Bye bye Aotearoa

6:15am 15th November

Hopefully our last early morning. The alarm went off at 4:15 this morning and boy it hurt. Ness and I are both suffering from a bit of a cold, which didn’t help us get up. Yesterday we visited a wildlife park to finally see our first live kiwi. They’re very odd-looking creatures; cute though! We then dropped off the van at the rental place and in doing so discovered that Christchurch airport closes overnight! Unlike the 24/7 Heathrow, we couldn’t just go in early and then doze on a seat until 4am — we’d have to get a hotel for the night.

We checked in at the hotel opposite the airport, and boy am I glad we did so now. A proper shower and whatnot and at least a few hours’ decent kip mean that this morning wasn’t quite as awful as it could have been. Next door to the hotel was the Antarctic Experience — an attraction demonstrating the wonders of the Antarctic. It was pretty good too: it certainly killed a couple of hours anyway. After that we had dinner in the hotel, then had an early night.

We’re now just waiting to board our first plane of the day — a flight to Sydney. At Sydney we have a 3 hour wait to transfer to a flight to Hong Kong; and our adventure continues! Still no wireless internet here — I’m hoping our hotel room in HK has a decent internet connection and I can finally upload all these stories!

Update: finally got half-decent (well…shite really but that’s another story) internet access. Fixed xania.org (yay) and hopefully it won’t break again until I get home!