John Walton, aviation journalist, columnist and travel writer | 44john.com: the blog

Doing it right: a one way trip from London to New Zealand via SF, LA and Fiji

So the most frequent question I'm getting at the moment is: "what do you do that means you can afford to do all this travelling?"

Well, the answer is this: by day I'm a project manager with a specialty in economics, the environment and international relations, which basically means that I organise teams of people into doing really awesome and important things. (If you know someone in NZ who's looking, by the way, I'm still available!)

By night, though, I'm a travel geek who's been travelling since he was eight weeks old, and I know my way around the international airline system. Plus, I absolutely love to explore bits of the world that I've not visited before.

Which led me to New Zealand, where I am right now. I visited here for three weeks in January-February 2010, and I had such a fantastic time that I looked into the various ways that I could come back here for a longer explore. Turns out that, since I'm still under thirty (just!), I was eligible for the Working Holiday Program. I chose the two-year visa, which gives me a 23-month stay in NZ from the day I entered, of which I can work for 12 months. If I want to stay longer, I need to go through the normal work permit and/or residency process.

While the 12-month visa doesn't need a medical (you apply and that's it), the 23-month visa does, which cost me a couple of hundred pounds for X-rays (to show no TB), a set of bloods and a rather perfunctory medical examination. Once you have the medical all sorted, you send it off to the nearest Embassy/High Commission and apply for the visa itself. All in all, it took about four weeks. So then I started saving my pennies like whoa.

I then looked into flights, which is always an issue when flying one-way -- tickets tend to be more than half as much as a return. Through my knowledge of how to get to NZ and the reputations of various airlines as inexpensive, plus my British Airways Executive Club mileage account, I found a great route:

LHR-SFO
LAX-NAN
NAN-AKL

For non-geeks, that's:

London to San Francisco
Los Angeles to Nadi, in Fiji
Nadi to Auckland

The London to SF leg cost me GBP 250 in taxes alone, plus 50,000 BA miles to fly Club World (BA's business class), the drive from San Francisco to LA cost me about GBP 150 for car and fuel, and the LA to Auckland flight in total cost me USD 600 on Air Pacific (the national airline of Fiji) in economy. Not bad for literally the whole way round the world: 12,559 miles.

Of course, I realised that if I rang up the Air Pacific office in Fiji (I used Skype, so it was pennies) to book, I could get a free stopover in Fiji. So, rather than spending 11 hours on a plane overnight to Nadi, a few hours in an airport, then another 3 to Auckland, I chilled out in Fiji for four days. Good times.

I also made arrangements to spend ten days in SF with friends, since I hadn't been there since I was nine and, well, it's rather a nice place. So I did that, booked a very reasonable rate at the Radisson in Fiji (which pushed my hotel points account with Radisson over 100,000 points, which equals 18,000 miles if I transfer it to an airline programme), and flew off!

So, to recap:

London to SF in business:

A week in SF and a drive down the gorgeous Highway 1 to LA:

A flight to Fiji:

Five days and four nights in Fiji:

...and a flight to Auckland!

And that's what I did! On my list of things to blog about is how to get to NZ cheaply...consider this a taster.

Food: Steak at Gaucho, Piccadilly, London

For my [REDACTED] birthday, Alex & Jag and Audree & Steve and I went to Gaucho at Piccadilly. Which is actually a fair way up Regent Street, if you're trying to find it. (The Apple fan in me suggests that this would make an excellent stop to or from buying a new iThing.)

After some rather delicious cocktails downstairs, we headed up to the table. Those of you who have been to Gaucho will recall its Tasteful Cow theme, and we had a great table in the corner...and a smoking hot Irish waiter. I have a sneaky suspicion that they choose their staff based on hotness.

Since it was my first trip to Gaucho, Alex and I shared the sampler (so did Aud & Steve, and Jag had his own steak). It was a lot of meat, too much by the end of it, but it was absolutely brilliant. Four steaks, some flavoursome, some buttery, some melting, some meaty and textured. So good. And the humitas -- which you must try if you go to Gaucho -- were divine too.

The wine -- a Perdriel malbec, because hey, Argentina, you guys, Argentina -- was absolutely stunning. It was almost too big, but then I combined it with some more steak (because, you know, there was enough there) and it just matched perfectly.

All in all, a fantastic place for great steak. Would go back again.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus

I wish I'd had more time in Salzburg, and I will certainly return for a week sometime and really explore its musical heritage. (As opposed to its musicals heritage, which is entirely different. The hills, as they say, are indeed alive.) I'd particularly love to visit it at Festival time, although I'm usually singing at a different festival that time of year.

Mozart would be 253 today. That's only slightly older than Cher.

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Tourists under Untersberg, Salzburg

One of the odd things about Salzburg is that Austrians don't really do The Sound of Music. Clearly, Salzburgers do, because there is a fair deal of money in it, but the film itself is fairly unknown in Germany and Austria, certainly compared with its ubiquity in the English-speaking world. It's quite useful, really, because it means that Salzburg has a purpose other than the hills being alive with, et cetera, and that one can dork out with other lonely goatherds (yodel-eh-ee, and so on) in the morning and do some serious Mozart-geeking in the afternoon.

This is Salzburg's iconic peak, the Untersberg, with Salzburg's iconic tourist swarm below.

Helsinki Harbour

When I got back to Helsinki from Kuopio and Rovaniemi on Easter morning, I splurged on a room at the Scandic Grand Marina. It's a fantastic place in a beautiful old brick customs building right on the harbour, which was more than a little icy in April -- in the same way that a Coke in the American South in summer is served with more than a little ice in it. Helsinki still has frequent ferries to Tallinn, Stockholm and points west across the Baltic, and it was cool to watch the enormous ships loom out of the fog and the darkness before nipping downstairs to the hotel's sauna.

Machynlleth, Wales

Machynlleth is in the middle of nowhere, to the south of Snowdonia National Park, amid mountains and mist and sheep in north Wales. It's an incredibly beautiful area, and Machynlleth -- pronounced not machine-leth but mukh-un-tleth -- is pretty too. There's a fab deli, too for the makings of a picnic, perfect for mid-May.

Norwegian fjord, sans fjord

At some point, I imagine, there was water here. There was certainly a glacier at some point -- my GCSE Geography A grade and my geographer father helped me figure that out. But now, it's grass, northeast of Bergen, and it's beautiful.

Infinite tube, London

Ah, the sight of much of my life in London: the Central Line. Normally deep, crowded, and late, I'm surprised that I ever got a picture of it this deserted, even out west where I used to live.

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Église catholique de S. Pierre-le-jeune, Strasbourg

For those of you who don't parle français, that's the Catholic church of St Peter the younger -- and, interestingly, the "younger" part refers not to a younger St Peter, of whom there were many, but to the fact that it is the younger of the two Sts Peter in Strasbourg. Or at least so Judith, my Strasbourgeois friend, tells me, and she's French, so she should know.

The church was beautiful in the spring light, with its pale stone and the flowers and the bright green new growth of the tree nearby, just beautiful.

Airbus sunset

On my way back from an Easter long weekend in Finland, the sunset over northern Europe was incredibly beautiful -- a fitting end to what was a very beautiful (if chilly) holiday. I do love the enormous skies that you get looking out of a plane, and the way that a sunset will stretch out for hours if you travel westwards.