Travel

The Magical Hanukkahtime Section Variety Hour is an eight-day festival of light reading. BC Magazine's sports editor spreads his Gentile love in every other section but his own. And because it's Hanukkah, the gifts of are substandard quality: in this case, it's an article. Today: BC Culture.So you've decided to not drive to your senile great aunt's house this year. You're going to fly. Good for you. It's statistically safer. Furthermore, the whiplash isn't nearly as painful down the road when you get in a plane accident, you know, on account of the death and all.So… you've decided to drive after all. Wait! I apologize, I'm rude sometimes. Flying is safe. Of the 30 flights I took this year, not one of them ended on a mountainside. That's a 100 percent rating, and should not deter you from boarding an airplane. Especially because the security is enhanced by the Transportation Security Administration's airline carry-on guidelines.And the
(Read the full post about ‘What Not To Carry On, My Wayward Son’…)

As they do on a regular basis, Northwest is again offering members of its WorldPerks program the opportunity to purchase tickets using a combination of frequent flyer miles and cash. Program members can combine cash with either 10,000 or 20,000 miles. Domestic tickets start at $139 plus 10,000 miles, or $89 plus 20,000 miles. Tickets for travel between the U.S. and Europe are priced from $298 plus 20,000 miles, or $388 plus 10,000 miles. And Asia tickets start at $488 plus 20,000 miles, or $598 plus 10,000 miles, and increase from there. Tickets must be purchased at least 14 days prior to travel and no later than February 16, and travel must be completed by March 6. Certainly the ability to combine cash and miles is desirable from a flexibility standpoint. The question is whether the required dollar and mileage amounts represent good value or not. Looking at the domestic tickets, paying $89 plus 20,000 miles amounts to buying the 5,000 miles necessary for a 25,000-mile award ticket
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Lyttleton Harbor ItГўВЂВ™s New YearГўВЂВ™s Eve and IГўВЂВ™m going to New Zealand.  The 3-hour flight to Christchurch was short compared to my earlier trip to China.  While on the plane I was able to catch a glimpse of Mt. Cook through the window sitting on the aisle seat.  I had to really stretch my neck to see it.  Breezed through customs and took a taxi to my homestay just 15 minutes from the airport.  The taxi driver said the ride from the airport in Christchurch is the prettiest because you take the surface streets and there are nice trees, parks, and gardens along the way.  No highways needed like most places.  That’s why Christchurch is called the ГўВЂВњGarden CityГўВЂВќ.Settled down at my homestay then had dinner together with the rest of the mates living there. She’s a beast   After that a friend picked me up and took me to his boat at Lyttleton Harbour.  The night was clear and stars were
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PHILIPSBURG, Montana (AP) — When our daughter told us she couldn’t come home for a visit because of her work schedule, we did what any doting parents of an only child would do: we went to her. No matter that she worked 2,300 miles away on a remote ranch in Western Montana that had just received 10 inches of snow. No, she’s not a cattle wrangler. She was working as an intern for Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan voter education Web site based on a ranch 25 miles from Philipsburg, Montana, an old mining town midway between Missoula and Butte. And if winter is not exactly high season, we still found our long weekend in Montana to be unexpectedly delightful. Philipsburg is just off Montana’s oldest state road, Highway 1, a 55-mile stretch known as the Pintlar Scenic Loop for the mountain range that surrounds it. The route runs through historic copper town Anaconda, between vast tracts of grazing land dotted with black and brown cows, past glistening Georgetown, Silver and Echo lakes
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When we arrive Christmas afternoon, the hosts and their kids clearly aren’t expecting company. In fact, we catch them snoozing. But we barge in anyway—we have come so far, after all, to see them. Our hosts, the sea lion family, live on San Cristobal island in the Galapagos and they’re everywhere on the otherwise deserted beach and the rocks—mamas and pups nursing, adolescents swimming, fathers marking their territory. We’re mindful of our guide’s warning to stay 20 yards away. In the water, they swim rings around us. It’s one of those rare I-can’t-believe-we’re-here-doing-this moments in a holiday week filled with memorable moments. We’ve spent the week touring these remote islands off the coast of Ecuador where the wildlife inspired Charles Darwin’s life’s work. We pose with giant tortoises that ignore our presence, and step around the marine iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks on another island. We crouch next to blue-footed boobies (yes, their feet are bright
(Read the full post about ‘A memorable holiday trip to Ecuador’…)

I had been impatiently waiting for this day and it had finally arrived.  Oh yeah.  To save on precious vacation leaves, I clocked in the morning and spent a few hours at the office and pretended to work.  I was home by lunch time, took care of last minute bringables and weaved through the tangled mess that is Manila traffic to the airport.  First stop was Singapore, where I met M, a friend and former collegue who was joining me on this trip.  It was just a couple of hours’ layover at Changi, and we would finally, finally, finally be leaving on a jetplane to meet the Queen.

Safety investigators expect to report by the end of the month on two recent in-flight equipment failures aboard OzJet aircraft. Passengers on an Ozjet flight on Saturday were told to don lifejackets and prepare for a possible crash-landing in the ocean after a wing malfunction over Norfolk Island. The Brisbane-to-Norfolk Island Boeing 737 flight made two approaches before it was forced to abandon the landing in bad weather and divert to Noumea. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is investigating that incident, as well as the discovery of a broken elevator balance tab on a Boeing 737-200 on a flight from Port Moresby to Brisbane on Monday. "The investigations into the component failures will include extracting data from the black box flight recorders from both aircraft, interviewing aircraft crew and examining the aircraft components involved," the bureau said. It expects to issue preliminary reports into the failures in 30 days. The bureau said yesterday that OzJet had
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Imagine a world in which all domestic flights are operated by the likes of Southwest and JetBlue and all overseas flights are operated by American, United and their ilk. Now relax. Because the odds of that scenario materializing are close to zero. But don’t relax too much—we are moving in that direction. As low-cost carriers increase their share of the domestic market for air travel, the legacy airlines are focusing on growing their international operations and slimming down their domestic presence. According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch, Continental will increase overall seat capacity just two to three percent in 2008, and the number of domestic seats will actually decline. Other full-service carriers are doing the same. The reasons for the shift aren’t far to seek. The mainline carriers can make higher profits on overseas flights, where there is little or no pricing competition from discount carriers, so they are shifting their flights from
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Many young couples have a tropical honeymoon vacation, and some take an African Safari Honeymoon to Tanzania or Kenya, and then urgently seek a peaceful quiet escape for the last few days, and this is where an Indian Ocean Island in the Mafia Archipelago off Tanzania called Chole comes in.   There are few better places to finally end up in than Chole Mijini Lodge which is the epitome of a romantic honeymoon getaway. This is never more true if you are very conscious of the damage that new holiday developments can do to the local environment or population, because Chole Mijini Lodge has developed with the best principles of eco tourism and benefiting local communities.   Chole Miniji Lodge is on a tiny fertile island called Chole, some twenty minutes sail from Mafia. It has been set up as a partnership with the owners Jean and Anne de Villiers and the people of Chole Village. In fact $10 per night per guest goes to resource community development projects, and this is
(Read the full post about ‘End Your Tropical Honeymoon Vacation in the Mafia Archipelago off Tanzania’…)