Amused by Rick

I’m taking a trip to China pretty soon, and I thought I’d jot down a braindump of everything I’ve been considering in preparation and, hopefully, this could be a useful guide for someone else.

• Use a site-scraper. Kayak.com is a great travel site scraper. It will return results from travel sites (like Orbitz) and airline/hotel direct websites, plus they have neat Ajax tools to refine your results. Last plug, you can sign up for a newsletter that will show fare history along your favorite routes.
• As an entertaining exercise in futility, see what directions Google Maps lays out. Traveling on foot to Ireland, Josh pointed out that step 33 would be a challenge. Interesting that you are routed through France and the UK before stepping foot on your final destination.
• Read about the plane you will fly in. Wikipedia has a number of great articles on the various passenger aircraft models in commercial aviation today, such as the Boeing 777. You can read up on the history of a model before you fly, including its chronology of incidents. This might seem trivial, but this plane crashed the week after I took the exact same tour in the Mexican interior — here’s the story.
• Read about the Airline. Wikipedia also covers each airline very well, such as this Korean Air article. I had forgotten that it was a Korean Air flight that got shot down by a Soviet aircraft in the 80’s. Speaking of the USSR, Aeroflot has had 127 accidents since 1953. No thanks.
• Check out the details on your seat assignment before you sit in it. Seatguru.com will show you the seat layout of each carriers aircraft fleet, the seat configuration is different for each one and in some cases there are seats you specifically want to avoid. Seatguru will also tell you what amenities are available on each airline, like personal television sets.
• Look for blog entries relating to your trip before you go. Google has a blog search engine, probably old news to some, but it is useful to research other’s travel experiences specific to, say, an airline or hotel you are planning on booking a trip with. A search for Kahana Sunset, an obscure destination in Maui off the beaten path of megalithic hotels, reveals personal photo albums, vacation recaps and old press releases related to the resort. Another search for China Eastern Airlines brings up a multitude of tips and experiences flying with that company.
• Sign up for the Loyalty program and accrue points, you can still use them elsewhere. If you are flying with a carrier that isn’t part of your mileage program you can use Points.com to transfer miles between programs. For example, that 7,000 mile Air Madagascar credit to fly to Sri Lanka will do you no good towards a free flight from LAX to Hawaii, but you can transfer a portion of the miles to Hawaiian Air .. the only thing it will cost you is a bad exchange rate, but for miles you couldn’t use anyway, what’s the difference?
• Skip the foreign exchange cash window, use your ATM card instead. The exchange rates at airport cash windows are terrible, you get institutional rates when you withdraw cash from a foreign ATM. Check with your bank before you go, they might have a “no fee” list of participating banks in the country you are going to. With Bank of America, for instance, you can withdraw fee-free from Barclay’s in the UK (here’s a full list of participating banks with BofA).
• Call your Bank(s) before you travel abroad and tell them what you are doing so that your transactions won’t be automatically declined. A café-half-caf-double-soy-latte-175-degrees in Los Angeles on Monday, a double order of Sake Sushi and Kirin in Okinawa on Tuesday… flips the automatic fraud detectors and as a result, declines your purchase. Don’t be caught in Japan (or anywhere else) convincing your bank that you really are about to get cleaved by an angry Sushi Chef. If you call ahead, these automatic safeguards will be removed.
• Check the Visa requirements. The US State Department outlines this pretty well on their website. For some countries you get an automatic visa as a US citizen but others require an application. South Korea has an amusing requirement: HIV test required for persons working as entertainers and staying longer than 90 days. So that’s why U2 doesn’t tour there…
• Check out the free travel guides at Wikitravel. 5 hour layover in Memphis? No problem! Check out the National Civil Rights Museum or take photos of people that still think Elvis is Alive. Stuck in Munich? Don’t miss the BMW museum!!
• Plan for boredom. International flights are long, bring something to eat through the time. Melatonin. Nintendo DS. Personal DVD Player. A years subscription to Car & Driver. A laptop. Playing cards. A GPS device is always fun on a plane. MP3 player (but not an ipod, ipods suck).
• Bring your own food. If you’re finicky like me, bring a sandwich and some chips that you’ll know you will like rather than the microwaved fare they serve on an airplane. If you’re on a foreign airline, chances are they will serve comfort food indigenous to the operating country — so no Air India flight meals for me, ever.
• Pack light if the exchange rate is favorable. If you can get items for 50 cents on the dollar, don’t bring everything you need if you think you’ll have time to do some shopping. Get some new stuff.
• Pack a smaller suitcase for the trip back. For gifts and trinkets.
• But bring all your own toiletry. I heard on NPR that the Chinese favor tea-flavored toothpaste, gross. For those with sensitive stomachs, like me, heartburn and other digestion-related medicines can be a godsend. Papaya enzymes are a natural way to help prevent indigestion when you’ve eaten a little too much. They also sell travel sized fiber packets so that you don’t have to bring a big tube of Metamucil with you. Ok enough details, you get the point.
• Outlet Converter. For those countries that have funny-looking power couplings.
• You don’t need a power converter. Most likely. All the things you want to plug in, such as latop/phone/accessory rechargers already have a power converter built into them. Beauty accessories, like curling irons & hair dryers might need them. The hard and fast way to tell is if there is a DC power converter hooked up to the device, a little black box that has the plug (and most devices are DC powered anyway). Laptops, for sure, don’t need one.
• Bring/Use a Money Belt if you’re going into crowded, touristy areas. It’s perhaps the best defense against a pickpocket, it goes on underneath your clothes in a zippered pouch. You might look silly digging into it, but a pickpocket will have to stick his hands down your pants to steal your cash.. I am now imagining certain readers of this blog stuffing $100 bills down their pants on purpose…
• Put your snail mail on hold while you’re away. You can even do this online. When you get back you can pick up the entire batch at once.
• Sign up for as many electronic bills as you can so that you can pay them while abroad. Or use auto-pay features on your banking website. Service providers will not care that you were climbing the steps of enlightenment in Tibet.
• Make several copies of your most valuable documents, such as your Passport, Driver License, credit cards, Airline tickets, travel itineraries and travel visas. Staple them all together as a set. Leave one at home, leave one with your spouse/friend in your home country, in your checked luggage, in your daybag, in your hotel and send a copy off to your destination ahead of time. Make sure to get both sides of the credit card, if it gets stolen abroad it could be very difficult obtaining the right phone number to call. Banks, by the way, will accept an international collect call for customer inquiries.
• Check your health insurance coverage before you go. You are probably covered in some way, but surely not as good as you are in your home country. For example, here are the guidelines for Blue Cross of Florida. If you’re going to get behind the wheel, check out your auto insurance and credit card deductible waiver too.
• Make sure you have adequate life insurance for your family. Sore subject. Fool.com covers this very well in their Insurance Center.
• Read up on the local faux pas before you go. Etiquitte in Asia and the Middle East is particularly vexing. I could get used to living in Korea, from wikipedia: In restaurants and bars, pouring one’s own drink is a faux pas. Keep an eye on your neighbors’ glasses and fill them if they are empty; they will do the same.
• Bring a gift if you’re visiting someone. A reminder from home is always appropriate, even simple things, like Diet Coke (it tastes different everywhere), or homemade cookies.
• Check your passport for renewal. New laws in effect this year require one when leaving the country, there is a massive backlog at the State Department as a result; the best way to make sure it happens right away is to go there yourself and wait in line. If you’re not traveling within 6 months, just mail it in, but pay for the expedited service so that you can track your passport as it gets processed (you can track your passport without the expedited service, but they won’t send it back to you with a trackable delivery method and any phone calls requesting status will be in futility since you didn’t opt for the faster service. FWIW).
• Plan for jet lag. TimeAndDate.com is a great resource for local time and weather worldwide. Try to adjust to your new time zone a few days ahead of time by going to sleep or waking up a bit earlier than usual.
• Plan for weather. Parka or flip-flops, obvious, but you can get burned bad if you don’t. TimeAndDate.com has weather info conveniently on their time pages.
• Your GSM mobile phone will most likely work abroad. But it will cost you a small fortune to use casually. T-Mobile, for example, charges $2.99 per minute in China. You might be better off buying a temporary phone at your destination with prepaid minutes. There are a number of technicalities you should research if you intend on bringing your phone with you, I would start by calling your customer service line about international coverage. Sprint phones will not work abroad.
• Bring a wordless travel book. It might be priceless, especially in countries that are not compatible with your language (like, say, a yank in Vietnam).
• Register with the local US Embassy or Consulate through the State Departments website. This will establish your whereabouts in case of an emergency and registers persons to contact if something goes wrong. Sore subject, but a good exercise for the cautious types. Here’s a list of US Embassies and Consulates. Ever wonder what happens if you are in an emergency overseas? Here is the State Departments FAQ.

and finally.

• Read the guidelines from the US State Department on for A Safe Trip Abroad. Arguable better than my own. Arguably.