It’s quite honestly impossible to describe Moscow. It’s a city of wild contrasts – glass skyscrapers right behind the Soviet-era apartment blocks (though it’s not as wild a contrast as Hong Kong, to be fair); Ladas driving alongside Mercedeses (though…
Wise people say that you should read maps. Study them, understand them, and cherish them, for in war they are the difference between victory and defeat, and in travel they are the difference between a boring business trip and a…
A typical foreigner’s visit to Japan begins with the shrines in Kyoto, and possibly the megapolis of Tokyo. For many people, this is about the image of Japan that they have, and they walk away from it with an impression…
The next grand voyage was to Amsterdam for a few days. It was for work, and I was somewhat disappointed I had to cancel vacation plans to Cambodia and Vietnam (there went my opportunity to try Intercontinental Da Nang, and…
I’ve always wanted to visit Australia, and when I got the opportunity, I didn’t hesitate. Helps I had a good friend there whom I’ve not seen in years, and whose time I wanted to needlessly usurp (I feel like more…
The following week after my mad blitz to Komatsu and Miyazaki, I continued my visits to places less travelled in Japan, and did a weekend run to Kumamoto. It helped that I had a friend there that I’ve not seen…
So after I finished my trip to Komatsu (well, “trip” is maybe a bit too big of a word given that it was a day trip), I still had the Sunday of that weekend remaining, not to mention the night.…
So since I have a decent amount of free time on weekends, and a huge stash of Avios points – and it costs only 4,500 points each way (and $3 of taxes), I decided to explore Japan. Today, I’m going to to Komatsu – the only thing the city is really known for is the eponymous construction company. In light whereof, there’s apparently the world’s largest dump truck parked near the main station, as well as a fairly impressive car museum. So here we go.
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).
After a sort of a good night’s sleep, powered in part by local produce and in part by pretty good homebrew, it was time to go explore the wonderful city of Novosibirsk. The city was only founded about 120 years…