wandering amphibia
A new trip, and a half a day in Zurich

A new trip, and a half a day in Zurich

A bit of background is in order first. A long time ago, there used to be a really fun frequent flyer program called US Dividend Miles, courtesy of the now assimilated US Airways. Awards were well priced, but far more importantly, they were manually processed, which means if you could convince an agent that "Barcelona" was a South-American sounding city, then you could easily fly New York – Barcelona – Mexico, for instance. No checks were performed, and quite literally, if you got an agent that knew that Hong Kong was actually on the other side of the world from Honduras, you hung up and called right back, and here you go, round-the-world itinerary with stops in South Africa, Australia, South America and Greenland for good measure. It was basically like bmi's program, although a little bit less egregious (with bmi, agents were geographically incompetent and lax, so you could book a short economy leg, append a long first class leg, pay the short economy fare, then send your boarding passes for the first class leg, earn 300% mileage flown on those, and suddenly find yourself with more miles than you started with. A true perpetuum mobile for miles, but that died when BA bought them).

Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur

After Brunei, next stop was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I actually had work to do there (imagine that!), so I only allocated a day for touristy purposes; but based on Wikitravel and other sources, there isn’t too much to see in KL proper, compared to some of the other places in Malaysia (i.e. Georgetown). So I figured a day is probably good enough. Not to mention that it was wildly hot, which made my life much harder for random walking around.

Brunei and the Borneo rainforest

Brunei and the Borneo rainforest

One of the things I've always wanted to do in my life is visit some of the places (actually, that grammar makes absolutely no sense, but my blog – my grammar) that I read about in Jules Verne's books. Patagonia, Africa, Borneo – they all appear somewhere or other and the magic that he creates describing the adventures in them simultaneously belies the impossibility of most people to actually go and verify it and underestimates the difficulty of actually doing half of the things he writes about. 

A trip to Wakkanai

A trip to Wakkanai

I should preface this post by saying that not all my trips necessarily make sense (some of my friends would probably argue that only some of my trips do make sense, but were they to do so, they would promptly cease to be part of that exclusive category, so they don’t). Sometimes I travel because of reasons that other people would think I should be locked up for; some people already think that, for what it’s worth.