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Pacific Ocean Country/Territory Visit Difficulty, Easiest to Hardest (from San Francisco)

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Note: difficulty is partly ranked by which can easily be reached via Star Alliance carriers vs. not as I’m a Star Alliance flyer and this is a list for my own purposes. Country & Territory list is taken from here.

Easy (non-stops)

  • Hawaiians Islands (nonstop from SFO) (been)
  • New Zealand (AKL nonstop from SFO) (been)
  • Australia (SYD nonstop from SFO) (been)

Next easiest (1-stops)

A Simple Matter of Flights (2+ stops)

Other Logistics Entirely

Corobici River Wildlife Day

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Today we went rafting down part of the river here in Costa Rica (part of it was the Corobici river, and part was a feeder river, both in the Guanacaste region). We saw monkeys–and even monkey families–in quite a few trees.

We saw three crocodiles. The first two were close up and about the length of my forearm, but the third was much larger. We only saw his nose, though, so difficult for me to estimate size.

We saw two emerald basilisks, one of which we scared off into the bushes.

Also spotted: Four male green iguanas, complete with orange spikes (one of which we scared off by accident), and one female, as well as one black iguana.

In the bird department, we saw: a magnificent frigatebird (where magnificent is part of the name, not my adjective), several boat-billed herons, a squirrel cuckoo in flight, several osprey, a beautiful green kingfisher, and a grey hawk nest (complete with birds).

The best find was a small long-nosed bat colony consisting of about twenty bats hanging (and asleep) on an angled ledge. One of the mothers had a little baby bat with her.

Sadly, no camera with me today as there were dire warnings of wetness. Turns out it would have been okay, but better not to risk expensive equipment.

Aside from that, my Keens are soaking wet and still have rocks in them. Just so you know.

Costa Rica Vacations: Visiting Mount Arenal

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Mount Arenal, a common destination for Costa Rica Vacations
We were very lucky to visit Mount Arenal on our recent Costa Rica vacations. I didn’t get to see Mount Arenal on my first trip in 2012. On that trip, I only visited the Papagayo region in the northwestern Guanacaste Province.
Mount Arenal isn’t the most active of Costa Rica’s six active volcanoes, but it is one of the most accessible from Costa Rica’s capital of San José. For that reason, almost 70% of Costa Rica’s tourists visit here.
Our vantage point where I took this photo came after a drive through the Arenal Volcano National Park, where we saw white-faced capuchin monkeys and quite a few birds. We didn’t see coati in the park, but we did see some outside.
After our trip to see the volcano, we relaxed in the hot springs nearby, fed by the heat from Mount Arenal. There are many, many hot springs in Costa Rica. We happened to visit the Tabacón hot springs, which was an amazing experience with so many high-quality pools to visit!
We booked our Arenal Volcano day trip through Swiss Travel, Costa Rica’s oldest and most respected tour agency. (Currently, they’re updating their website, so I can’t link to a specific tour.)

My Forthcoming Book: Coffee & Canopy

I’m writing a book about our Costa Rica and Nicaragua vacations. My new book should be out in late spring 2015.

Want Some Ideas for Your Costa Rica Vacations?

I have blogged about some trip ideas for Costa Rica Vacations.

How Airline Status Protects You

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We’re on a trip. Well, we should be. Aren’t yet. Last night, due to hard frost and no de-icing equipment in San Francisco, our flight was canceled.

When we first booked, I held the reservation for Rick and myself. Later, my mother decided to go on the trip, too, so we booked her a separate airline ticket.

Because we were paid first-class customers, we were re-booked in status order.

  1. I’m a Premier Platinum, the third of United’s status tiers. (Earnable tiers, lowest-to-highest: Premier Silver, Premier Gold, Premier Platinum, Premier 1K, and then there’s Global Services, which is an entirely different category.)

  2. Rick’s a Premier Silver.

  3. My mother, however, has no status.

Thus, when there were no more seats, guess who got rebooked into economy?

Yeah, so that happened.

2014 Calendar: My Travel Photography

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I started making calendars in iPhoto in 2007, using travel photos for the year.

I didn’t make one the last two years, which is really a shame, so this year I relaxed my rules a bit. Normally, I want photos from December of the year before to November of the current year for next year’s calendar, and I try to show the diversity of places we’ve visited.

This year, the goal is to show as many of the Travelers Century Club regions as I’ve been to in the last couple of years. Most of these are iPhone photos, by the way.

Cover photo: Hong Kong (June, 2012), Asia

This photo was taken from the Macau ferry on what was obviously a very wet day. The focus on the window was accidental, but it was a happy accident.

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January: Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia (January, 2013), Pacific Ocean

This photo was taken out of the window of a United flight as we were landing in Chuuk. In my case, I continued on to the next stop, Pohnpei, which became one of my favorite places in the world.

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February: Narita Hilton Wedding Chapel, Japan (January, 2013), Asia

Finally a use for the oil paint filter in Photoshop!

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March: Wales (September, 2013), Europe

After Milford, we did a field trip around Northern Wales. I need to figure out where this was on the map. What’s not obvious from the big shot, but is in the detail below, is the dog chasing the vehicle.

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April: View down from the Burj Khalifa, Dubai (June, 2012), Middle East

In my only visit to the middle east (yet), the group tour to the Burj Khalifa was definitely one of the highlights. The wind was pretty fierce, and I was afraid I was going to drop my iPhone from the tallest building in the world.

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May: Rick Swimming with the Dolphins, Tortola, British Virgin Islands (December, 2012), Caribbean

Professional photo, and the best of the lot of them. They have other locations (and there are other providers), but this was a lot of fun. Our first SeaDream cruise, and we loved them so much we ripped up our other cruise plans and rebooked.

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June: Sunset, Guanacaste Region, Costa Rica (August, 2012), Central America

Picture was taken on one of my several crazy miles-using trips last year. Out on a Friday night red-eye, arrive in Central America around noon, take the noon-ish flight home the following day, arrive home Sunday night. Total trip time: around 48 hours, of which half was spent on a plane. Crazy. This trip cost me about $150 (plus miles and points), and most of that was the shuttle to/from the airport.

After one of these weekends, one of my coworkers looked at me Monday morning and said, “Oh, look what United dragged in.” That’s about how I looked, too.

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July: Waterfall, Faroe Islands (September, 2012), Atlantic Ocean

I like weird cruise itineraries, so we went on one from Denmark to Norway to Faroes to Iceland to Scotland to Ireland and back to Denmark. Some of the seas were super-rough (even I got seasick and I’m not prone to it) and it was bitterly cold at times, but we got to go to some awesome places and have some awesome pictures to show for it. The Faroes were amazing.

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August: Ex-Soviet Submarine Base, Balaklava, Ukraine (June, 2013), Europe

We missed BayCon this year because we took a Black Sea cruise on Seadream. It was a very similar itinerary to a cruise Rick had taken before the collapse of the Soviet Union–just a very different cruise for him. For me, it was all new. This place haunts me. It was very strange to be walking through a place that was built to withstand such high megatonnage blasts and staffed by 1000 people. Because they were afraid of us.

Here’s a link that gives more context to the submarine base.

Another SeaDream cruise.

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September: Island in the Lagoon, Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia (January, 2013), Pacific Ocean

This is about the entire size of the island: a small house, a thatched-roof outdoor picnic table (with a dog underneath), a fishing net to catch dinner, a handful of trees for shade, and a ledge to make getting on and off a boat easier. Someone really lives there.

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October: Sunbeams on Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa (July, 2013), Africa

My third trip to Africa, but the first time I got to see any impressive mountains there.

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November: Sunset, Maldives (April, 2013), Indian Ocean

Taken from my own over-water bungalow at the Conrad Maldives.

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December: Gustavia, St. Bart’s, French West Indies (December, 2012), Caribbean

I thought it would be kind of cool to have the calendar end with Rick walking away, sort of a metaphorical end of the year. The ship in the harbor is SeaDream II, and we’re on the sister ship, SeaDream I.

I learned that one of the yachts we saw had anti-paparazzi lasers. Way.

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Back Cover: First Man, Street art, Brisbane, CA (July, 2011), North America

Taken in an old burned out building in Brisbane, this remains one of my favorite photos. Here’s the original version of the photo, though I prefer the highly-processed version.

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Counting Countries

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Once you get to more than a handful of countries, they start becoming difficult to count.
Consider the problem I had recently: I was at Manchester airport, about to board a flight to the Isle of Man, and domestic departures are one way and international departures are the other.
Which way should I go?
I stood there, stuck, not sure what the right answer was.
Isle of Man’s a little island between Wales, England, and Scotland on one side and Northern Ireland on the other. It’s got the oldest continuously-running parliament in the world. It has its own currency. It has its own official languages. It has its own passports. Unlike the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the Isle of Man is not a part of the European Union.
For more about their relationship (and the whole mess generally), here’s CGP Grey’s wonderful video:

So, from a customs and immigrations standpoint, it occurred to me that maybe it was treated as an international flight. Instinct, however, told me that it was probably treated as a domestic one because most of the people coming/going would be arriving via the UK and it would be treated in the simplest possible manner.
Which, it turns out, happened to be the case.
Nevertheless, I counted Isle of Man as the 88th country I’ve visited.
I bring this up because there’s a new map showing where “all” the (196) countries are and I asked the question in the comments: “Why is 196 the right answer?”
As I also say, I use three different lists to keep track of country counts. The most restrictive (UN) lists 193 countries. The next most restrictive is the ISO Country Code (ISO 3166) list, which has 247 entries. The least restrictive is the Travelers Century Club list, which has 321.
Examples of some differences in my own visited countries:
UN and ISO counts England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as the UK, but TCC separates them because they follow their guidelines of “geographically, politically, or ethnologically distinct.”
UN counts Hong Kong and Macau as a part of China. ISO and TCC separate them. They have separate currencies, immigration policies, passports, visas, and official languages. As a practical matter, they are distinct.
TCC counts Hawaii and Alaska separately because of how far they are from the Continental US. TCC and ISO also both count Guam, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, etc. separate from the US. That’s partly because the TCC list is really aimed at travelers who are looking to broaden their horizons and because Guam is a very different experience than St. Croix or Hilo or Omaha.
Anyhow, it’s a complicated question. You might think it’s easy to determine what’s a country vs. what’s not, but it all depends on the definition, doesn’t it? 33 countries in the UN don’t recognize Israel as a state, and you can’t have a country without some recognition by other countries. So when is enough? When do the Cook Islands get their due?
When is enough for it to become a distinct blob on a map? When I was a kid, I had a globe with Ifni separately marked on it. I remember because it was one of the smallest places marked on the globe. Like now, I was fascinated by enclaves and exclaves (and enclaves within exclaves, like Nahwa).
World Map © alextrim and used under license.

United Family Day

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united-747
One of the things the travel community has are mini-conventions called DOs, and one of the cool things they do are station tours of various airport operations.
Smaller events (in time and scope) are called mini-DOs.
Thus, the household went to the SFO Mini Do, which consisted of the following:

  1. Charity lunch at The Slanted Door, where we raised money for FF Giving which is a pass-through charity primarily for the United We Care Employee Relief Fund, which helps United Airlines employees and retirees in crisis. I’ve got to say, The Slanted Door was among the best Vietnamese food I’ve had outside Viet Nam. (It’s really really hard to beat Cục Gạch Quán in Ho Chi Minh City.)
  2. Learning about United’s wifi and in-flight entertainment strategy, which had some interesting info about the problems of wifi bandwidth in the air.
  3. Sitting in operations listening into flight operations as we sat with one of the people handling flights and gates.
  4. A visit to the still-under-construction part of Terminal 3 (boarding area E, consisting of gates 60-68), complete with hard hats and safety vests. I declined to go up on the roof, but Rick did.

Then we trundled over to the 8th annual United Family Day, which had a bunch of things to do: vendors to visit (Rick got a picture taken as a Captain of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner), United planes to trundle onto and off of (we went on the 747), classic car displays (Rick liked the Morgan), new car displays (I had some quality Tesla time), food vendors (mmmm, pulled pork), and classic airplanes of various sorts.
Oh, and they ejected one of the airplane slides while we were watching. Quite loud!
There was also a plane pull. You could sign up on a team that pulled a United Airbus 320. We didn’t, but I’m sure there will be photos of other people from the Do who did.
One of the neat things about the planes on display is that each of them had something highlighted that you don’t normally get to see, like the innards of a 747 engine.
united-747-engine

Outside the Comfort Zone

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I’ve been asked a number of times why I travel the way I do, and why I make a point of going to so many different places.
Do I have favorite places to go back to? Of course. Hawaii, Ireland, London (and the UK generally), Venice, Istanbul — those are among my favorite places.
In general, though, I’d rather go somewhere new. By new, I mean a country I haven’t been to. I have a list of countries sorted by minimum time it’d take to get there.
Why?
Because I discovered that I was sticking to countries that felt too safe, too secure.
At some point, I found out about the Traveler’s Century Club: to join, you have to visit 100, but their list is quite liberal. For the last 10 years, I’ve kept track of my progress, and I discovered that I really needed to get outside of my comfort zone if I wanted to visit 100 countries.
What I’ve discovered is that the world is not as intimidating a place as I’d thought. Somewhere between 50 and 75 countries (I’m now at 88), I lost a lot of fear about travel. I’m no longer quite as uncomfortable walking around in a country where I can’t read the script system and I only know a few phrases in the local language.
Some countries I’ve visited completely cold: I didn’t research El Salvador before visiting, except for the obligatory bits (checking to see what the safe kinds of local foods are and booking a place to stay). Imagine my surprise when I realized that the country’s currency was the US Dollar.
Some I’ve overprepared for: I actually planned a trip to Australia over a period of months. When it fell through, it took me years to actually want to go to Australia again because I felt like I’d already been there.
Every new place brings its challenges, but what I really love are the unexpected moments that challenge your assumptions about the world: making the faux-pas in another English-speaking country because the language usage is different; having a broken conversation because neither of you understand each other very well, leading to some great comedy; seeing some amazing treasures of art and architecture that you can’t see where you’re from; seeing how other people’s cultures differ.
Everyone has their own way of getting outside their comfort zone. Some people like it, some don’t. I think it’s an essential practice. Otherwise, over time, your comfort zone tends to get smaller and smaller.
ithaa_restaurant
Outside my comfort zone is dining underwater. I love the ocean, but there’s always a fear because large bodies of water can also be lethal. The photo above was taken at Ithaa restaurant (the world’s first underwater restaurant) in the Maldives.
A few of the things I’ve done in the last two years:

  • Visited Þingvellir and seen the divide between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates
  • Walked some of the broad promenade in Douglas, Isle of Man
  • Visited the ruins of Nan Madol, one of the more fascinating prehistoric sites
  • Landed on Kwajalein, where tourism is pretty tightly controlled because of the US military
  • Been quizzed by a suspicious Bermudian immigration officer about the purpose of my short trip. He let me in when I showed him my Steve Jobs autographed iPad
  • Suspicious Canadian immigration officer wondered why I was having dinner in Vancouver and not staying longer. I pointed out that I’d had lunch in Indonesia the month before (it’s a ferry ride from Singapore), and showed him my passport entry. He rolled his eyes and let me in
  • Ski Dubai!
  • Trip with friends up the tallest building in the world
  • Weekend trips to four Central American countries, so I’ve now had at least a cursory visit to all seven
  • Spent Christmas Day in the exclusion zone of an active volcano
  • Flew on the last departure ever for Continental Airlines with friends
  • Nearly missed a flight out of Tokyo’s Narita airport
  • Had green tangerines in Kosrae. Apparently, oranges and tangerines never develop their eponymous colors in that part of the world
  • Got the deal of a lifetime on a ticket home from Myanmar (fka Burma). Side effect: took trip to Myanmar.
  • Visited a friend I hadn’t seen in far too long in her home town of Cape Town, South Africa
  • Being delayed getting out of Russia because the bureaucrats wanted more bribes from the cruise line (and they’d already had quite enough…)
  • Saw an octopus while I was snorkeling
  • Fell for Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Thailand, South African Airways (and, to a lesser extent, Cape Town), Micronesia, and New Zealand (again)
  • Flew around the world. Twice