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!
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. He works for Hudson River Trading on super fun but secret things. He is one half of the Two's Complement podcast. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.