An introduction to my New Zealand Arrival

26 December, 2008

A four in the morning awakening to 12 inches of fresh snow and a rough drive to the airport were to be an indication to how my day was to go. Upon arrival at the airport, I realized that my caffeine fetish and addiction took precedence over my flight itinerary and travel documentation. Translation: I set my packet of travel documents down to pick up my travel mug and neglected to re-acquire the documents. My wonderful parents risked a quick trip home and back on the unplowed highways for the sake of arming me with everything that I needed to make this trip. I was able to board in a nick of time, the last passenger to sit before the doors closed. Thus starts my journey to New Zealand.

It was to be an unpleasant trip the entire way. We were slow and late to Seattle but I was able to catch my connecting flight to San Francisco without incidence. The flight to San Fran was also slow and late to arrive. Upon arrival I discovered that my flight to Los Angeles was canceled and my tickets to New Zealand were canceled. Evidently Air New Zealand switched the Pacific crossing flight to a smaller airliner and dumped all of the excess people for a next day flight.

Needless to say that was stressful. I was able to convince my United Airlines carrier to L.A to get me on board an American Airlines flight and by harassing the nice people with Air New Zealand, I was able to get re instated on that evenings flight to New Zealand. I just about missed my new connection to L.A. due to a virtual strip search by the TSA in San Fran. They did give me the opportunity to choose the gloves used to search me. Pink or Blue. I picked blue. Very considerate of them, or so I thought. I had to argue to keep my hiking boots…evidently they detected gun powder residue and thought I might be a terrorist? My bags were searched twice and I had a hell of a time re-packing things to fit. But I got on board in a nick of time feeling thankful that I wasn’t subjected to a cavity search.

L.A. airport was its typical jungle of bustle, rude people and mayhem. Instead of riding the bus to the international terminal, I opted to hoof it and did the ¾ mile walk with luggage in record time beating the bus. From there on out it was smooth sailing. The flight from L.A. was uneventful. All said and done, the 14 hour flight wasn’t too unpleasant. I had good company from a young German couple to occupy my time in between the occasional nap and games of Tetris on the interactive in flight console. We had tolerable food and the flight crew were excruciatingly polite. I still don’t want to do it again though. I am not looking forward to my flight home.

28 December, 2008

My arrival in Auckland was fairly un-eventful. Note the date. Crossing the international date line discomboobles the inner time clock. It took a bit of time to get the hang of the fact that today is tomorrow and yesterday is today as far as the calendar was concerned. Tis a 20 hr time difference. Customs was uneventful. Kat met me at the airport. We spent the day recovering…me from my flight and her from 2 months of tramping about the country on holiday. I didn’t even bother digging my camera out for my time in Auckland. Auckland is a city worth exploring and hopefully I will get the time to at a later date. About the only thing worth mentioning is that the down town city proper is fairly modern, highly Americanized and full of an amazingly young population. The traffic was light and food was affordable, very diverse and readily available. The temperature stayed between 70 and 75 degrees from dawn to dawn. Very nice and much preferable to th e -10 degrees and 2 feet of snow I left behind in Montana.

29 December, 2008

This was the start to a whirlwind tour of the northern parts of the North Island. Unfortunately I didn’t get a great selection of photographs. The North Island has an immense diversity of terrain, vegetation, communities. Kat rented a tiny Pinkish Toyota Vitz. Yes…Pink. And Yes…Tiny. It barely held our baggage and we virtually had to get out and push to get it up a hill. We took the entire day to go from Auckland north to the town of Kaitaia stopping here and there to go on short hikes or to see the tourist sites. In reality a person needs at least two days to get a feel for the area. The most notable sites consisted of a beautiful array of native forests, rolling sheep and cattle pastures and rugged hillsides. We took a few short walks into the bush to witness some of the oldest living trees in New Zealand. The Kauri tree is a large diameter, fairly short jungle tree that live for amazing lengths of time. The ones we visited were in excess of 1200 years old…the oldest being in the ballpark of 2200 years old. Later during our trip we witnessed Kauri logs dug out of swamps and peat fields that had fallen, been covered and left alone for as much as 45,000 years evidently. I personally am skeptical but the scientific evidence seems to be in favor of this. Beautiful trees though. I will show pictures at a later post.