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Colin's Adventures In Sheepland
It began innocently enough. 9 hours in a plane. Repeated watching of The Fast And The Furious and the comedy shows. And pilots who timed the turbulence just right. Thank God for the non-slip surface of the food trays, otherwise I would have had steamed salmon (or so they would have me believe) all over my crotch. It's NOT a good experience. All the same, I doubt if turbulence in airplanes is a good way to break up kidney stones, which the fat Kiwi behind me seemed to have. He kicked my seat every 5 minutes and complained that his ass hurt. The luxurious experience of Singapore Airlines.
Anyway, once the pilot, amazingly, landed safely, and even more amazingly, in the right airport, I got out of one hell and straight into another: the immigration queue. It snaked through miles of velvet rope and spilled out onto the stairs. And when, thousands of years later, we got to the front, the big sign said "New Zealand Immigration Service [maori gibberish] Our Mission: To provide the best welcome experience in the Pacific!" Too late mate! Of course, it was pretty good compared to, say, Papua New Guinea, where there is a gang shootout (with live rounds too!) held for the entertainment of the tourists suffering under fans which move hot air around.
Much of what is here is exaggeration and sacarsm to make an otherwise boring period of time seem like fun, but what is next is totally true. [begin absolute truth section] Behind us at Customs was a guy wearing a shirt that said "Canada Kicks Ass", and the line shuffled impatiently through the green lane past bored customs officers with sniffer dogs which sniff more than your luggage. But once those Customs people saw the guy's shirt, he said, "Canada kicks ass, eh? Could you open your luggage please?" [end absolute truth section] Of course, with a shirt like that, you become a number 1 suspect for smuggling maple leaves, which might decimate the local ecosystem. And with NZ's economy based on agriculture, the scattering of a few maple leaves around the countryside would spell disaster for them.
But the luxurious experience of economy class was not quite over yet as we went on another plane and went south for the summer (In case you forgot, New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere and December = summer). To Queenstown, a little town of about 20,000 which is NOT the same as the one in South Africa and the 4th or 5th-closest city to Antartica (nope, not kidding). The airport is a bit bigger than Bee Hock's house, not including the main runway which can barely take a 737. Luckily, we were in a plane made by British Aerospace and we came to a stop a healthy 10 meters or so from the end of the runway.
Once grunting luggage handlers had tossed the luggage onto golf buggies and driven them a few centimeters to the airport building, the passengers clambered out and the Japanese family in front started talking excitedly in Japanese, which they do all the time anyway. The word "Tokyo" came up a lot and I think they were complaining about the ineffiency of the luggage handling and the lack of other Japanese on the plane.
Summer it might have been, but it wasn't exactly how most people envision summer. For Queenstown, summer means it's not snowing. The thermometer barely pushed up to 8 degrees Celsius (what did you expect, Farenheit?!) and at night it was around 2 degrees and if only there was a storm in the area, it'd have snowed. Predictably, the hotel had a bookable hot tub which was free if you booked it early. However, the hot tubs are 10 meters from the hotel building. Not knowing that the temperature had drastically dropped, I stepped out wearing only pants and froze my ass off. Stop laughing. NOW. Anyway this is the end of part 1...