There’s something I forgot to mention about Monteverde: pelo de gato. This is a very light, misty rain that seems to fall constantly there, even when the sun is out. It’s one of the most pleasant sensations. Look closely at the picture of the coatis in the Costa Rica post, and you’ll see some white streaks – that’s pelo de gato. I wish we had it here!
December, 2008:
Wrangling for Air Miles
This isn’t going to be the most exciting post. To make up for it, I’m starting us off with a cute picture of raccoons in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
It looks like there might be a chink in Qantas’ armor – online questions about booking. I had the following question:
Hello. My wife and I just booked a flight from Los Angeles to Auckland. I noticed when we booked there was a drop-down menu for selecting our frequent flyer program, but Continental OnePass wasn’t one of the selections. When we last flew Qantas about 16 months ago, our Qantas miles went into our Continental accounts. Can you advise me to make sure they get into the right place?
Here’s the response:
Thank you for your request for Qantas Frequent Flyer points. I’m unable to credit you with points on this occasion, as your transaction was not with one of our program partners. If you’d like to know more about our program partners, please visit qantas.com/frequentflyer where you’ll find details of your membership benefits, along with our latest news and offers.
Yours sincerely
Richard Switzky
General Manager
The Qantas Club Frequent Flyer Service Centre
Um, Richard? Did you actually read my question? We both speak English, but clearly different forms of it.
I sent nearly the same e-mail to Continental, and this was their response:
Dear [Wandering Justin]:
Thank you for contacting the OnePass Service Center and I apologize for any inconvenience not being able to enter your account number online.
Please contact the airline directly to give the representative your OnePass account number and [...]
A quick run through Costa Rica
I promised everyone some short posts with lots of pictures and a few tips about where to go. Let’s start with our first trip to Central America – Costa Rica!
This is a great country, even if you’re on a budget (which we were). We’re talking about genuinely nice people, beautiful scenery and lots of fun stuff to do. Winter is a perfect time to visit, which is when we were there. It’s warm, but sometimes the night would get chilly. Bring a medium jacket for those occasions, along with a sturdy rain poncho. We never got eaten by bugs, which was really nice.
Even if you don’t speak Spanish, at least master the phrase “pura vida!” It means “pure life,” and is the Costa Rican equivalent of “g’day.” I thought it might be something that those in the tourist industry say to tourists, kind of like tour guides in Arizona saying “howdy, parnder” to Germans. But no … I heard them use it on each other, and even on us when we were far from the touristy bits.
A quick breakdown:
San Jose area – We stayed at a place called Hotel Aranjuez the first night. They have community bathrooms, but it’s still a nice place. And the breakfast … awesome! We also spent a few nights at a bed and breakfast called Villa Escazu. It’s one of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen, and the food is fantastic. Very personal service, too. If you want to get out of the city [...]
Cameras: Just as important as a plane ticket
The best souvenir you can bring home is a great photo. And New Zealand looks like it will give me a lot of incredible photos. There’s just one little problem – my poor old Fuji S5200 superzoom has been through a lot of hard knocks, from deserts to temperatures well below freezing. It’s showing its age a bit, with some shots starting to lose sharpness, and a power button that often gets sticky and balks at firing the camera up. It seems that over the last year, the Fuji has gotten particularly bad at high ISO settings.
The Fuji could probably survive New Zealand, but I don’t want to fly 15 hours and have it die. Or worse yet, just take mediocre shots of stellar scenery. So it’s time for a new one … and I decided long ago that I was ready for a digital SLR. The first one I considered was the Olympus E420, the smallest SLR in all the land (and the one that uses the same xD cards as my Fuji). My co-worker, Alex Scott (who is a most-excellent graphic designer and artist), steered me toward Pentax, which is making some impressive stuff. I gave Canon and Nikon their due, but I just wasn’t impressed with the plastic-like, somewhat flimsy feel of their entry and intermediate-level cameras. Sony wasn’t a consideration since I just don’t like their controls and layouts. I thought about Fuji, but they just didn’t have what I wanted in my price range. Believe it [...]
The Final Australia 2007 Post
Friday, Aug. 31
Seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen an F-111 fly a few hundred feet over your head with its afterburners lit. This was part of a crazy celebration called Riverfire. If you ever visit Australia, do yourself a favor: Be in Brisbane for Riverfire. The video is lengthy, but it gives you a great idea of the fireworks display, and the jets that open and close it. Awesome!
We woke up early and took a stroll around the downtown area. This is a very outdoorsy city, lots of people running and cycling. After some breakfast, we picked a direction and walked. We also noticed that everybody was getting all aflutter about Riverfire. People were already lining the riverbanks to grab primo spots for the evening’s festivities. Sarah and I aren’t much for parades and shindigs, so we largely ignored it. We were pretty happy to be proven wrong later, but more on that toward the end.
Our first stop was the excellent Queensland Museum, which is really strong on science and nature. There was just too much cool stuff to see. We spent a few hours easily cruising around in there before heading out for general walking about. There’s a very neighborly feel to Brisbane, with a lot of non-chain store types of places. This particular section of Brizzy is like a big college town, even though Queensland University is down the river. Speaking of QU, we thought it would be fun to check out the campus.
We hopped on the [...]
Australia Post #11: Yunguburra to Cairns to Brizzy
Thursday, Aug. 30
The early bird gets to see a tree kangaroo, don’t you know? I was lazy this morning. But Sarah wasn’t, and she got rewarded: She went for a run and spotted a mama tree kangaroo cradling its baby.
Anyway, we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hostel (NOTE: The brown gooey stuff is Vegemite, not Nutella. Don’t believe otherwise for a second!) and drove off to see the curtain fig tree, which is just a slight detour from our route back to Cairns. It’s cool. Look at the pictures, and you can be the judge if it’s worth the trip.
From there, we dropped into a small park to hike down to one of the many crater lakes in the area. It’s not really a big lake, but it’s still really cool and worth seeing. But here’s the really exciting part: As we finished the hike (which was really too easy to really be a proper hike) and returned to the car, we saw the one critter that had been eluding us: a cassowary!
Now, these are big, mean, nasty birds. They’ll often chase joggers and rip up the roofs of convertible cars. They have nasty claws that can rip you up, and they’ll also peck the shit out of you.
But me? I had a Steve Irwin moment, and “crikey’d!” my way up to it and fired off a bunch of photos before we dove into the car and sped off. Cool!
So far, this was shaping up to be another one [...]
Australia Post #10 – Port Douglas and Yungaburra
Tuesday, Aug. 28
For some time, I’ve chased an elusive fruit called the black sapote. It’s related to the persimmon, and I first encountered it in Mental Floss magazine, which also called it the chocolate pudding fruit. The magazine said it tasted like chocolate pudding. How could you not love that? I’ve scoured the Internet for any way to get a hold of them in Arizona, but could never succeed. The nearest was Mexico. I could try to grow my own, but that would take years. And my brown thumb would likely kill it. The only think I can grow is basil. But more on this later …
At the hotel, we were walking distance from a place called Four-Mile Beach. If you think that Sarah’s not gonna run that beach first thing in the morning, you’ve got another thing coming. I didn’t pack running shoes, so I just puttered around town a bit.
Anyway, Sarah came back and we went off in search of some breakfast and an idea of what we’d like to do with our day.
We rented a small motorboat ($30 for 90 minutes) and went up the nearby river system. It was fun to be at the tiller, but the scenery was only so-so. I had the most fun checking out all the old boats. I honestly didn’t spot any interesting wildlife.
I also thought about how nice it would be to live in Australia and just anchor a boat on the river, and maybe take it out into the [...]
