AKL-NAN-SUV-NAN-AKL Part 2: I left my heart
Jul 12, 2017, 10:19 pm
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Original Poster
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: NZ
Programs: airpoints
Posts: 65
AKL-NAN-SUV-NAN-AKL Part 2: I left my heart
So, the Fiji gig was great, wafted to the venue every morning in a govt car, out on the town at night eating excellent fish-dishes and drinking pints of cold Fiji bitter.
But all good things must come to an end and it was bitter-sweet because although a piece of my heart is now firmly lodged in Fiji I was keen for the return trip because I had scored an upgrade to Premium Economy on the Air NZ flight home (this is like old-school first class) and also, I would be flying Suva to Nadi in the daylight so third time lucky I would get to see the interior of the Island.
I bade goodbye to Mr Oily Pants the night before as I had an 8am car coming for me and he was going to have a lie-in as he wasn’t due at Govt House until 9am the next day. He was staying on for 2 more days to sort out some compliance issues.
The car was late, it would either have been early or late, ‘on time’ is a difficult concept in a country where time really doesn’t mean a great deal.
I was at the point where I thought it prudent to phone Ms T to see if the car really was coming and ask if I should just grab a cab when the govt car turned up.
The driver was the usual dark-skinned (dark brown, a lot of Fijian govt staff are much darker skinned than usual, must be a tribal thing) muscular Fijian dude in an official shirt and a ‘sulu’ (skirt for blokes) with the regulation Roman sandals.
As he loaded my bags a lighter, skinnier dude in wrap-round shades and a dark suit emerged from the front passenger side…he was quite intimidating, like a Fijian CIA agent, he didn’t say a word but just looked at me until I got into the back of the SUV.
Without looking at me the suit said:
“So Mr Jafa, Mr Oilypants is not going back today?”
“No, he has compliance work to do” (I wondered how the hell he knew my name)
He continued:
“I have been asked by the minister to fly some sports equipment back to my Island”
I humoured him cautiously because he was still freaking me out a bit…
“Long flight?”
“An hour”
He then reached forward onto the dash of the car and picked up a distinctive cream towel with which he wiped his face. Once he was finished wiping his face he wrapped it round his right hand in a familiar way…D’oh! I knew who this guy was, I uploaded all my workshop pics to his laptop just last night! He was one of the attendees on the course I had just observed, not a CIA agent but a drama and music teacher!!
He had looked a lot friendlier in a sulu and tropical shirt with no shades!!!
I laughed inwardly at myself for being such a dick but really, this guy looked badass today!
Heading out to Nausori, where Suva airport lives we encountered traffic but slipped out of it to head into the suburbs. The suited one had the driver stop at a non-descript house in a non-descript suburb and hopped out to deliver some drugs or pick up some extortion money, or whatever it is that Fijian teachers do to supplement their income.
Scabby but friendly dogs roamed the streets, there was a bit more rubbish than I was comfortable with blowing about the place and every spare patch of ground was planted with Cassava, the staple carbohydrate of Fiji.
The dogs must be a bit of an issue because each house had a steel platform at the end of the drive to keep rubbish bags up off the ground and away from dogs, rats and other vermin.
The drug deal, or the shortest conjugal visit in history, complete, we headed off once more and I got odd looks from the two guys up front because I was snapping random pics but the reality was that an opportunity to photograph a Fijian suburb is not one that comes up too often for a man of my elevated status and I wanted to capture the flavour of the Fiji that the tourists seldom see.
Eventually, after feeling a bit tense about whether photographing bridges and gas stations is considered spying in Fiji, we arrived at the airport, which is next to a field full of horses and sort of leaps up on one as it doesn’t really have that airport vibe at all.
I bade farewell to the alleged teacher with his box of alleged sports equipment and my official govt driver and plunged back into reality…one minute somebody of importance in a chauffeured govt car and the next just a mid-50’s white dude with a few extra kilos sweating in the heat and wondering why the flight numbers at the check-in desks were all different from the one on his ticket.
For a few minutes I looked around me to take stock and see if there were any sort of clues to how I might find the correct desk. Then I saw it…”Premium Check-in”…I was flying economy but my white privilege kicked in and I strode up to the counter.
A smiley “Bula” and the inevitable question.
“How was your stay in Fiji?”
“Very good, I love it here”
“Work or holiday?”
“Work” and then a moment of paranoia as I didn’t have a work permit, I was not permitted to indulge in work on this trip but I was allowed to attend a conference.
“A conference for my work”
I relaxed, I swear I could hear the CIA dude behind me un-cocking his Glock and adjusting his shades…
So, with boarding pass in hand and nothing to do for at least 40 mins I headed to the toilets, found a cubicle with a door that had both hinges and a lock and sat bethroned for a pleasant constitutional interlude.
Using my smart phone I bought tickets to the Auckland “London Grammar” gig in September whilst waiting for the plumbing to perform.
As I emerged into the bustling shed that is the domestic terminal at Suva I heard my flight being called to the gate, it was way before the gate call was due so I ran the five steps to the X-ray machine and spilt loose change everywhere, set off the alarm and generally made sure that if I needed an alibi for Thursday the 15th June 2017 at 09:30 then nobody could say they hadn’t noticed me.
I hung a left into the “gate lounge” which looked more like a holding pen for dissidents in Orwell’s 1984 and sat there in a folding chair waiting for something to happen.
My butt had barely hit the chair when they made the boarding call, I was in 5F again (an ATR 42 this time so no propeller paranoia). I struggled past the lady who tore my boarding pass in half because those who had just come through the X-Ray machine were still coming into the gate lounge as those in the first five rows were trying to get out. The burly cop who was there in case anybody was trying to smuggle a live pig on board was getting in everybody’s way.
I loved it, chaos is good at times and it reminds you how uptight the ‘civilised’ world is.
Let me take a break here and tell you about a live animal story from when I lived on the Greek Island of Corfu in 1988.
We were waiting for a bus and a lady was in front of us in the queue. She had three live chickens in her hands. The bus arrived and there was a bit of a wait as the bus driver and a couple of farmers struggled to get a live sheep up onto the roof rack and strapped down.
Mrs Jafa and I watched in disbelief…what happened next made our jaws drop...as the clickbait would say.
The lady tried to board the bus but the driver held out his hand and said in Greek:
“No live chickens on the bus Mrs”
“Oh” said the lady
She then took a step back, strangled all three chickens and got back on the bus. The driver never batted an eyelid…
Back in Suva I strode out into the morning heat and boarded the immaculate ATR42-600, said “Bula Vinaka” to the Flight Attendant, she was sporting a fine afro hair-do, and slumped into my seat, 09:30 is far too early to be exerting oneself.
I had a person of size (fat bloke in the real world) next to me who seemed almost as semi-conscious as me. I fell in love with the lady in front of me even though I could only see the back of her head but there was something about her.
Danvers L’Hommedieu, who is a reincarnation of Hunter S Thompson, would have admired the shape of her skull, at least until the bats descended.
There were no bats on the plane but I was getting unpleasantly hot, I turned on the aircon jets and angled them at my fevered brow. I got hotter still and realised with alarm that the plastic wall panel beside me was very hot to the touch from about the level of my waist up the window surround to the top of the window.
Suppressing a rising panic, I considered my options which were:
1. Alert the FA so that people with tools could come and investigate and risk making a spectacle of oneself.
2. Run off the plane shrieking “you’re all gonna die!” and risk making a spectacle of myself.
3. Keep quiet and die a fiery death with dignity.
I chose option three because in the unlikely event we did make it to Nadi I would at least have the full three hours in the Koru lounge.
I thought the heat from the wall panel had subsided about a quarter of a degree and relaxed a bit from screaming paranoia and indecision to a more Zen-State in which death is merely a transition to a better (or worse) place…
The warm towels, bottles of water and safety advice “As this is a day time flight you can greatly assist with the safety of this journey by screaming if you see us heading towards a canyon wall” were dispensed with in record time and we lifted off 10 mins early.
I felt cheated, from emerging from the toilet cubicle to being in the air was all a blur, it had happened too quickly for me to savour the moment, an unseemly hurry which was not really in the lexicon of Fijian experiences and I resented it in a way.
The hot spot in the wall reached a crescendo of heat but the views were too good and too rare for me to waste time worrying about how long an ATR would last with a cabin fire or whether the rush hour traffic would have us landing in the river which would make a mess of my shoes.
Up and away, through some bumpy clouds and out into a clear sky with reducing clouds between us and Nadi.
Putting all thoughts of overheating plastic to one side I snapped away with my cell phone camera and kept an eye out for suitable landing spots for when the starboard side of the ATR started to smoke.
Agog at the beauty of the landscape I resolved to come back, rent a dirt bike and go exploring to meet the noble savages of the interior and buy one of their women for a mirror and a bag of Star Wars Lego.
I forgot all about the impending inferno.
We crossed the Fiji equivalent of Africa’s Great Rift Valley and noticed the land use change from “Hunt, Kill, Eat” to a more farming type thing. The spectacular, angular hills of the hinterland were exchanged for something softer, wider and less intensely green.
The pilot came on the PA.
“Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen, LGBTI identifiers, Non-Binaries, Pan-Sexuals, Asexuals and the Gender Fluid”
Maybe he didn’t put it quite like that.
“As you can see we are on the descent into Nadi where the weather is a cool 26C, thank you for flying with Fiji Air and not screaming too much…Cabin crew, please prepare the cabin for landing”
A cool 26C huh? I’ll take that in summer time thank you very much (it is winter in Fiji).
I looked out to sea, I looked back at the ground, I saw the topography flatten out and the housing density increase. I saw the airport from high up as we crossed the main runway to go out to sea, crank a right-hand U turn and try to make the smaller runway without bursting into flames or hitting a canyon.
The sea was a lovely turquoise, the air was a perfect blue and the wall against my right hip was as hot as ever.
The pilot smacked it on the runway with casual aplomb and I breathed a sigh of relief as the ATR still wasn’t an inferno and I was safe again.
During the taxi to the gate I idly viewed a gaggle of smaller aircraft that sat around in various states of disrepair, took in the hills to our north and realised I was very happy, that I had fallen in love with Fiji and that I would have to come back soon but as a tourist rather than someone who gets driven to work in a car with light blue number plates.
The airport was no longer wreathed in smoke and I still wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
At the tiny baggage carousel I surveyed my fellow travellers and decided that a package holiday for stray and wanton Cougars must have been on that flight.
There were about half a dozen of them, all with a certain set to their jaw and a certain depth to their tan that suggested they had been having a good time with not very many clothes on.
They stalked about with confidence and a certain lack of inhibitions.
Hmmm, I felt I had missed out and wondered if the package holiday company had a website perhaps? It looked like they did a roaring trade.
All around us smiley brown men in skirts went about their business, picking things up, putting things down and ticking boxes on clipboards but it was all a show, they could smell white meat and were eyeing up the Cougars, the Cougars eyed them back…
My bag arrived with its Harley Davidson Bandana looking a little undone so I tightened it up and strode purposefully into the grubby café once more and surveyed the tables to see if my Samosa and chips were still there or the corpse of the poor miscreant that thought he was onto a winner with a free feed.
Nope, nothing of the sort, they know how to hide the bodies out here, so off I went, across the road into the magnificently cool edifice that is international check-in.
The check-in desk said that it was opening at 11:00 and it was only 10:20 which gave me time to go to the souvenir store next door and buy some very reasonably priced and suitably ethnic stuff to take home.
I bought some barkcloth paintings and a wooden carving plus a T shirt or two…the bark cloth and wood could very well get me inspected at AKL, probably even sent to the special place where they fine Chinese people for bringing unidentifiable foodstuffs into NZ, which is very strict about things like that.
The girl who took my money was lovely but she couldn’t count or subtract so the money side of things (which was a cash transaction as all financial transactions with young women in foreign countries should be) took a bit of getting through, that and me handing over some NZ coins and a car part instead of proper Fiji money.
Eventually she gave me back my suitcase, which had been removed from me upon entering her shop as a ransom, and I wondered why on earth anyone should possibly consider a dodgy white man with cash to burn to be any sort of a risk.
Stuffing the purchases into my bag I headed back into the Cathedral-like check-in area and wandered into the Premium check-in lane with a proper Premium ticket for the first time on this trip.
One of the sturdy white ladies who looked like she had been made every happy on at least several of the nights she was in Fiji was the only person in the lane…this shows my utter lack of breeding because proper Premium passengers would never enter the lane if there was another human being present. No, they wait until the lane has emptied because standing without purpose and with the chance of being mistaken for working class does not fit their cultural protocols…that would never do Sybil…did you pack the All-Bran?
At 11:04 the desk clerks appeared with little bags of tags and the things that ground staff stick on bags and passports.
Another, older lady with a tight Afro and a way of walking that comes from spending 40 years living in a furnace with 89% humidity, stood by the pressing throng that had assembled by the tensa-barrier lanes of the ordinary people…They shall not pass until the check-in troops were tooled up, passwords entered and a smile at the ready.
I watched a lithe young Austrian girl remove most of her clothes while standing in the queue and repacking her bag. I admired her legs and recognised her pink tan that marked her out as European from 100 paces away. She covered up with a flimsy cardigan to hide her white strap-lines.
I think I would have chatted her up if I had seen her by the pool, assuming I hadn’t already been dragged off behind the bike sheds by one of the package-deal Cougars that is.
The Cougar was called forward as the lady with the Hi-Temp walk held back the commoners. Another gate agent, a taller, comely wench with smiley eyes and perfect brown skin that accentuated her very white teeth, beckoned me over.
Behind me the commoners were getting restless but now the two Premiums were locked and loaded the lady with the tight Afro slipped the last tensa-barriers and the human tide surged forward like the marines on Iwo Jima.
My comely wench took my passport and documents, pressed some buttons and looked quizzically at my ticket…she pressed more buttons and frowned.
Taking my passport with her she gave me a quick “Don’t go anywhere” and disappeared.
People were looking at me like I had been caught with mucky books in my carry-on, some looked in admiration as they thought I might have been a spy who had been caught by Interpol.
I felt like a spy who had been caught by Interpol and tried to remember if any of the countries in my passport would be considered undesirable?
Well Australia is in there so yes, quite possible that The land of the Long Brown Snake might have offended Bananarama somehow and the mere fact that I had been there would now count against me…especially as it was the Gold Coast!
Minutes passed and turned into paranoid fantasies, women hugged their brood to their skirts, men gave me knowing winks and the Chinese student, who had been asleep on a bench since I arrived, suddenly woke up and took a selfie.
The shame reached a crescendo and became panic just as the comely wench returned.
She fixed me with her dazzling smile, I was hers, I would accept my fate just so long as she came and smiled at me in prison each day.
“Mr Jafa, sorry, bit of a problem, your ticket was not associated” (This means that my ticket was booked through our mouth-breathing travel company but the upgrade was done through the Air NZ app and so the two didn’t link because the system thought I was ….oh I dunno what it thought but it was wrong and so is the use of corporate travel companies. All they do is take your money for doing something really simple at half the speed you can do it yourself and at twice the price).
She continued “But I sorted it for you so Vinaka Vakalevu and have a nice flight.”
We smiled at each other, she handed me my ticket, pressed a button and my bag rolled off down the conveyor.
I asked the way to the Koru Lounge just to hold her gaze a moment longer and at a point calculated to be long enough to convey passion, longing and a sense of loss but not long enough for the Cops to arrive, I broke off the relationship and headed to the Koru Lounge in tears.
The Koru Lounge in Fiji has just completed its makeover, pretty soon Fiji will have been so comprehensively made over that it won’t recognise itself, this will change everything…no more the thrill of excitement as you get into a lift and wonder how long you will be trapped there (I had this thrill on this trip…twice!) no more will I wander the streets of Fiji to that slight waft of sewers that reminds me so much of my time in Greece.
Who knows? maybe they will even demolish the Domestic shed or the govt car will turn up at the right time and then where will one go for a bit of native colour?
Actually the new Koru Lounge in Fiji is pretty fab and there was only, a smiley brown lady who runs the show and the Cougar who I briefly shared the Premium queue with in there.
Great, I hoped nobody else would be coming is as I found myself a quiet and secluded corner.
Putting my cellphone on to charge and arranging my bag and coat in such a way that no Germans would think of throwing a towel on my seat, I headed off in search of food…which to be honest is always a disappointment in the Koru lounge.
For all the fantastic awesomeness of Air New Zealand as an airline, and they are easily one of, if not the best in the world, the food they serve in the lounges is generally bland and boring. The desserts are always marvellous and they do serve Kapiti Blue Cheese which in itself is a thing of beauty but their Chefs appear to be all foreign and incapable of cooking any main meal that isn’t rice and some meaty stew type thing that has a strange hue to it.
I think the menus must be designed in Wellington, that drab, politically-correct pile of greyness that, as a collective, is determined to ensure that the tastes and interests of the majority are extinguished as it tries desperately to suck up to all and any minorities with the sort of vigour that is usually only displayed by a small dog shagging one’s leg.
Which in essence means that the main courses are a noxious fusion of ethnic food that ends up being bland to everybody.
So I ate a lot of fruit, pancetta and blue cheese and drank a lot of Ginger Ale…
The lounge started to fill up as I was updating Flight Memory and the tone of the place was lowered considerably. Fat ruddy-faced men with overblown peroxide blonde females who were almost all dressed 20 years younger than would deemed appropriate in all but the most degenerate of societies. Both sexes showing signs of too much sun and not enough sunscreen, that and European ancestry, probably mostly Danish.
All had the look of the perennial heavy drinker, the kind of people who think that drinking Prosecco or Lager and dancing to 80’s music is fun and not something that immediately defines one’s social strata.
There were a couple of mousey looking ladies who might have been lesbians if they would only admit it or possibly the wives of vicars…they had a look about them that suggested they had seen something unpalatable on the beach…like half-naked white people…these poor ladies would never be the same again and probably missed the Victorians.
As the lounge got busier still I had the unfortunate experience of a bookish looking man and his well-preserved but brain-dead girlfriend (in retrospect I think she may have been charging by the hour) coming and sitting next to me in my quiet corner.
She babbled like a schoolgirl on a full moon and played him (time and time again) some awful video of a dog that had been drinking coffee, with a background of Mexican music, it involved a swimming pool and lots of banging and crashing.
She laughed like a hooker and played this video to her client at full volume and kept telling him that is was on the UniLad website which meant she couldn’t scroll….somebody please explain…
Holy Cow I wish my vermin permit was valid in the Koru lounge, others looked and tutted but I moved away as the desire to round on her and tear her off a strip for her extreme lack of dignity was getting too much to hold back. To add insult to injury she was doing all this on an iPhone…ugghhh! An Apple device! No wonder she had no breeding.
I began to fidget so decided that I would head to the gate as the hour was upon us and I wanted to scope out the duty-free shop for expensive aftershave.
Exiting the lounge I began to calm down, idly watching the cleaners scrubbing the escalator on their hands and knees I ascended the stairs and was dismayed to find that they only had Issey Miyake in Eau de Toilette and not the full strength cologne but things looked promising over at the gate. I presented myself at the premium line and ended up first in line once they had driven away the mislocated Economy passengers.
All groups of Fijian gate staff are marshalled by a thin brown lady with a tight Afro it would appear. Her sole job is to make sure everything happens on (Fiji) time and in the right order. She has the power to silence a braying, entitled ninny and scare recalcitrant children into submission...I love these ladies, they make me feel secure and it is a testament to Fijian organisation that they understand how much white tourists require organising.
The tensa-barrier dropped and a tall, dark-brown Fijian guy held out his massive paw to receive my passport and boarding pass. A cursory glance and I was waved into the bright sunlight to walk down the open walkway to the airbridge. It seemed incongruous to walk outside and then into the airbridge but it was fun all the same.
A very gay male FA looked at my boarding pass and declared me to be a lucky man, waved to 24A with a flourish and gave me a longing look. That was OK by me as it probably meant better service.
Legroom, personal space and the whole package of Premium Economy is well worth the expense on Air NZ. There are only 40 seats in PE on a 777-200 and curtains keep that world a private place. I actually prefer PE to Business Class which seems to me to be more business than class these days.
The IFE welcomed me by name and I noticed that my neighbour would be “Destiny”, I hoped that didn’t mean I would be sat next to a strung-out drag queen for the next 2.5 hours but she turned out to be a very nice lady. We had a good chat and exchanged business cards as we work in similar arenas to each other.
Outside the sun was beating down, it was a perfect day and it was with an immense sense of sadness that I drank my complimentary fizzy wine and pondered, as the doors closed, whether I really could live in Fiji for any length of time…I think I could do a couple of years, more if I flew to NZ regularly to ride my Harley and generally misbehave.
Pushback came, I was given a menu but had pre-ordered a Gluten Free meal as a way of establishing my moral and spiritual superiority (and get fed first). We taxied out, a long roll down a runway that isn’t actually very flat and we romped into the air like a puppy catching a Frisbee on a summer beach.
I took a lot of pics on the ascent, farms, lakes the Coral Coast and the sea plus assorted tropical Islands. I started to plan my return trip to ride around the island on hired motorbikes but got drawn into a conversation with Destiny about volunteering opportunities in the Pacific Islands and the merits of the Blue Banana Lodge in Tonga. Which led into ethical whale-watching and then silence as I helped her find the film she was looking for on the IFE…something about black ladies and how without them NASA would have never reached the heavens (every time I looked at her screen there was a man with a hammer breaking stuff).
I settled in to watch Travis Rice overthinking snow and rain but ultimately it turned into a ripping good 93 minutes of snow sports.
My gluten-free meal was very nice indeed, apart from the bread roll, there are some very good GF breads available in NZ but the rolls are pants. At least I got served first and male FA flirted with me.
Gazing down at the sea with Jazz on the headphones I started thinking about that guy who drifted from Mexico to the Marshall Islands, 14 months adrift in a 19-foot boat. This made me think about how the vastness of the Pacific Ocean might affect one’s head when down there in a small boat and how one might feel, looking forlornly up at a passing 777 and imagining them eating their gluten-free prawn entrees and drinking fizzy wine while you dined on raw seagull and drank your own urine.
It was then that I spotted a tiny, tiny speck of white, which on closer inspection turned out to be a yacht, heading north. I thought again of that dead guy they found recently, mummified at his chart table in a dismasted boat. That freaked me out and made me put Sigur Ros on the IFE and listening to Sigur Ros at 37,000 feet makes your world look like this…don’t do it if you are easily frightened…
The rest of the flight passed in a daze of Icelandic Indie-Rock and there isn’t much more to say other than I was very comfy, well fed and had charming company on the odd occasions when I wasn’t chilling out with the headphones on.
As we descended into AKL the weather began to get a bit ordinary and the clouds had lumps in them, none of that was an issue in a 777-200 so we rode it out and the Captain slapped us on the runway bang on time…well a bit early actually and due to construction work at the gate we had to go park on the apron and take a bus to the terminal…imagine! Me! An empowered and entitled white male being made to go by bus with all those foreign and poor people!!!
I asked the FA if my Limousine had been delayed but he looked hurt and told me it was the best bus they could find and would I please get off the aircraft and go home.
I looked askance down the stairs at the growing mass of ordinary people, said a quick prayer, held my nose and plunged into hell on wheels.
We were driven round the back of the new part of the terminal, where men with fluoro vests did their best not to push the Project Managers down into deep, flooded holes.
Flinching as I involuntarily made contact with people with more money than breeding I resisted the urge to vomit long enough to get into the building, march over to the baggage carousel and feel whole again as my priority bag came popping out from behind the flappy plastic curtain before all the others.
Dignity restored I joined the “nothing to declare” line but remembered that I had wooden artefacts in my bags so I ducked under the tensa-barrier barged into the queue and bared my soul to the Asian man and his love/hate affair with his racist clientele (extra Jafa points if you can spot the lyrics quote…).
The Asian man wrote on my customs card with a green felt tip, the symbols probably meant something to him and possibly to the guys further up the corridor and may have said “Utter plonker, strip search for the hell of it” for all I know.
I was ushered to a big hall with long stainless steel counters and stern-looking Customs types.
This is the place where Chinese people go to be fined for bringing in big bags of food stuffs that they know damn well can’t be brought into the country. They are humiliated, fined and have all their food taken away, if you can call Duck Tongues, dried Reindeer Penis and Salted Cod guts food.
I watched in amazement as diminutive Asian Grandparents dragged in trolleys piled high with stuff that only the Chinese understand the value of…indescribable food items in bags and shiny things of supposedly ritual purpose.
I was the only non-Asian on the suspect side of the counters, the Asian Customs interpreter was rushed off her feet explaining in five different dialects what “You’re not bringing that shite into New Zealand” means in their native tongue. She looked exasperated as some of the perpetrators appeared to think that not understanding any language currently used on planet Earth would get them an immediate dispensation to bring it all through.
Oh no it doesn’t and those Asian custom interpreters are hard-case, they keep at it until the message gets through and large wads of notes have changed hands.
Eventually the spotlight fell on me and I was bailed up in front of a very tall Customs dude of Polish extraction who very carefully examined my wood and told me that if it showed no signs of rot or insect infestation I would be good to go and no fines imposed nor destruction of my property.
He was super-friendly, efficient and very knowledgeable…I left with the feeling that he was glad to have somebody to talk to that shared a language and didn’t have a suitcase full of air-dried body parts to deal with.
A final whisk through an X-Ray machine to ensure I didn’t have live frogs or kittens hidden in my carry-on and I was free to go.
Released as if from a prison cell I strode out into the fading evening light, felt the sight chill of an Auckland winter evening and spent 20 mins trying to find my car, once found I was on my way home and missing Fiji like you wouldn’t believe.
But all good things must come to an end and it was bitter-sweet because although a piece of my heart is now firmly lodged in Fiji I was keen for the return trip because I had scored an upgrade to Premium Economy on the Air NZ flight home (this is like old-school first class) and also, I would be flying Suva to Nadi in the daylight so third time lucky I would get to see the interior of the Island.
I bade goodbye to Mr Oily Pants the night before as I had an 8am car coming for me and he was going to have a lie-in as he wasn’t due at Govt House until 9am the next day. He was staying on for 2 more days to sort out some compliance issues.
The car was late, it would either have been early or late, ‘on time’ is a difficult concept in a country where time really doesn’t mean a great deal.
I was at the point where I thought it prudent to phone Ms T to see if the car really was coming and ask if I should just grab a cab when the govt car turned up.
The driver was the usual dark-skinned (dark brown, a lot of Fijian govt staff are much darker skinned than usual, must be a tribal thing) muscular Fijian dude in an official shirt and a ‘sulu’ (skirt for blokes) with the regulation Roman sandals.
As he loaded my bags a lighter, skinnier dude in wrap-round shades and a dark suit emerged from the front passenger side…he was quite intimidating, like a Fijian CIA agent, he didn’t say a word but just looked at me until I got into the back of the SUV.
Without looking at me the suit said:
“So Mr Jafa, Mr Oilypants is not going back today?”
“No, he has compliance work to do” (I wondered how the hell he knew my name)
He continued:
“I have been asked by the minister to fly some sports equipment back to my Island”
I humoured him cautiously because he was still freaking me out a bit…
“Long flight?”
“An hour”
He then reached forward onto the dash of the car and picked up a distinctive cream towel with which he wiped his face. Once he was finished wiping his face he wrapped it round his right hand in a familiar way…D’oh! I knew who this guy was, I uploaded all my workshop pics to his laptop just last night! He was one of the attendees on the course I had just observed, not a CIA agent but a drama and music teacher!!
He had looked a lot friendlier in a sulu and tropical shirt with no shades!!!
I laughed inwardly at myself for being such a dick but really, this guy looked badass today!
Heading out to Nausori, where Suva airport lives we encountered traffic but slipped out of it to head into the suburbs. The suited one had the driver stop at a non-descript house in a non-descript suburb and hopped out to deliver some drugs or pick up some extortion money, or whatever it is that Fijian teachers do to supplement their income.
Scabby but friendly dogs roamed the streets, there was a bit more rubbish than I was comfortable with blowing about the place and every spare patch of ground was planted with Cassava, the staple carbohydrate of Fiji.
The dogs must be a bit of an issue because each house had a steel platform at the end of the drive to keep rubbish bags up off the ground and away from dogs, rats and other vermin.
The drug deal, or the shortest conjugal visit in history, complete, we headed off once more and I got odd looks from the two guys up front because I was snapping random pics but the reality was that an opportunity to photograph a Fijian suburb is not one that comes up too often for a man of my elevated status and I wanted to capture the flavour of the Fiji that the tourists seldom see.
Eventually, after feeling a bit tense about whether photographing bridges and gas stations is considered spying in Fiji, we arrived at the airport, which is next to a field full of horses and sort of leaps up on one as it doesn’t really have that airport vibe at all.
I bade farewell to the alleged teacher with his box of alleged sports equipment and my official govt driver and plunged back into reality…one minute somebody of importance in a chauffeured govt car and the next just a mid-50’s white dude with a few extra kilos sweating in the heat and wondering why the flight numbers at the check-in desks were all different from the one on his ticket.
For a few minutes I looked around me to take stock and see if there were any sort of clues to how I might find the correct desk. Then I saw it…”Premium Check-in”…I was flying economy but my white privilege kicked in and I strode up to the counter.
A smiley “Bula” and the inevitable question.
“How was your stay in Fiji?”
“Very good, I love it here”
“Work or holiday?”
“Work” and then a moment of paranoia as I didn’t have a work permit, I was not permitted to indulge in work on this trip but I was allowed to attend a conference.
“A conference for my work”
I relaxed, I swear I could hear the CIA dude behind me un-cocking his Glock and adjusting his shades…
So, with boarding pass in hand and nothing to do for at least 40 mins I headed to the toilets, found a cubicle with a door that had both hinges and a lock and sat bethroned for a pleasant constitutional interlude.
Using my smart phone I bought tickets to the Auckland “London Grammar” gig in September whilst waiting for the plumbing to perform.
As I emerged into the bustling shed that is the domestic terminal at Suva I heard my flight being called to the gate, it was way before the gate call was due so I ran the five steps to the X-ray machine and spilt loose change everywhere, set off the alarm and generally made sure that if I needed an alibi for Thursday the 15th June 2017 at 09:30 then nobody could say they hadn’t noticed me.
I hung a left into the “gate lounge” which looked more like a holding pen for dissidents in Orwell’s 1984 and sat there in a folding chair waiting for something to happen.
My butt had barely hit the chair when they made the boarding call, I was in 5F again (an ATR 42 this time so no propeller paranoia). I struggled past the lady who tore my boarding pass in half because those who had just come through the X-Ray machine were still coming into the gate lounge as those in the first five rows were trying to get out. The burly cop who was there in case anybody was trying to smuggle a live pig on board was getting in everybody’s way.
I loved it, chaos is good at times and it reminds you how uptight the ‘civilised’ world is.
Let me take a break here and tell you about a live animal story from when I lived on the Greek Island of Corfu in 1988.
We were waiting for a bus and a lady was in front of us in the queue. She had three live chickens in her hands. The bus arrived and there was a bit of a wait as the bus driver and a couple of farmers struggled to get a live sheep up onto the roof rack and strapped down.
Mrs Jafa and I watched in disbelief…what happened next made our jaws drop...as the clickbait would say.
The lady tried to board the bus but the driver held out his hand and said in Greek:
“No live chickens on the bus Mrs”
“Oh” said the lady
She then took a step back, strangled all three chickens and got back on the bus. The driver never batted an eyelid…
Back in Suva I strode out into the morning heat and boarded the immaculate ATR42-600, said “Bula Vinaka” to the Flight Attendant, she was sporting a fine afro hair-do, and slumped into my seat, 09:30 is far too early to be exerting oneself.
I had a person of size (fat bloke in the real world) next to me who seemed almost as semi-conscious as me. I fell in love with the lady in front of me even though I could only see the back of her head but there was something about her.
Danvers L’Hommedieu, who is a reincarnation of Hunter S Thompson, would have admired the shape of her skull, at least until the bats descended.
There were no bats on the plane but I was getting unpleasantly hot, I turned on the aircon jets and angled them at my fevered brow. I got hotter still and realised with alarm that the plastic wall panel beside me was very hot to the touch from about the level of my waist up the window surround to the top of the window.
Suppressing a rising panic, I considered my options which were:
1. Alert the FA so that people with tools could come and investigate and risk making a spectacle of oneself.
2. Run off the plane shrieking “you’re all gonna die!” and risk making a spectacle of myself.
3. Keep quiet and die a fiery death with dignity.
I chose option three because in the unlikely event we did make it to Nadi I would at least have the full three hours in the Koru lounge.
I thought the heat from the wall panel had subsided about a quarter of a degree and relaxed a bit from screaming paranoia and indecision to a more Zen-State in which death is merely a transition to a better (or worse) place…
The warm towels, bottles of water and safety advice “As this is a day time flight you can greatly assist with the safety of this journey by screaming if you see us heading towards a canyon wall” were dispensed with in record time and we lifted off 10 mins early.
I felt cheated, from emerging from the toilet cubicle to being in the air was all a blur, it had happened too quickly for me to savour the moment, an unseemly hurry which was not really in the lexicon of Fijian experiences and I resented it in a way.
The hot spot in the wall reached a crescendo of heat but the views were too good and too rare for me to waste time worrying about how long an ATR would last with a cabin fire or whether the rush hour traffic would have us landing in the river which would make a mess of my shoes.
Up and away, through some bumpy clouds and out into a clear sky with reducing clouds between us and Nadi.
Putting all thoughts of overheating plastic to one side I snapped away with my cell phone camera and kept an eye out for suitable landing spots for when the starboard side of the ATR started to smoke.
Agog at the beauty of the landscape I resolved to come back, rent a dirt bike and go exploring to meet the noble savages of the interior and buy one of their women for a mirror and a bag of Star Wars Lego.
I forgot all about the impending inferno.
We crossed the Fiji equivalent of Africa’s Great Rift Valley and noticed the land use change from “Hunt, Kill, Eat” to a more farming type thing. The spectacular, angular hills of the hinterland were exchanged for something softer, wider and less intensely green.
The pilot came on the PA.
“Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen, LGBTI identifiers, Non-Binaries, Pan-Sexuals, Asexuals and the Gender Fluid”
Maybe he didn’t put it quite like that.
“As you can see we are on the descent into Nadi where the weather is a cool 26C, thank you for flying with Fiji Air and not screaming too much…Cabin crew, please prepare the cabin for landing”
A cool 26C huh? I’ll take that in summer time thank you very much (it is winter in Fiji).
I looked out to sea, I looked back at the ground, I saw the topography flatten out and the housing density increase. I saw the airport from high up as we crossed the main runway to go out to sea, crank a right-hand U turn and try to make the smaller runway without bursting into flames or hitting a canyon.
The sea was a lovely turquoise, the air was a perfect blue and the wall against my right hip was as hot as ever.
The pilot smacked it on the runway with casual aplomb and I breathed a sigh of relief as the ATR still wasn’t an inferno and I was safe again.
During the taxi to the gate I idly viewed a gaggle of smaller aircraft that sat around in various states of disrepair, took in the hills to our north and realised I was very happy, that I had fallen in love with Fiji and that I would have to come back soon but as a tourist rather than someone who gets driven to work in a car with light blue number plates.
The airport was no longer wreathed in smoke and I still wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
At the tiny baggage carousel I surveyed my fellow travellers and decided that a package holiday for stray and wanton Cougars must have been on that flight.
There were about half a dozen of them, all with a certain set to their jaw and a certain depth to their tan that suggested they had been having a good time with not very many clothes on.
They stalked about with confidence and a certain lack of inhibitions.
Hmmm, I felt I had missed out and wondered if the package holiday company had a website perhaps? It looked like they did a roaring trade.
All around us smiley brown men in skirts went about their business, picking things up, putting things down and ticking boxes on clipboards but it was all a show, they could smell white meat and were eyeing up the Cougars, the Cougars eyed them back…
My bag arrived with its Harley Davidson Bandana looking a little undone so I tightened it up and strode purposefully into the grubby café once more and surveyed the tables to see if my Samosa and chips were still there or the corpse of the poor miscreant that thought he was onto a winner with a free feed.
Nope, nothing of the sort, they know how to hide the bodies out here, so off I went, across the road into the magnificently cool edifice that is international check-in.
The check-in desk said that it was opening at 11:00 and it was only 10:20 which gave me time to go to the souvenir store next door and buy some very reasonably priced and suitably ethnic stuff to take home.
I bought some barkcloth paintings and a wooden carving plus a T shirt or two…the bark cloth and wood could very well get me inspected at AKL, probably even sent to the special place where they fine Chinese people for bringing unidentifiable foodstuffs into NZ, which is very strict about things like that.
The girl who took my money was lovely but she couldn’t count or subtract so the money side of things (which was a cash transaction as all financial transactions with young women in foreign countries should be) took a bit of getting through, that and me handing over some NZ coins and a car part instead of proper Fiji money.
Eventually she gave me back my suitcase, which had been removed from me upon entering her shop as a ransom, and I wondered why on earth anyone should possibly consider a dodgy white man with cash to burn to be any sort of a risk.
Stuffing the purchases into my bag I headed back into the Cathedral-like check-in area and wandered into the Premium check-in lane with a proper Premium ticket for the first time on this trip.
One of the sturdy white ladies who looked like she had been made every happy on at least several of the nights she was in Fiji was the only person in the lane…this shows my utter lack of breeding because proper Premium passengers would never enter the lane if there was another human being present. No, they wait until the lane has emptied because standing without purpose and with the chance of being mistaken for working class does not fit their cultural protocols…that would never do Sybil…did you pack the All-Bran?
At 11:04 the desk clerks appeared with little bags of tags and the things that ground staff stick on bags and passports.
Another, older lady with a tight Afro and a way of walking that comes from spending 40 years living in a furnace with 89% humidity, stood by the pressing throng that had assembled by the tensa-barrier lanes of the ordinary people…They shall not pass until the check-in troops were tooled up, passwords entered and a smile at the ready.
I watched a lithe young Austrian girl remove most of her clothes while standing in the queue and repacking her bag. I admired her legs and recognised her pink tan that marked her out as European from 100 paces away. She covered up with a flimsy cardigan to hide her white strap-lines.
I think I would have chatted her up if I had seen her by the pool, assuming I hadn’t already been dragged off behind the bike sheds by one of the package-deal Cougars that is.
The Cougar was called forward as the lady with the Hi-Temp walk held back the commoners. Another gate agent, a taller, comely wench with smiley eyes and perfect brown skin that accentuated her very white teeth, beckoned me over.
Behind me the commoners were getting restless but now the two Premiums were locked and loaded the lady with the tight Afro slipped the last tensa-barriers and the human tide surged forward like the marines on Iwo Jima.
My comely wench took my passport and documents, pressed some buttons and looked quizzically at my ticket…she pressed more buttons and frowned.
Taking my passport with her she gave me a quick “Don’t go anywhere” and disappeared.
People were looking at me like I had been caught with mucky books in my carry-on, some looked in admiration as they thought I might have been a spy who had been caught by Interpol.
I felt like a spy who had been caught by Interpol and tried to remember if any of the countries in my passport would be considered undesirable?
Well Australia is in there so yes, quite possible that The land of the Long Brown Snake might have offended Bananarama somehow and the mere fact that I had been there would now count against me…especially as it was the Gold Coast!
Minutes passed and turned into paranoid fantasies, women hugged their brood to their skirts, men gave me knowing winks and the Chinese student, who had been asleep on a bench since I arrived, suddenly woke up and took a selfie.
The shame reached a crescendo and became panic just as the comely wench returned.
She fixed me with her dazzling smile, I was hers, I would accept my fate just so long as she came and smiled at me in prison each day.
“Mr Jafa, sorry, bit of a problem, your ticket was not associated” (This means that my ticket was booked through our mouth-breathing travel company but the upgrade was done through the Air NZ app and so the two didn’t link because the system thought I was ….oh I dunno what it thought but it was wrong and so is the use of corporate travel companies. All they do is take your money for doing something really simple at half the speed you can do it yourself and at twice the price).
She continued “But I sorted it for you so Vinaka Vakalevu and have a nice flight.”
We smiled at each other, she handed me my ticket, pressed a button and my bag rolled off down the conveyor.
I asked the way to the Koru Lounge just to hold her gaze a moment longer and at a point calculated to be long enough to convey passion, longing and a sense of loss but not long enough for the Cops to arrive, I broke off the relationship and headed to the Koru Lounge in tears.
The Koru Lounge in Fiji has just completed its makeover, pretty soon Fiji will have been so comprehensively made over that it won’t recognise itself, this will change everything…no more the thrill of excitement as you get into a lift and wonder how long you will be trapped there (I had this thrill on this trip…twice!) no more will I wander the streets of Fiji to that slight waft of sewers that reminds me so much of my time in Greece.
Who knows? maybe they will even demolish the Domestic shed or the govt car will turn up at the right time and then where will one go for a bit of native colour?
Actually the new Koru Lounge in Fiji is pretty fab and there was only, a smiley brown lady who runs the show and the Cougar who I briefly shared the Premium queue with in there.
Great, I hoped nobody else would be coming is as I found myself a quiet and secluded corner.
Putting my cellphone on to charge and arranging my bag and coat in such a way that no Germans would think of throwing a towel on my seat, I headed off in search of food…which to be honest is always a disappointment in the Koru lounge.
For all the fantastic awesomeness of Air New Zealand as an airline, and they are easily one of, if not the best in the world, the food they serve in the lounges is generally bland and boring. The desserts are always marvellous and they do serve Kapiti Blue Cheese which in itself is a thing of beauty but their Chefs appear to be all foreign and incapable of cooking any main meal that isn’t rice and some meaty stew type thing that has a strange hue to it.
I think the menus must be designed in Wellington, that drab, politically-correct pile of greyness that, as a collective, is determined to ensure that the tastes and interests of the majority are extinguished as it tries desperately to suck up to all and any minorities with the sort of vigour that is usually only displayed by a small dog shagging one’s leg.
Which in essence means that the main courses are a noxious fusion of ethnic food that ends up being bland to everybody.
So I ate a lot of fruit, pancetta and blue cheese and drank a lot of Ginger Ale…
The lounge started to fill up as I was updating Flight Memory and the tone of the place was lowered considerably. Fat ruddy-faced men with overblown peroxide blonde females who were almost all dressed 20 years younger than would deemed appropriate in all but the most degenerate of societies. Both sexes showing signs of too much sun and not enough sunscreen, that and European ancestry, probably mostly Danish.
All had the look of the perennial heavy drinker, the kind of people who think that drinking Prosecco or Lager and dancing to 80’s music is fun and not something that immediately defines one’s social strata.
There were a couple of mousey looking ladies who might have been lesbians if they would only admit it or possibly the wives of vicars…they had a look about them that suggested they had seen something unpalatable on the beach…like half-naked white people…these poor ladies would never be the same again and probably missed the Victorians.
As the lounge got busier still I had the unfortunate experience of a bookish looking man and his well-preserved but brain-dead girlfriend (in retrospect I think she may have been charging by the hour) coming and sitting next to me in my quiet corner.
She babbled like a schoolgirl on a full moon and played him (time and time again) some awful video of a dog that had been drinking coffee, with a background of Mexican music, it involved a swimming pool and lots of banging and crashing.
She laughed like a hooker and played this video to her client at full volume and kept telling him that is was on the UniLad website which meant she couldn’t scroll….somebody please explain…
Holy Cow I wish my vermin permit was valid in the Koru lounge, others looked and tutted but I moved away as the desire to round on her and tear her off a strip for her extreme lack of dignity was getting too much to hold back. To add insult to injury she was doing all this on an iPhone…ugghhh! An Apple device! No wonder she had no breeding.
I began to fidget so decided that I would head to the gate as the hour was upon us and I wanted to scope out the duty-free shop for expensive aftershave.
Exiting the lounge I began to calm down, idly watching the cleaners scrubbing the escalator on their hands and knees I ascended the stairs and was dismayed to find that they only had Issey Miyake in Eau de Toilette and not the full strength cologne but things looked promising over at the gate. I presented myself at the premium line and ended up first in line once they had driven away the mislocated Economy passengers.
All groups of Fijian gate staff are marshalled by a thin brown lady with a tight Afro it would appear. Her sole job is to make sure everything happens on (Fiji) time and in the right order. She has the power to silence a braying, entitled ninny and scare recalcitrant children into submission...I love these ladies, they make me feel secure and it is a testament to Fijian organisation that they understand how much white tourists require organising.
The tensa-barrier dropped and a tall, dark-brown Fijian guy held out his massive paw to receive my passport and boarding pass. A cursory glance and I was waved into the bright sunlight to walk down the open walkway to the airbridge. It seemed incongruous to walk outside and then into the airbridge but it was fun all the same.
A very gay male FA looked at my boarding pass and declared me to be a lucky man, waved to 24A with a flourish and gave me a longing look. That was OK by me as it probably meant better service.
Legroom, personal space and the whole package of Premium Economy is well worth the expense on Air NZ. There are only 40 seats in PE on a 777-200 and curtains keep that world a private place. I actually prefer PE to Business Class which seems to me to be more business than class these days.
The IFE welcomed me by name and I noticed that my neighbour would be “Destiny”, I hoped that didn’t mean I would be sat next to a strung-out drag queen for the next 2.5 hours but she turned out to be a very nice lady. We had a good chat and exchanged business cards as we work in similar arenas to each other.
Outside the sun was beating down, it was a perfect day and it was with an immense sense of sadness that I drank my complimentary fizzy wine and pondered, as the doors closed, whether I really could live in Fiji for any length of time…I think I could do a couple of years, more if I flew to NZ regularly to ride my Harley and generally misbehave.
Pushback came, I was given a menu but had pre-ordered a Gluten Free meal as a way of establishing my moral and spiritual superiority (and get fed first). We taxied out, a long roll down a runway that isn’t actually very flat and we romped into the air like a puppy catching a Frisbee on a summer beach.
I took a lot of pics on the ascent, farms, lakes the Coral Coast and the sea plus assorted tropical Islands. I started to plan my return trip to ride around the island on hired motorbikes but got drawn into a conversation with Destiny about volunteering opportunities in the Pacific Islands and the merits of the Blue Banana Lodge in Tonga. Which led into ethical whale-watching and then silence as I helped her find the film she was looking for on the IFE…something about black ladies and how without them NASA would have never reached the heavens (every time I looked at her screen there was a man with a hammer breaking stuff).
I settled in to watch Travis Rice overthinking snow and rain but ultimately it turned into a ripping good 93 minutes of snow sports.
My gluten-free meal was very nice indeed, apart from the bread roll, there are some very good GF breads available in NZ but the rolls are pants. At least I got served first and male FA flirted with me.
Gazing down at the sea with Jazz on the headphones I started thinking about that guy who drifted from Mexico to the Marshall Islands, 14 months adrift in a 19-foot boat. This made me think about how the vastness of the Pacific Ocean might affect one’s head when down there in a small boat and how one might feel, looking forlornly up at a passing 777 and imagining them eating their gluten-free prawn entrees and drinking fizzy wine while you dined on raw seagull and drank your own urine.
It was then that I spotted a tiny, tiny speck of white, which on closer inspection turned out to be a yacht, heading north. I thought again of that dead guy they found recently, mummified at his chart table in a dismasted boat. That freaked me out and made me put Sigur Ros on the IFE and listening to Sigur Ros at 37,000 feet makes your world look like this…don’t do it if you are easily frightened…
The rest of the flight passed in a daze of Icelandic Indie-Rock and there isn’t much more to say other than I was very comfy, well fed and had charming company on the odd occasions when I wasn’t chilling out with the headphones on.
As we descended into AKL the weather began to get a bit ordinary and the clouds had lumps in them, none of that was an issue in a 777-200 so we rode it out and the Captain slapped us on the runway bang on time…well a bit early actually and due to construction work at the gate we had to go park on the apron and take a bus to the terminal…imagine! Me! An empowered and entitled white male being made to go by bus with all those foreign and poor people!!!
I asked the FA if my Limousine had been delayed but he looked hurt and told me it was the best bus they could find and would I please get off the aircraft and go home.
I looked askance down the stairs at the growing mass of ordinary people, said a quick prayer, held my nose and plunged into hell on wheels.
We were driven round the back of the new part of the terminal, where men with fluoro vests did their best not to push the Project Managers down into deep, flooded holes.
Flinching as I involuntarily made contact with people with more money than breeding I resisted the urge to vomit long enough to get into the building, march over to the baggage carousel and feel whole again as my priority bag came popping out from behind the flappy plastic curtain before all the others.
Dignity restored I joined the “nothing to declare” line but remembered that I had wooden artefacts in my bags so I ducked under the tensa-barrier barged into the queue and bared my soul to the Asian man and his love/hate affair with his racist clientele (extra Jafa points if you can spot the lyrics quote…).
The Asian man wrote on my customs card with a green felt tip, the symbols probably meant something to him and possibly to the guys further up the corridor and may have said “Utter plonker, strip search for the hell of it” for all I know.
I was ushered to a big hall with long stainless steel counters and stern-looking Customs types.
This is the place where Chinese people go to be fined for bringing in big bags of food stuffs that they know damn well can’t be brought into the country. They are humiliated, fined and have all their food taken away, if you can call Duck Tongues, dried Reindeer Penis and Salted Cod guts food.
I watched in amazement as diminutive Asian Grandparents dragged in trolleys piled high with stuff that only the Chinese understand the value of…indescribable food items in bags and shiny things of supposedly ritual purpose.
I was the only non-Asian on the suspect side of the counters, the Asian Customs interpreter was rushed off her feet explaining in five different dialects what “You’re not bringing that shite into New Zealand” means in their native tongue. She looked exasperated as some of the perpetrators appeared to think that not understanding any language currently used on planet Earth would get them an immediate dispensation to bring it all through.
Oh no it doesn’t and those Asian custom interpreters are hard-case, they keep at it until the message gets through and large wads of notes have changed hands.
Eventually the spotlight fell on me and I was bailed up in front of a very tall Customs dude of Polish extraction who very carefully examined my wood and told me that if it showed no signs of rot or insect infestation I would be good to go and no fines imposed nor destruction of my property.
He was super-friendly, efficient and very knowledgeable…I left with the feeling that he was glad to have somebody to talk to that shared a language and didn’t have a suitcase full of air-dried body parts to deal with.
A final whisk through an X-Ray machine to ensure I didn’t have live frogs or kittens hidden in my carry-on and I was free to go.
Released as if from a prison cell I strode out into the fading evening light, felt the sight chill of an Auckland winter evening and spent 20 mins trying to find my car, once found I was on my way home and missing Fiji like you wouldn’t believe.
Last edited by Jafa39; Jul 13, 2017 at 4:23 am
Jul 14, 2017, 4:45 am
#3
Join Date: Jun 2014
Location: London
Programs: Amex Centurion, B.A. Silver, Virgin Atlantic Gold, C.X. Diamond
Posts: 205
She babbled like a schoolgirl on a full moon and played him (time and time again) some awful video of a dog that had been drinking coffee, with a background of Mexican music, it involved a swimming pool and lots of banging and crashing.
She laughed like a hooker and played this video to her client at full volume and kept telling him that is was on the UniLad website which meant she couldn’t scroll….somebody please explain…
She laughed like a hooker and played this video to her client at full volume and kept telling him that is was on the UniLad website which meant she couldn’t scroll….somebody please explain…
Enjoy seeing them live, they're incredible!
Jul 14, 2017, 6:46 am
#4
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: JNB
Programs: Flying Blue, Miles and Smiles, Hhonors, ICHotels
Posts: 1,307
Oh wow, this has made my Friday. Awesome writing, and I was cracking up every few minutes. Thank you for finishing Part 2!! You have a great gift, please share more when you next go on another trip. Even popping off to the shops would do.......
Jul 16, 2017, 4:20 am
#5
Original Poster
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: NZ
Programs: airpoints
Posts: 65
