I’m back from New Zealand and man, it’s
everything it’s billed to be. I mean, beyond the beauty, every single public
toilet I went into was clean and had toilet paper. How can you top that?
Getting there is never half the fun. I swear, as much as I
love to travel, I hate traveling. If that makes any sense at all.
The Guangzhou
airport is a beast, and this time around I thought I’d pull my hair out before
wheels up.
First, it’s time for the annual Canton Fair, which is this
huge event and people come from all over, meaning the airport is crowded. For
the first time in my travels through the airport, there was a massive line just
to get to the security line. As in, a complete standstill for 10 minutes.
After getting in, I did this new trick I learned and went to
the first-class line and waved the black passport, which saved oodles of time
as the immigration line was backed up beyond the quarantine and customs
sections, which are both before. So no telling what kind of time that saved,
but once to that line, I didn’t move up in the line for 5-10 more minutes, and
in all, spent about 20 minutes in line.
Seriously, every time I hear someone complain about security
in America,
I want to choke them. In Guangzhou,
it’s a full pat down for EVERY person, which takes awhile. A long, long while.
But it, too, passed and I went to my gate. I arrived in
plenty of time so I just read one of the three books I’d brought.
Finally, they called my flight, but not after a gate change.
This really isn’t a big deal, because how they do it, the gate is merely a
false start anyway. You don’t actually go down a jetway into a big plane; you
load up on a bus and get driven to what seems like a tarmac in the next county
over, and then you board.
This doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens far, far
more often than not. I’m so sick of little buses on either end of the flight.
You come back, get off the plane and think you’re done, but then you have to
wait on everyone to cram on a bus and then get driven for a solid 5-10 minutes
to a building that’s forever away from your landing spot. And that’s not even
counting the 10 minutes you taxied after landing.
Anyway, on both ends of my Auckland flight, I was subjected to these
annoying bus rides. I swear the departing flight ride was close to 10 minutes.
Then, to add insult to tiring injury, we got off the bus and THEN climbed up a
staircase to a jetway. God knows where we were, but it appeared to be at a
gate. What the purpose was for us to go to one gate, only to be bused to
another to enter a second jetway was beyond me.
And the same thing happened on the way back. We pulled in
after a long, long taxi and I saw the building and thought I’d struck gold
because the little jetway thing came out. I got off quickly – somehow I’d been
upgraded to economy plus – and thought I was going to make a beeline to the
immigration and baggage claim areas, but no sooner had I stepped into the
jetway than I realized everyone was stepping right back out on another
staircase, which led to the road, which led to yet another van.
But all that’s history. I’m back now and will get to posting
about New Zealand,
but right now I’m really exhausted and want to get laundry done before
crashing.
My first stop there, though, was the Hobbit place, so I’ll
start off with photos from there. It really was cool, although I’m not a huge
Hobbit fan. The guide guy kept saying, “You know how in [enter name of one of
the movies], [enter name of character] [enter verb for character] and then he [enter another verb/scenario].” Well,
other than one, I didn’t know any of them.
The one I did know was the yellow door. That was the home of
Sam Wise, Frodo’s best friend. At the end of the LOTR series, Sam returns to
the Hobbit and is greeted by his wife and daughter. He sees them, smiles, and
walks into his hobbit hole and shuts the door, closing out the trilogy.
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