Flying Domestically Within Australia

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Tara

Given that Australia is so large and that bird species are spread out over the entire country, most people will need to use domestic flights at some point. These can sometimes be purchased at a good rate if you keep an eye on the sales on Qantas, Jetstar & Virgin’s websites. You can get a pretty good snapshot of what’s available on Webjet. Take for example our first flight from Brisbane to Perth. Bear in mind that some fares do not allow a checked bag, you have to pay extra for this and that carry-on bags are limited to 7kg and by size.

If you need to get from a foreign country to Australia, please see my guide on redeeming awards to Australia. I also have a guide to Perth as a gateway city.

Neither Star Alliance nor Skyteam have a partner in Australia, but luckily anyone who is in a program from the One World Alliance has some good options. Most people will use either American Airlines or British Airways Avios or Qantas points.

AMERICAN AADVANTAGE

Using AAdvantage is very easy as flights can be booked online and only cost 10,000 miles for a one way award that allows a checked bag.

This search has produced 3 non-stop flights followed by several connections for 10,000 miles. As you can see, the blue tab for business/first class awards is lit up so you could also chose a premium cabin for 17.5k miles. Personally, for a 5.5 hour daytime flight, I would save my miles for something else but the option is available for those who wish it.

Once you choose a flight, log in with your account, you will see that there are taxes of $14.60 in addition to the miles. If you have been taking advantage of the Citibank American AAdvantage credit card bonuses which range from 40,000 – 100,000 miles, you can see that adds up to lots of free flights within Australia!

BRITISH AIRWAYS AVIOS

Since Avios redemptions are distance based, they may or may not be the better option. If the distance is more than 2000 miles, then AAdvantage would be cheaper as you can see by the chart below.

First you need to know the distance between origin and destination for each leg. I use the Great Circle Mapper. The non-stop flight is 2246 miles which means it costs 12,500 Avios. Since each segment of an Avios award is charged separately, if you connect in Sydney, you would be charged 4500 Avios for the first segment and 12,500 for the 2nd segment which isn’t a great deal. If you were going simply from Brisbane to Sydney, 4500 Avios is a much better deal than paying 10,000 AAdvantage miles!

QANTAS

Qantas points are zone based and you can get the mileage required from their calculator.

VIRGIN VELOCITY

If you are from Australia, you probably have points in Virgin’s Velocity program which are very easy to redeem online. You can choose to use your points to cover the taxes or pay the taxes in cash and spend fewer points.

Just Returned From Birding In The Aussie Outback

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Tara

People often ask me why I travel so far abroad to see wild birds, especially parrots when I have so many in the wonderful country I live in – Australia. Actually this trip has been several years in the making and I had been working on itineraries but it always got pushed to one side because I had so many mileage-earning opportunities that enabled the exotic trips overseas. I would normally never be able to afford such travel if I hadn’t been able to churn a few credit cards and shift spending to maximize mileage earning. I also got involved in some insanely lucrative promos such as US Airway’s Grand Slam, Daily Getaways, various Facebook promos, survey taking and checking into hotels via Foursquare. The last few years have been a golden era for those who were savvy enough to take advantage of it! So with lots of miles on hand, we concentrated on overseas travel, even flying business class in some cases!

But the one thing I had to face is that my husband and I are not spring chickens and we are not getting any younger. Traveling in the Aussie Outback involves huge distances and is very challenging. I knew we couldn’t put it off much longer, even though we only had to burn 10,000 AA miles for each one way sector on Qantas and I booked the Virgin Australia flight from Hobart to Brisbane during a 15% off sale.

During the last month, I drove over 8000 kilometers in cars rented from Hertz, Bargain Car Hire and Thrifty! The parrots have been amazing, we saw 37 species just on this trip, though I have seen more Aussie parrot species in my life since some are also found in West Papua and some are found in my own back yard! In the chart below, the boldface represents a species I have seen in my life, the grey shaded boxes represent parrots I saw on this trip within the last month.

Locations of Australian Parrots

Even though Parrots were the primary focus of the trip, I knew that these locations would also be home to other beautiful birds such as Fairy-wrens, Bowerbirds, Robins, Honey-eaters, and more!

The good news is that Australia is logistically a very easy country to travel in. It’s safe, people speak English, credit cards are widely accepted and you can easily get your own rental car. The AUD has gone down against the USD, GBP, EUR over the last few months so it costs less than it used to if you are coming from overseas. Over the next few weeks, I will be showing you more of the birds we saw, where we stayed and how I organized the flights, accommodation and rental cars so that you too can have your own Aussie Outback adventure!

A Rocky Road To Colombo (CMB) That Ends With A Shopping Spree & Lounge

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Tara

Sadly our last day in Sri Lanka had arrived and it was time to start heading home. After a lazy morning of last chance birding from our balcony, we paid the bill and went down the road a few metres to wait for the bus to Kalawana. Since it was a Sunday, there were fewer buses and we waited almost an hour but a bus finally did show up. The trip to Kalawana was around an hour with stops and we easily found a bus for the next leg of the journey to Matugama. The road was in terrible condition with apparent rock slides and bulldozers everywhere so this relatively short leg (40km) actually took over an hour.

I love how this bin kind of looks like a bird!

In Matugama we had an easier task because there were a lot more choices to Colombo. I was actually more interested in a non-stop trip than the AC so we chose this bus hoping for a better experience.

It was pretty good and the man behind us spoke English so we chatted a while but he got out before we did. We took the road along the seaside to Colombo.

I wasn’t sure where to jump off the bus and no one else spoke English so we stayed on to the end. It was around 3pm and we hadn’t had lunch so were pretty hungry. I remembered the name of a shopping centre – the Dutch Hospital so we grabbed a rickshaw and asked to be dropped there. He actually dropped us in front of the adjacent TGI Fridays and we were both in need of a clean toilet so we went in and ended up having a late lunch there.

After stuffing ourselves, we walked next door to the Dutch Hospital (it used to be a hospital but was now a trendy shopping centre) to have a look around. There were several boutiques and a snall branch of Odel, a local department store. I ended up buying a green kaftan top.

There were some newlyweds taking photos outside. It’s interesting to see the different styles of wedding clothes!

I wanted to buy some Sri Lankan art, preferably with birds so I asked some locals and was directed to Laksala, a huge craft shop a few blocks away.

I bought a few batiks since they were easily packed in our carry-ons, then we went out and got a rickshaw to the airport bus stand. It was still a bit early but we didn’t have anything else to do, at least not anything we could do while shlepping all our stuff around! You get a choice of AC or regular bus and we had plenty of rupees left over so went AC as it was still pretty hot and humid.

It took well over an hour to get to the airport………….and this was a Sunday evening! When we arrived, we discovered that we would have to wait about 3 hours until the Singapore Airlines staff arrived for check in. Ina sat with the bags while I scouted the shops for something worth blowing our last few rupees on. It was nice to see all the Christmas decorations!

Sand paintings were tempting but I was afraid they wouldn’t allow them in Australia.

T-shirts were too small.

Ah yes! Here we go, bird batiks! I snapped up a couple and liked them so much I not only finished my rupees, I had to top it off with Visa.

The waiting area was poorly placed where you couldn’t see the board where flights open for check in were displayed. The seats were really uncomfortable and I was desperate to get past the formalities and go to the business class lounge since we had J tickets on SQ.

Not the best lounge in the world but they did have food, drinks and internet! I was pretty sad to leave Sri Lanka as we had had a great time and seen some amazing birds but with so many options especially with One World, I am sure we will be back some day!

Why Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Tara

I stumbled across this mini-doco from Weird Science on YouTube and found it fascinating! I’ll be looking a lot closer the next time I see a Woodpecker on one of my trips!

Multimodal Transport Search: Rome2Rio

Posted on March 16, 2014 by Tara

I have already been blogging about how to use airline miles to make your eco-tourism travel dreams come true. But what do you do when the destination you want is far away from the main gateway airport? What if you don’t have the right kind of miles to get there? Is a bus REALLY the cheapest option?

Enter ROME2RIO!

One the home page, you can enter any two destinations.

In this example, we are going to say that we are using Star Alliance miles to visit Brazil for birding. Our final destination is the Pantanal to see the stunning Hyacinth Macaws and other birds. We will be traveling in 2015 and booking the trip in mid 2014 and TAM will have left Star Alliance to join One World.

There are no Star Alliance options to get to Cuiaba so we can join our Pantanal tour, we need to spend money. So how do we determine the best option? Enter Sao Paulo & Cuiaba, then put in your date in the Rome2Rio search engine. We get a screen that looks like this.

We have 4 options. You can click on any option to get further details.

Make your choice between the non-stop or the somewhat cheaper one-stop. Either way you are arriving in Cuiaba at an inconvenient midnight-ish hour. You can then click on the flight of your choice to be directed to their website to book it.

Beware the prices are not always accurate on Rome2Rio but at least you can click over to the airline’s website to compare.

The main value I see in the site is comparing different modes of transport so you can make a decision if a bus is cheaper than a flight and if the difference in price is worth the longer time it would take. For example, option 1 on our Rome2Rio search query gives a total time estimate of 5 hours 17 minutes. The different components of the trip: metro, plane, taxi individually add up to 2 hours 47 minutes so the program is also allowing for time spent checking in, going through security & retrieving checked bags.

Now look at the bus option on #4 and the car option on #5. You are going from city centre to city centre so they only give the bus travel time.

The bus will save you around $100 per person but will take you 20 hours longer to get to Cuiaba. Depending on how much time you have, this may or may not be worth it to you.

The car option only gives the estimated cost of fuel and driving time. You need to add the cost of a rental car on to this. Then you need to work out the per person cost, compare the dollar amount to the loss of time vs flying you would have if you choose to drive. If you are not returning to Sao Paulo by car, you would also have to add the drop off fee which in Brazil can be pretty bad!

Rome2Rio is a very clever tool which can give you a lot of information you need in making decisions about what mode of transport you will take once your mileage-booked flight deposits you at the the gateway airport. You can learn more about this enterprise and their carbon offsetting program on their “About” page. Scroll down for 2 very interesting videos which explain more uses of the tool.

Alexandrine Parakeet (Psittacula eupatria)

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Tara

The Alexandrine Parakeet or Alexandrian Parrot (Psittacula eupatria) is a member of the psittaciformes order and of the Psittaculidae family. The species is named after Alexander the Great, who is credited (blamed) with the exporting of numerous specimens of this bird from Punjab into various European and Mediterranean countries and regions, where they were considered prized possessions for the nobles and royalty.

The Alexandrine Parakeet is the largest species of all Parakeet (small Parrot with long tail) species, thus often being the largest Parrot in their native range. This species measures 58 cm (23 in) in total length with a wing length averaging 18.9–21.5 cm (7.5–8.5 in) and a tail length of 21.5–35.5 cm (8.5–14.0 in).

The following sub-species, many of them allopatric are recognised based on geographical distribution:

Psittacula eupatria eupatria, Nominate Alexandrine Parakeet – East India to Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh in the South, Sri Lanka.
Psittacula eupatria avensis, Indo-Burmese Alexandrine Parakeet – Northeast India to Amherst in Myanmar
Psittacula eupatria magnirostris, Andaman Islands’ Alexandrine Parakeet – Andaman Islands
Psittacula eupatria nipalensis, Nepalese Alexandrine Parakeet – Eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan, North and central India, Nepal, Bhutan to Assam in Northeast India.
Psittacula eupatria siamensis, Laos’ or Siamese Alexandrine Parakeet – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, north and east Thailand

Of these, I have seen the nominate and the Nepalese subspecies.

Because they have such a large range, you can plan birding trips to Central and South-east Asia and have a good chance to spot them. I have seen them in Chitwan National Park, Nepal & Kithulgala & Sinharaja in Sri Lanka.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PARROT

Wikipedia

World Parrot Trust

Birdlife

VIDEO

It’s surprisingly hard to find videos of these parrots on Youtube as they are so popular as pets. At least I found one from Sri Lanka!

Lazy Birding From Rock View Motel Balcony, Sinharaja

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Tara

After a hard day’s work walking uphill to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve, what could be better than a lazy afternoon kicking back with a cold drink and watching Alexandrine Parakeets and other birds fly past? And when bird activity dies down, there were still farmers at work and beautiful green fields. For some reason, it was very hazy. This will be a lazy pictorial post of my lazy afternoon and the following morning trying to get the best photos I could.

Using Flightstats To Find Availability

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Tara

There are some airlines that allow you to easily search award availability on partners such as United, American, ANA, Qantas…………….but sometimes not all partners can be searched, especially partners that are not in the airline’s main alliance. A good example of this is Air Tahiti Nui. You can book their flights with AA miles but you can’t see their availability on AA’s website or any other One World partner’s website since they aren’t a member of One World. In some cases you can use Flightstats to see award availability. On the Flights tab, click on “Availability”.

For this example, business class is not available (I = 0) but there are 7 seats in economy (W = 7).

Sinharaja Forest Reserve, Sri Lanka

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Tara

Located in south-west Sri Lanka, Sinharaja is the country’s last viable area of primary tropical rainforest. More than 60% of the trees are endemic and many of them are considered rare. There is much endemic wildlife, especially birds, but the reserve is also home to over 50% of Sri Lanka’s endemic species of mammals and butterflies, as well as many kinds of insects, reptiles and rare amphibians. You know when it’s been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO it has to be something special……………….and it is!

GETTING THERE

Use your miles for a Central Asia award ticket to Colombo. From there, you can get a taxi to your accommodation near Kudawa or take a bus to Matugama, then change to a Kalawana bus and get a taxi/rickshaw from there to your accommodation. Obviously there is a trade-off between comfort & convenience and cost.

WHERE TO STAY

Forget about points and try to get into the closest eco-lodge to the park you can get, it will save you the trouble of hiring rickshaws every time you want to go into the park. Don’t expect the Marriott, these are simple lodges that cater to birders and serve their purpose well.

Martin’s Lodge – Yes it really is simple but Martin, the owner is a lovely guy and teh views are amazing! They don’t have a website but more information is here and Trip Advisor reviews here. Do not trust local travel agents who tell you it is full and try to steer you to someplace more expensive. You need to call Martin to get an accurate answer if he can book you in or not. 045 568 1864 He doesn’t have email.

Blue Magpie Lodge – The second closest lodge to the park. I didn’t get a look at it but I met a lady who was staying there and she said it was great! Trip Advisor reviews.

Rock View Motel – About 20 minutes away by auto-rickshaw but add a whole different habitat to your birding with the amazing views over the valley! Trip Advisor reviews

Rainforest Edge – Looks stunning but was way out of our budget. This is the poshest lodge in the area. Trip Advisor reviews.

HOW TO VISIT THE RESERVE

You can walk from Martin’s or Blue Magpie, otherwise you will need an auto rickshaw to drop you and arrange to pick you up. Once you arrive, you need to buy your ticket and pay for a mandatory guide. The guides are very good and know the local birds and animals well. You can’t request a guide, they are assigned by rota. If you don’t have leech socks, you can buy some here, they also sell snacks, cold drinks, postcards & books. This is our guide, his name is Raushan (probably spelled it wrong) and he was very good with bird identification.

Once you have your ticket, your guide will walk with you up the hill pointing out whatever birds and animals he sees along the way. When you reach the top, another official will check your ticket and you can enter the main trail of the reserve.

THE BIRDS

Sinharaja boasts an amazing bird list including many endemics. We saw quite a few in our one day visit: Sri Lanka Junglefowl, Green Imperial Pigeon, Spotted Dove, Sri Lanka Green Pigeon, Emerald Dove, Sri Lanka Wood Pigeon, Layard’s Parakeet, Red-faced Malkoha, Malabar Trogon, Blue-tailed Bee-eater, Sri Lanka Grey Hornbill, Yellow-fronted Barbet, Crimson-fronted Barbet, Lesser Yellownape, Orange Minivet, Sri Lanka Drongo, White-bellied Drongo, Sri Lanka Blue Magpie, Black-capped Bulbul, Red-vented Bulbul, Orange-billed Babbler, Yellow-billed Babbler, Oriental White-eye, Sri Lanka Hill Myna, Lesser Hill Myna, Spot-winged Thrush, Legge’s Flowerpecker, Purple-rumped Sunbird

I couldn’t get a good shot of the Blue Magpie as he stayed well within the dense foliage and the Layard’s Parakeet was just a fleeting glimpse of one darting overhead. Here’s a few of my better shots (LOL).

Malabar Trogon was the best bird I got a photo of.

We did our best to lure the Blue Magpie out but he just wasn’t having it!

OTHER ANIMALS

I forget what lizards these are.

Giant Squirrel

Purple-faced Langur

Pitcher Plants

Sri Lanka Blue Magpie (Urocissa ornata)

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Tara

The Sri Lanka Blue Magpie or Ceylon Magpie (Urocissa ornata) is a member of the crow family living in the hill forests of Sri Lanka, where it is endemic. In Sri Lanka, this bird is known as Kehibella (කැහිබෙල්ලා) in Sinhala Language.

My attempt to photograph this stunning bird resulted in a lot of leaves so we will have to use this Wikipedia shot.

They have a restricted range in south-central Sri Lanka. Sinharaja is considered to be the best place to see them. An award to Central Asia can get you to Colombo, then take a taxi or the bus to Kalawana then to Kudawa in Sinharaja. See the red dot for location.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS BIRD

Wikipedia

Birdlife

Ceylon Bird Club

Miles To The Wild

Create unforgettable eco-tourism and birding adventures using miles & points!

Flying Domestically Within Australia

Just Returned From Birding In The Aussie Outback

A Rocky Road To Colombo (CMB) That Ends With A Shopping Spree & Lounge

Why Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches

Multimodal Transport Search: Rome2Rio

Enter ROME2RIO!

Alexandrine Parakeet (Psittacula eupatria)

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PARROT

VIDEO

Lazy Birding From Rock View Motel Balcony, Sinharaja

Using Flightstats To Find Availability

Sinharaja Forest Reserve, Sri Lanka

GETTING THERE

WHERE TO STAY

THE BIRDS

OTHER ANIMALS

Sri Lanka Blue Magpie (Urocissa ornata)

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS BIRD

VIDEO