Category: nature

Why I Passed on the Cathay Pacific Mistake Fares

January 5, 2019 / / 7 Comments

Unless you are living under a proverbial rock (in which case, I’d love to know how you found this blog), you heard by now of the insane Cathay Pacific business and first class mistake fares that were available departing from Hanoi. Heck, my dad heard about it. The deal was insane — cheaper-than-economy price tickets on one of the best business or first class products in the world.

If you got in on the deal, congrats. To the confusion of my friends and family, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I missed the deal. I was online for it as it was discovered. Instead, I chose not to. Crazy, right?

Why We Travel (Hack)

If you’re like me, you probably got into travel hacking when a friend shared some mistake or cheap fare to a country you were interested in going to. For me, that was a $400 round-trip fare to India, which I took with my friend Jacob and kicked off a multi-year stint of jetsetting that made me the envy of many of my friends and family. (In the context of the Cathay Pacific deal, this one seems amateurish in retrospect).

Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated a wealth of incredible experiences and encounters. I saw a play at the Sydney Opera House, took a flamenco class from a world-famous dancer, visited the site of genocide in Cambodia, and hiked the W-trail in Patagonia, to name a tiny few. Those are the flashy ones, the ones that earn social “cred.”

Perhaps more importantly, I got to celebrate the holidays with my family, see my sister graduate from college, and kindle a burgeoning relationship with my partner. 

We travel for many reasons — to see beautiful things, to experience new cultures, to connect with friends and family — and we travel hack to travel better, cheaper, or more often. However, in the thrill of the deal and the likes and the shares it’s easy to forget that our travel is not free.

Climate Change

The cost of world travel is its contribution climate change. Every 1,000 (economy) passenger miles flown dumps about a third of a ton of carbon dioxide into the air, which has the effect of trapping progressively more heat in the earth via the greenhouse effect. This in turn affects global climate and weather patterns, destabilizing many of the natural environments that are often the destination of our travels in the first place.

We often think of climate change as affecting far off places like the arctic and beings other than humans. Unfortunately, in the last few years that’s ceased to be the case. Whether it be hurricanes, droughts, or forrest fires, we’ve seen the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters. I was among those who thought I was immune to the effects, given my position of relative wealth and status, until the recent forest fires that cloaked the Bay Area in smoke as damaging as smoking eleven cigarettes in a day

Aviation is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, and as travel hackers chasing mistake fares, we are culpable in contributing to the problem.

That’s not to say flying is evil. It’s transformative and has been essential to our steady progress in global health and well-being over the last century. It allows us to move vaccines from laboratories in France to warzones in Africa. It allows us to move food grown in California to a grocery store in New York. 

However, just as flying is incredible because humans are not equipped to soar in the air, flying is unsustainable because it leads us to do things we didn’t evolve to do. Unintuitively, flying is more energy efficient than driving, but flying makes it easier to travel unimaginable distances in tolerable times. Three years ago, Jacob and I hopped down to Los Angeles for a day to see my then-favorite band perform at a concert. Would I have driven the five hours to do that? Absolutely not. Going one step further, would I really spend three days to drive across the country to visit my parents? (For the sake of my familial relations, I will not answer that here, but you can read between the lines 😛)

Three Years, In Pictures

Thinking about this fact has led me to re-evaluate my travel patterns in the last few years, which is one of the reasons you’ve heard less of me on the blog. Here’s how things have changed:

(Maps generated using the Great Circle Mapper)

What I’m Doing

The simplest change for me has been to stop chasing mistake fares, and to let where I truly want to go dictate where I end up going. As painful as it was to see such an amazing deal as the Cathay mistake fares go by, buying a ticket would have meant two trips to Asia that I hadn’t planned for (four, if you count my partner or a friend) and would rather “save” for when I want to visit my grandparents in Japan whom I’ve only seen a few times in my life or a special event like attending my maternal grandmother’s 90th birthday.

The second change I have made has been equally easy and moreover, fulfilling — to find places closer to home that are just as exotic or wondrous as the other, farther places I could go. My partner and I visited Kauai last year instead of New Zealand, alternating hikes with snorkeling, kayaking, and seeing double rainbows. We took a trip to Vancouver instead of Europe, replete with a swanky hotel stay and delicious pastries. These sorts of substitutions have huge impact. They’re not just switching off a lightbulb. They’re switching off thousands of lightbulbs, thousands of times.

I believe that anyone can do this, and that everyone must do this if the places that we are visiting now are going to survive for our kids to see them.

Three Years, In Pictures

It’s true, my “world” has become much smaller. My travel maps have shrunk from needing the full globe, to a single hemisphere, to just a quarter of the earth’s area. Why am I doing it? I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

(Calculations generated using the Cool Climate Calculator from UC Berkeley)

What You Can Do

I understand those who don’t feel the same way as I do about climate and the environment, or where climate change sits relative to their wants and needs. I’d love to talk to you more if you fall in either of those camps, but at the very least, I’d like to offer you an indulgence: if you truly cannot reduce your travel and you truly want to do something about it, consider contributing to Rainforest Action Network commensurate with the “social cost” of carbon emissions, which has been estimated to be anywhere between $85 and $300 per ton. (Sorry, the $5-$10 offered by airlines through the Nature Conservancy doesn’t begin to make up for the damage we’re doing to human health and the health of the planet). If you have no upcoming travel, or jumped in on the mistake fare, contribute to offsetting 25 HAN-YVR round-trips here:

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How we Hacked Fiji

March 4, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Greetings from the Intercontinental Fiji! We can’t believe that we’ll be headed home in just a few short hours after our adventures (and misadventures!) in Sydney, Queenstown, Auckland, and now here. It’s been a blast traveling together, though, and we’ve gotten to work on a little surprise project going on that we’ll share with you in the coming weeks.

Before I go on, let me share with you exactly what I’m looking at right now:

How did we get to stay at such an amazing property as the Intercontinental (IC) Fiji with such an amazing view? On points, of course. 30,000 IHG points per night, to be exact. Given that rooms start at around $350/night, it’s a pretty ludicrous award redemption (you can typically expect to get around 0.6-0.8 cents per point), although as I explained a few weeks ago, you should never be paying more than $210 for a hotel of this category.

That said, this hotel and in general, Fiji (and other island/resort-based destinations) are not without a glaring flaw. You are entirely resort-captive.

What do I mean by that? Basically, it’s very difficult to do anything without shelling out a hefty chunk of change because there is nowhere else for you to go (unless you happen to have a car). Resorts have wide ranges of activities, some of which are free, but as a rule of thumb, the nicer the hotel, the fewer the free activities and the more the paid ones will cost. To put it in perspective, the resort we stayed at two nights ago, the Naviti Resort, offered kayaks, snorkeling gear, and paddleboards for free, whereas the IC Fiji charges anywhere from 10-30 USD for the privilege of renting them for a few hours.

On top of that, meals are obscenely expensive (anything that could remotely be considered a main course started at 20 USD), and the one place you can buy food on the property doesn’t stock any food other than chips and ice cream.

The travel hackers that we are, we were not going to stand for this, so we got a bit creative. At Naviti, where our breakfast was included, we went on the later side of it, had our meals, and made sandwiches that we brought back to our rooms to eat for lunch. Here at the IC, for the first night, we snagged some pizza at the end of lunch hours (before prices increased for dinner) and then shared it later. In general, if you can get yourselves on a two meal schedule, you can save some serious change.

Activities-wise, we loaded up on every single free activity the IC offered, from an introductory scuba diving lesson in a special dive pool, to, a yoga class, to evening music performances and fire shows. We checked out neighboring hotels (which were nowhere near within walking distance, but just a $10 cab ride away) and perused their event and meal offerings and partook when they were appealing.

Basically, we thought outside the box (well, resort). Even better then, when Esther and I stumbled on a set of local villagers who had set up shop not too far from the resort to offer massages, tours and sundries “at local prices.” I’m sure they weren’t exactly what a local would pay, but when we found out it would only cost 10 USD for a specially-prepared four-person lunch, you can be damn sure we asked them to bring us some food. On top of it all, it was really nice to talk and get to know the locals, because resorts can be isolating (personally, they drive me insane, but that’s probably just because I can’t sit still 😉 ), and we came all this way for more than just the scenery.

Long story short — just because you’re at an expensive resort doesn’t mean you can’t have a trip that doesn’t break the bank.

Happy travels!

The best money I spent in Bali

October 21, 2015 / / 7 Comments

After jumping on a mistake fare to Indonesia in the spring (and convincing my friend Jacob to join), I finally got to live out my trip, spending five days in Bali followed by one in Singapore and another in Tokyo.

We spent a large portion of our Bali segment staying in Ubud, from which we had access to much of northern Bali (like Mt. Batur, an active volcano, shown above) as well as respite from the hordes of tourists typically crowding the beaches of Kuta (we did of course spend a day in Legian to take advantage of the beaches).

On the third day of our stay, we followed the advice of the (wonderful!) hotel manager at the Gajah Biru Bungalows and walked into Ubud city center searching for ‘push bikes’ (not to be confused with normal ‘bikes’, which is how the locals refer to motorcycles) to rent.

After walking down a side street we stumbled on a vendor and asked how much it would cost to rent bikes for the day. He told us 25,000 rupees (a bit less than $2) per bike.

“25,000?!” I asked, feigning outrage, “That’s ridiculous!” (The hotel manager told us to expect 15,000 as a fair price). I turned to walk away.

“Fine. 20,000”, he acquiesced.

I gave the man an uninterested glance and then continued down the street.

After proceeding about five minutes without passing another vendor, Jacob turned to me and pointed out, “You realize that you turned down an offer for a full day bike rental of $3, right?”

“That’s not the point. We have to get a good deal!” I retorted.

We then started laughing and turned back down the street.

At the end of the day, during which we biked about 15km, we navigated our way back through rush hour traffic and returned to the vendor from whom we had rented.

“The bikes were good?” he asked.

“Yes, very.”

As we walked away I remarked that the price of the bike rentals — barely $3 — was by far the best purchase of the whole trip. They had carried us 15km in and around Ubud, through expanses of farmland, dozens of local temples, and finally, to the terraced rice fields at Tegalalang.

Jacob agreed.

Feeling reminiscent, I then posed the logical extension to what was originally meant as a rhetorical question — for each of the trips we had taken since the start of the year, what was the best money we had spent? I’ll clarify here that we settled on the term ‘best money’ to mean the greatest ratio of enjoyment to amount spent, with free things being excepted.

Here were my answers:

  • India: $30 on a cooking class in Jaipur.
  • Austin: $11 on barbecue in Austin with one of my mother’s childhood friends.
  • Japan: 2000 yen for entrance to the Chichu Art Museum with my dad and grandmother.
  • Chicago: $15 on a growler of beer purchased during a four minute Amtrak stop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado on the California Zephyr (a redemption sadly disappearing at the end of the year) between Chicago and Emeryville. Word quickly spread throughout the train and we made many friends over the next few hours.
  • Arizona/Utah: $300 on dinner at the Cliffside restaurant for my parents’ 25th anniversary

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