existing routing wouldn't get us to Sydney until Thursday morning.

So, the question is.. how do we feel about 14 hours then 10 hours on China Southern airlines?

My initial thoughts about flying that far on a Chinese airline can be summed up in these photos:

Loaded in like sardines

Perhaps not the safest.. (click for the story of this picture)

Yummy Chinese Food!

So I did some research to decide what to do.  I read tons of reviews on SkyTrax, TripAdvisor, Australian Product Review, DestinationTravel, Epinions, and more.  There are so many airline reviews that it kinda starts to hurt after awhile.  Like most reviews, the majority are written by someone with a complaint to air and rarely by someone with nice things to say.

Here's the facts:
 China Southern is the world's sixth largest carrier in terms of passenger numbers and Asia's largest carrier by both fleet size and number of passengers.  They fly to 121 destinations with 421 aircraft.  They were established in 1988 when the Chinese government cut the national airline into three pieces (the other two are China Eastern and Air China.)  They began flying to LAX in 1997 and joined SkyTeam in 2007.  They currently fly CAN-LAX using the same 777-200s that have been in use for a long time but have recently received several new A330-200's that they use on the CAN-SYD route.  Reviews of the 777's are typically bad ('barely survivable' in business class and 'like Chinese prison camp torture' in coach) but the new A330's get pretty good reviews ('not bad for a Chinese carrier','almost as good as a bargain European carrier').  So what if the flight attendants rarely speak English (how often do you talk to them anyway?) or if China has one of the worst air safety histories in the world?

Here's my favorite quote of all: "China Southern's aircraft have been known to ignore directions from airport control towers, pilots have missed flights and therefore been crewed by co-pilots, planes have attempted to land at the wrong airport and pilots often have poor English and misunderstand control tower instructions. China has one of the worst airline safety records in the world and incidents are more likely to be hidden than investigated."

But this is supposed to be an ADVENTURE, right?  In the spirit of trying new things (and gaining an extra three days in Australia) we decided to book it.  And in about 130 days we will add our own reviews to the huge pile currently on the web..

And after all, they do have a 380!
(Although they are still practicing on domestic routes
before the government will let them fly international)

And remember.. "They only want to hep you!  You say you no have boyfriend!  I say long betta.  That ok, no problem, only 3 dolla mo."

and, after all, in a true emergency.. "There will be doors everywhere..."

China, here we come!

4 AUG LAX-CAN CZ 328 @ 11:30PM
6 AUG CAN-SYD CZ 301 @ 8:20 AM