South Island, New Zealand October 2000

I'm grappling with a confusing blog development now that I purchased my cute little travel journal on the Tokyo trip I just blogged about, and from now on I have all these journal entries for each trip. So New Zealand was the first trip where I have the journal entries, and my plan all along was to use these instead of my off the cuff blog writing I've been doing up to date. I realize that very few of you care either way, as my Thai readers have made it clear they want less writing and more photos anyway. I guess I'll stick to the plan for now and see how it goes, although I've been flipping through the journal pages and can tell that the blog will take on quite a different style if I stick to the journal. Anyway, here goes...

We decided to take a 2 week trip to New Zealand largely because it's somewhere neither of us had been. We thought sticking to just the South Island (New Zealand is two islands, with most people on the North Island and most sheep on the South) would allow for a leisurely drive about with too much scheduling problems, which I'm sure is true. I just hope it's not too boring (hmm, this real time discussion can be confusing at this point. I think one thing I'm going to do is put clarifications or other comments from my current writing into parenthetical inserted comments).

We arrived via a rather tortuous route on a very totuous airline, Thai. The flight stopped in Sydney before going to Auckland, where we had to transfer to an Air New Zealand flight to Christchurch. The Thai flight featured awful entertainment and terrible seats. Since this was a 16 hour flight, this was a pretty bad start. The food was pretty good though, but unfortunately I ate all of it, a dinner, 2 breakfasts and a lunch, the beginning of my ritual vacation ballooning. I brought 2 Douglas Copeland books to read, which I thought would be enought for the whole vacation. With no inflight entertainment and no chance of sleeping, I read both books before arriving, further exacerbating my concerns about being bored over the next two weeks. Somchai alternated among ten minute spurts of reading a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, complaining about the turbulence and sleeping.

The Auckland airport is an overcrowded dump, and immigration took an hour (this is a recurring problem, every time I go to New Zealand I am amazed at the incredible ineptitude and rudeness of the immigration and customs system there). We were pretty beat up for the Auckland to Christchurch leg but the plane passed some pretty spectacular mountains, which we'll be driving through later.