The Auckland Shuffle

New Zealand Travelog #3
AKL Airport lounge - Mon, 8 Apr 2024, 9am

We landed in Auckland, New Zealand this morning at 7:15am local time. That's 12:15pm... yesterday... San Francisco time. We lost a day crossing the international date line. We'll get it back on the way home two weeks from now.

Our flight from San Francisco was 13.5 hours of drudgery. I slept maybe 4 hours, plus another 2 hours or so of.... trying to sleep. I'm not sure that a fancy upgrade, or choosing to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for an upgrade, would've made it much better. I tend not to sleep well on international flights for whatever reason.

We're not done with travel for the day. We've still got another flight! We're connecting onward to Queenstown, on New Zealand's South Island. It's a 2 hour domestic flight on Air New Zealand. That means we're having to do the airport shuffle here in Auckland.



The corridors from international gates into the airport terminal are generally long, boring affairs. This one was, too, except for the brief punctuation by what I think is a a Maori arch.

Then it was back to crass consumerism as usual.



Actually, while I sneer as usual, this is not usual in the US— thankfully! At least not yet. 😰 But it does seem to be increasingly par for the course elsewhere in the world. You disembark the aircraft, and before you even get to passport control it's time to buy, Buy, BUY! How about No.

Passport control was a total nonevent. We'd gotten electronic visas weeks in advance. All we needed to do was scan our passports at a self-service kiosk, answer a few simple yes-no questions on the computer, and continue on to baggage claim. Oh, and there were, like, 20 kiosks. It's not like in the US where they're often like, "Welcome, 800+ passengers disembarking these three jumbo jets that arrived at about the same time, we have SIX kiosks for your convenience!

As we awaited our checked bag we pondered where we'd find the best ATMs for withdrawing some cash in the local currency. I can tell you one place that's NOT the best....



These currency exchange desks routinely charge 10% or more of your transaction between their fees and their sneaky, crooked exchange rates. We later visited an ATM in the arrivals hall and paid less than 2% service fee— which my credit union will reverse when I ask them to. (On my last international trip they actually reversed it without me even having to ask!)

After claiming our bag the next stage in the gauntlet was clearing customs. And, oh boy, after everything else being like a walk in the luxury-shopping-mall park, this was a rigamarole. We had to filter through no fewer than three checkpoints. Each one wanted to understand in more detail what we had in our bags. They're on the lookout for not just drugs and wads of cash but also various kinds of food as well as dirty boots and other outdoor gear.

One thing of mine got confiscated: two packages of jerky I'd brought for morning meals. It turns out that pork products are not allowed. I had two small bags of jerky that were pork, so into the bin— with colorful paperwork documenting the find— those went.

"May I ask, what's the reason against pork?" Hawk asked.

"Well," I interrupted, "the Jewish people, in their traditions dating back more than 3,000 years—"

I don't think the customs checker understood why that was funny, but Hawk cracked up laughing.

To be continued....

The Auckland Shuffle, part 2

New Zealand Travelog #4
AKL Airport lounge - Mon, 8 Apr 2024, 11am

If there's one place where the phrase "Hurry up and wait" applies, it's the airport. Actually it's more like, "Hurry up then wait." You hurry to get from one stage of the gauntlet to the next, only to wait in a slow moving line, only to hurry after that to the tail of the next line. At the moment we've got our heels up in the Air New Zealand flight lounge. Just like we were able to use the United flight lounge last night— er, two nights ago— my lifetime elite status gets us lounge access with Star Alliance partners. And, no coincidence, we booked our ongoing flight to Queenstown, NZ on Air New Zealand, a Star Alliance partner.

Oh, but before we could go "heels up before wheels up" in the lounge, there was more hurry-up-and-waiting to do. After claiming our bags— with all drugs, weapons, and wads of cash intact but without eco-terrorism pork products— we had to transfer to the domestic terminal for our flight to Queenstown. We were able to recheck our bags in the international terminal but we still had get get ourselves over to the other building. And it was a hike!

"It's a 10 minute walk," the desk agent cheerily informed us.

Silently I figured that meant it'd take us 3-5 minutes. Walking times in the US always seem to be calculated for morbidly obese stupid people carrying armsful of Walmart shopping bags and 7-Eleven super Big Gulp Slurpees. But not so in New Zealand! Kiwi walk times are calculated for healthy adults who actually want to get there. (FWIW it was the same in Australia.) The 10 minute walk actually took us about 10 minutes. It was quite a hoof across the airport grounds!

Well, it was satisfying to get our exercise in. It was also satisfying that security checks in the domestic terminal were swift. We had to pull all our computers out of our bags, but we didn't have to remove belts or shoes. I also didn't have to pour out my bottle of water. That's one of the (many) infuriating things about the security theater we've been forced to accept in the US.... You can't carry a bottle of water through security "for safety reasons", but you can buy a bottle of water on the other side.... And those bottles of water, conveniently priced at $4+ literally go through the same scanner you're not allowed to carry water through.

Hurry up and wait... until it's time to relax! We planned our itinerary with a few hours of slack time (just in case shit happens). And we've been spending it in the elite lounge.



The food spread here isn't as spiff as at the Singapore Airlines lounge we visited in Australia before flying back to the US a few months ago. It's mostly bread and other carbohydrates. Those "sausages" are basically hot dogs with veins of cheese inside them. They taste... better than going hungry. 😨 And I'm washing them down with a few glasses of Coke Zero. Like the SQ lounge they do have a good selection of beer and wine here, but I actually want to be awake later today, because this is the start of our actual vacation in New Zealand!

Touchdown in Queenstown

New Zealand Travelog #5
Hilton Queenstown Resort - Mon, 8 Apr 2024, 3:30pm

We landed in Queenstown, New Zealand around 3:30pm today. We'd been in transit for the past 26½ hours. That's our last bit of flying for the next week... but not our last bit of travel. No, we've got quite a bit of driving planned. And hiking, too.

The views on the last 15 minutes of our flight into Queenstown were amazing. The city's in a valley, with steep mountains on both sides. To the west, especially, it's ridges as far as the eye can see. I heard at least one person today refer to this area as the Southern Alps.



The views were incredible just walking across the tarmac from the aircraft to the terminal. Yes, Queenstown ZQN airport is one of those small ones where you walk across the tarmac.

The views were even better facing out the other way as we left the airport. The sky was clearer on that side.



The colors are so vivid and the views are so sharp. I can only imagine it's because the air here is clean. It reminds me of things I last saw in the Western US over 25 years ago.

Well, as it's a small airport everything is close by. We got the paperwork and keys for our rental car in the terminal next to baggage claim, then walked 2-3 minutes to a parking lot.



Yup, here we are, 7,140 miles from home.