Another odd itinerary

25 June 2023

Another odd itinerary

Kim and I depart again today on another of my odd itineraries.  It evolved from a couple of requirements:

  • Using Korean Air expiring points which were best used for a flight from Okinawa to Seoul, and
  • Using a leftover Emirates ticket from nearly 3 years ago from Larnaca to Malta. That hop brought down the price of my flight from Auckland to Larnaca during the pandemic by over NZD200, simply by extending the ticket onwards to Malta.  Crazy!  That’s why people do skip-lagging.

With Okinawa, it made sense to go to Ishigaki as well.  Ishigaki, while just next to Taiwan wasn’t yet reconnected to Taipei after the pandemic (at the time of our bookings).

So, we decided to start our trip by flying to Hong Kong but the flight from Hong Kong to Ishigaki was cancelled a few months ago.  So, today we are flying to Tokyo Narita for a couple of days before heading to Ishigaki.

From Okinawa to Seoul, we wanted to continue to Europe.  Seoul is connected to Istanbul with up to 4 flights on which we can use staff standby tickets.

The trouble with that is that Istanbul is not connected to Larnaca for political reasons, so we threw in some short hops through Romania and Bulgaria to get to Larnaca.

The irony of that is that this time in Cyprus, we intend to explore the northern Turkish-occupied part.

Finishing in Malta, we managed to get reasonably cheap commercial tickets to Singapore where we can continue our journey back to New Zealand on staff tickets.

So, the overall routing is Auckland – Tokyo – Ishigaki – Okinawa – Seoul – Istanbul – Constanta – (overland) – Varna – Larnaca – Malta – Singapore – Auckland, for both of us.  I have a 10-day side trip to hometown Kuching from Singapore.

A dream departure

We took half a sleeping pill each last night but I had a light and interrupted night’s sleep, waking at 0500 for the ride to the airport.  Kim’s sister Jo dropped us off at 0615 and we were airside in 15 mins despite a large number of flights within 20 mins of our departure time of 0850.

It was a dream departure compared the nightmare I endured last couple of times. What made the difference?

  • Tokyo flights today were allowed to use the kiosks to check-in. My flights to Seoul and Singapore required manual check-ins due to document checks. Even today, the Hong Kong and Singapore flights had to be manually processed, probably due to the high number of onward connections to Europe and Asia.
  • Our Air New Zealand ticket into Japan didn’t contain a ticket out of Japan but we were returning out of Singapore. The kiosk asked us to confirm that we had an onward ticket out of Japan and accepted our response at face value without anyone checking it.
  • The flight wasn’t too full and we were issued boarding passes by the kiosk without having to wait at a standby desk till flight closing about 1h prior to departure.

We had about an hour in the lounge before proceeding to the departure gate where our paid upgrades to Business Class became available.

It was a pleasant and uneventful flight to Tokyo.  Earlier in the week, the flight to Tokyo turned back due to a broken windshield and a couple of days ago a flight to Chicago turned back due to a fuel discrepancy (either a faulty gauge/sensor or an actual leak I’m guessing).

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