First up, an apology. This website has been a bit neglected recently and that’s partly because (ironically) I have been travelling.
However it hasn’t exactly been fun trips: I have been flitting back and forth to Europe because of family dramas.
On the plus side, I did learn quite a lot about travelling to the other side of the world, having done it twice in as many months.
Firstly, all my UK friends who tried to warn me not to trust EasyJet with my connecting flights in and out of the UK were 100 percent right.
There was I boasting about how I had found a better, much cheaper way to get from Sydney to Scotland, by travelling to Paris via Vietnam Airlines.
Cheaper and better? Vietnam’s Premium Economy seats cost less than $200 more than Qantas cheapest economy tickets to London and back.
With flights from Paris to Glasgow costing little more than they’d cost from Heathrow, it was a no-brainer. But that didn’t take EasyJet into account.
First of all, I discovered they didn’t fly from Paris on Fridays, the day I was originally due to arrive. OK, I juggled some flights and it was all good.
Then the family dramas came along and I needed to get to and from Glasgow many weeks earlier than I had planned. It turned out Glasgow was not an option but Edinburgh was. It’s only 20 km farther from Dumfries, my ultimate destination, so it was no biggie. The brother-in-law met me from the airport and it was all good.
On the way back, having stopped over in Glasgow so I wouldn’t miss my flight, I got an email from EasyJet telling me that my flight from to Paris had been cancelled. Whoops! But that was OK, I could get a bus at 3am the next morning, get a flight from Edinburgh and still make the connecting flight to Hanoi.
Bleary-eyed on the bus the next day, I checked my phone and the same email popped up. Except it wasn’t the same – they had also cancelled the Edinburgh flight.
So there I am, panicking, at 5am on a freezing Edinburgh morning, calling my wife (who happened to be on a train on her way back from Katoomba) and asking her to call Flight Centre in Sydney.
Meanwhile, just in case, I called the Flight Centre emergency line. I soon had two Flight Centre operatives trying to get me home, playing duelling banjos with their computer terminals (sorry about that, folks!).
OK, there was an Air France flight to Paris but they had just bumped the fare from $250 to $1400 or thereabouts, one way, economy and anyway, it wouldn’t get in on time.
Plan B emerged. I would fly to Heathrow, stay overnight in a hotel there and catch the midday flight to Hanoi the next day. Between EasyJet and my travel insurance, the cost would be minimised, although I did lose a day in Hanoi and a trip to Sapa.
So what prompted me to fly Vietnam Airlines via Paris. My good friend and colleague Will Davies runs World War I battlefield tours to France and he said if I was ever going over there I should fly via Vietnam and use Paris as my hub.
It just so happened that I had scored a hike in Northern Provence so this seemed a smart move. Then life intervened and I needed to get to the UK in a hurry – a couple of times – and it all made sense.
All except for EasyJet, that is. So that’s my excuse for not attending to this website as diligently as I should.
But it’s OK. I’m back in the saddle and it all gets better from here on in. And hey, you can’t edit a website for “seasoned travellers” without having had some salt rubbed in your wounds.
