Subject: January 3: The last day in New Zealand (until I return)
Date Sent: Mon, January 4, 2010 12:01:16 AM ("home time")
Buenos dias,
I was waiting to send my final trip report email until I had uploaded a couple of videos on my website, but I've been having trouble converting those videos from the DVD's I have, so I'll finish this off: the videos will just have to wait!
It was a short day, relatively speaking: I went straight from Hamilton to Auckland airport. But before that I encountered two unexpected places.
The first was a rest area along the highway. When I exited I saw there were some picnic tables and a river next to the parking lot. It was a beautiful place so I decided to "hang out" over there for a couple of hours, eating a boxed lunch from a cafeteria nearby and a couple of ice creams -- typical of my "last day" desserts in any country. It was a nice place and there were hardly any people around, something quite strange for the North Island (it's a lot more heavily populated than the South).
My flight was at 7:30pm but with all the recent security changes for U.S.-bound flights, they were saying on the news you should allow FOUR hours for checking in and all the security. I was thinking about going back to the city (Auckland) and roaming around there but decided to scrap that and go straight to the airport instead. Just before entering the airport there is a viewpoint from where you can see the planes landing and taking off. I stopped there for a while just to kill some time, knowing that at 1:20pm would be a Thai Airways Boeing 777 landing from Bangkok (the only flight I was sure of), and I wanted to see a large plane like that up close -- landing on the runway. Well, I never saw that plane, but at 1:40 there was another plane landing -- the largest passenger plane in the world, the Airbus A380. It was an Emirates flight from Dubai-Sydney-Auckland, and I got to see the touchdown at AKL -- first time I've seen that giant plane landing. For a plane nerd like me, it was a special experience -- so close I could FEEL the sound from the engines as it came in on final approach!
Well, nothing more could top that, so after that I just went to drop the car off and check in for my flight. Because of the recent events they had all U.S.-bound flights under tight security. Every passenger was given a pat-down search and they were hand-searching every carryon bag too -- for 300+ passengers on my flight, this was a huge task and the plane ended up being about 1/2 hour late to accommodate everyone. At the departure time of 7:30pm, our captain made an announcement that 120 people were still going through the security checks and they'd wait for them to finish!
Anyway, the flight back was pretty uneventful, reaching San Francisco about 8.5 hours before it took off. Since then I've been sending these emails and uploading all my pictures... and trying to convert my 2 DVD's to get them uploaded, but that last part is going to take some time :). Everything else has been uploaded and this email will be up soon shortly too:
http://www.callmewanderer.com/austrlia/nz0910/index.html#TOP
That's it for this trip! New Zealand (and especially the South Island) definitely deserves repeat visits, and I know I'll return -- often.
So until February from Iguazu Falls, Argentina...
Adios,
-yo.
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| Jan 2 | Contents |