Onward to Invercargill

The flight over the Pacific was mostly uneventful. We had previously arranged to be situated in the 2-seats-to-a-group section at the back of the 747 where the fuselage narrows and there isn't room for the full 3-seat grouping. We noticed these seats on our extremely uncomfortable trip to Auckland last time and booked them on the way home and now for our trip there and back. I can't stress to anyone doing this type of trip how much better it is to be in these seats.

Passage through New Zealand customs and immigration was painless even though they have an extra step whereby incoming passengers are quizzed in detail regarding what food items they are bringing into the country. They are very serious about keeping foreign plants, animals, and plant and animal diseases out of the country. I am happy to report they didn't have any problem with the bottle of hot sauce we brought along.

We killed most of the time before our next flight arranging our tickets and transferring from the international terminal to the domestic terminal.



The flight from Auckland to Christchurch was late leaving Auckland and we were anxious about making our connection to Invercargill as we only had 50 minutes between flights. Although the flight was 35 minutes late, the flight was only half full and they seemed to take that as an opportunity to fly a little faster and we arrived with 25 minutes to go. Amazingly, our luggage made the jump between the aircraft without our intervention and it arrived in Invercargill on our flight.



The final leg of our journey was taken in an Air New Zealand ATR72-500 turboprop. I took a whack of pics through the window, but most of them didn't turn out very well. Here are a couple of the better ones.




After collecting our luggage, we caught a cab to our first NZ hotel of the trip. Invercargill is a city that seems to serve two main functions. As you can see in the second picture, it is located in the middle of a huge agricultural area and loads of the businesses serve the needs of the farming community. The other function is as jumping off point to Stewart Island. There will be more on Stewart Island later, but a huge chunk of the Stewart Island tourist traffic consists of Backpackers. As a result, Invercargill has more than its share of Backpacker Hotels which are inns that offer a range of room rates, from a bunk in a shared room to quite upscale rooms. Our hotel here is one of the upscale Backpacker Hotels, named Living Space.

Our acomodation is basically a hotel room with excellent keycard security, fridge, microwave, and private bathroom. We also get access to the common rooms including a huge lounge with a genuinely spectacular common kithen.


There is a balcony off the lounge that we have used extensively on our off time. This is the view down Tay street in Invercargill, taken from "our" balcony.


We settled in and then headed out for a late lunch and to buy a few groceries.


The long journey had taken the wind from our sails, though and by 9:00pm we were sound asleep.

Aaaaaaand They're Off!

Welcome to the 2008 edition of Debbie and Don's New Zealand trip. The Airport limo arrived at 6:00 am as requested and we were whisked off to the airport on the nearly empty 401. The trip from Toronto to Los Angeles was especially easy because the third seat next to the two in our grouping did not get sold, and we spread out in much greater comfort.



We ran into our first hitch in the planning when we discovered that the Air New Zealand check-in counter wouldn't open until an hour and a half after we were ready to check in. Unfortunately all of the restaurants at Terminal 2 are located behind the security screeners and we wouldn't be able to get there without having checked in with ANZ. So, after getting directions from a couple of helpful airport staff, we trundled our selves and all our luggage over to the next airport terminal and got ourselves a drink and some snacks.


Once we had checked in and had passed our luggage on to the loving ministrations of the Air New Zealand baggage handlers, we caught a cab to the beachfront at Venice Beach. The weather in LA that day was unusually cold and very windy.




We walked down from where the cab dropped us to the pier at Washington Blvd.



The houses facing the beach along this stretch are a mix of new "architecturally designed" structures mixed in with a lot of the original cottages that originally populated the beachfront. Many of the cottage-like homes have been "upgraded" either by the owners or by someone else who didn't have a clue, so there are some pretty wacky renovations. This is the one non-wacky cottage we both liked.


By the time we had reached Washington Blvd, we were pretty frozen, so we sought refuge in a bar that I had visited the only other time I had been in LA. We arrived just in time to catch the last few minutes of the Superbowl pre-game show and so decided to hang out and watch the game. It would seem there are a lot of Giants fans in that part of town.

The game was fun, the crowd entertaining, and the wind continued to whip the sand across the dunes.



We left there and headed down the street to a local mexican restaurant before cabbing back to the airport, slogging through the security theatrics, and settling in for a final North American pint before catching our flight across the Pacific.


If this pic looks familiar, it's because it's the same tired folks in the same tired pub at Terminal 2 in LAX (only 2 years later).

That will have to do for today. We are getting up at 6:00 am tomorrow morning to catch a flight so I need to retire now and catch up on some sleep.

Until next time ...

Don