thewoz.co.uk

What a horrible horrible way to start my New Zealand travels… arriving at Auckland international airport at 2.30a.m. with a chest infection and stinking cold.

I always knew I’d be arriving late, but had the flight not been delayed by 4 hours, I would have at least been able to say hello to the people I’d be sharing a dorm room with rather than being ushered into an anonymous space in the dark at 3am.

I’d booked a bed in a dorm room at the Kiwi Airport Hostel on the grounds that it was cheap and close to the airport as I need to go back the next day to meet Oli when he landed. I’ll never make that mistake again. On your first night in a new country never stay anywhere with either the words “airport” or “hostel” in the title.

I didn’t have the heart to turn the light on in the room, but the street light filtered through the thin curtain provided just about enough light for me to be able to about make out 4 other bodies in the room.

I headed in the general direction I was ushered towards and found an empty bed. I just dumped my bags and got straight into bed. Great. Some fucker had stolen my pillow. I pressed a button to illuminate my mobile phone (the modern man’s torch) and shone it around the room to try to identify the pillow thief. I narrowed my investigations down to 2 suspects, but due to the awkward way they both had their duvets over their heads, there wasn’t enough evidence for me to warrant waking up either of them. I just rolled up my jumper to act as a make-shift piloow and pulled the cover over me.

Then it started. A violent uncontrollable coughing fit. I tried to swallow it out, but it was no good. 20 minutes later, I was still going and heard angry sighs from different direction in at least 3 different pitches so I was pretty sure I’d woken up everyone in the room. There was so sign of my coughing letting up. I just need to get out. So I grabbed all my stuff and got the hell out of dodge.

Now at 3.30am, I had left the hostel and at great expense, checked myself into a hotel room so that I could continue my coughing fit in private. By the time I eventually got to sleep, it was light outside and check-out time only hours away. I think the only time people would ever check themselves into a hotel and spend less time there than I did that night would be if you’d just picked up something from the red-light district.

I spent most of the next day back in the airport terminal awaiting Oli’s arrival, drinking potentially fatal quantities of caffeine and forever blowing my nose on the toilet roll I’d taken from the hotel last night (along with soap, shower gel, tea bags, instant hot chocolate sahets and anything else that was free-to-take to justify to the expense of staying there). I was feeling crap and the news that Oli’s flight was delayed by 2 hours was massively annoying as it meant he would arrive after the van hire place closed. That meant I’d have to pick it up myself then we’d have to drive back the next day to get him added as a driver.

So I picked up the van, my home for the next 3 weeks, had another couple of cups of coffee and then went back to the airport to pick Oli up.

From New Zealand

After an accidental detour round the suburbs, wastelands and industrial parks of Auckland we arrived in the city centre and parked up at the YHA where i’d booked a twin share room for the night so that only Oli would have to suffer my coughing fits.