The 1st aircraft on my journey. I’m in Christchurch airport minutes from departure. I had checked in online all the way to Europe, so I didn’t have to wait at all. My main luggage is going, hopefully, straight to Vienna and I have all the boarding passes till there. After boarding this Emirates Boeing 777 I’ll be losing my cell and data connection, so I have to find ways of posting somehow wherever I am. Good luck and a safe trip to me!
Leaving NZ
January 17th, 2010About to Take off
January 17th, 2010This is the guy who’s writing this stuff, minutes from leaving New Zealand.
See you later and don’t forget to follow my trip with your mates!
How I’m Gonna Travel to Europe and Maybe Back to New Zealand: 4 Hours to Departure
January 16th, 2010I’m having a bath listening to a radio programme on international law in times of war, on my cell. Bloody serious but equally boring. As soon as the conversation passed the time of chivalry, knights and Crusades, I got my Nokia E71 (which is now in a plastic zip bag) to chech my emails. I have four addresses that I can manage from this phone and in the second inbox I found an em@il from the bloke who’s supposed to pick me up at the Bucharest Baneasa Airport in about 42 hours. He says: ‘It may be summer where you’re coming from but it’s damn cold winter in Romania and in the whole of Europe, bring warm clothes! The forecast for when you land is 11 bellow and snowing.’ Yeah, right! I replied: ‘Jandals, sunnies and maybe my tennis cap OK?’ I can’t ad a bloody straw to my bag. It’s locked, secured, tagged, sealed, ready to be thrown in the belly of the B777 & A380 beasts from Christchurch all the way up to Vienna. I’m not touching it. As the radio talk show gets to Israel’s right (?) to launch a preemptive strike on Iran, I open a wee software I installed on the Nokia, World Traveller, and check the weather through the cities I’ll be in at the respective times:
Christchurch: 15 (that’s our summer!), dry
Sydney: 29, dry
Dubai: 26, overcast
Vienna: 0, dry
Bucharest: -3, snow.
It’s getting better and better. [I see some guys are tweeting about this travel log and I haven’t even departed.] Prince William has just landed in New Zealand. Hillary Clinton, who was due here this weekend, has postponed her visit. But what do these have to do with my trip. I’d better get back to my last minute preparations. I’m leaving for the airport in two and a half hour. First I’ll turn this waterproof radio off because the show now reached the topic of terrorists and planes. Good timing, indeed!
How I’m Gonna… 8 Hours from Departure
January 16th, 2010Yesterday I went to the airport with my luggage to weigh it. It was like a dummy departure. I fly Emirates Christchurch to Vienna via Sydney and Dubai and they let you take 30 kgs + 7 in the cabin. Yet from Vienna to Bucharest I fly a budget Romanian airline, Blue Air , where the limit is 20. So I’m only taking 20, of which nearly half is the weight of my Samsonite-like suitcase. The test scale was frozen at 3.30 kgs so I looked around for cameras and I couldn’t see any (of course they could see me left, right and centre in this age of terrorist hysteria!), I found the power cord and unplugged the bloody machine, then powered it back to reset it. I had 21.6 kgs of which today I have to leave some behind. I also tried to pay the $25 tax they charge you when you leave New Zealand from Christchurch International but I couldn’t. You must pay on the day of departure. Emirates had quite a number of counters open, most of them economy class, where there were moderate lines, but I went to their customer service desk and I found out from the blonde there that I don’t really have to check in three hours before take off; one would be cool. This is good. I’ll be a bit longer in Christchurch, the city I love since I settled here ten years ago. I’ll have time for a last Heiniken on New Zealand soil.