MooQuack

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”.