The Auckland Shuffle
Apr. 7th, 2024 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerNew 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....
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....
