Sadly we had to leave one of our group members in Nadi. Jess, after a lot of thought, decided to return home for family reasons. Our hearts are with him and his family at this time and we hope he’s doing okay stateside!
We arrived in Auckland after some difficult moments. As if our daily activities didn’t throw us enough curve balls in Nananu (we love the curve balls), we were faced with some challenges. Our exit from Nadi was great, but when we arrived in Sydney, we had to run across the airport and through customs to arrive at our gate in time. After extreme cardio exertion, we were told by a friendly stewardess that we could not travel to New Zealand from Australia without visas. Now, the details of this were very confusing to me at the time, so there’s probably more to the story than what I just explained, but the bottom line is that we had to wait for 3 hours for the next flight to Auckland. I was okay with this since there was some delicious sushi waiting for Page and I in the international terminal, but our leader Mac struggled during this time with a slight fever and severe headache. The only option we had was to make it fun, so I along with the group had a very pleasant time after just a few moments of frustration.
Unfortunately our luck did not change immediately once we got to Auckland. The airline lost our baggage. However, the following morning our other awesome leader, Gwen, carried all of the bags up to our common space at 8 in the morning without waking up anyone. We are very thankful to Gwen. What a weird 24 hours we had! The next day was a well deserved free day in Auckland. We used that time to rest and replenish our supplies and most importantly, to slack line. We had a great time exploring Auckland. And then we went to the sky tower, and we played in parks and pretended we were small children again. It was fantastic.
We arrived in Auckland after some difficult moments. As if our daily activities didn’t throw us enough curve balls in Nananu (we love the curve balls), we were faced with some challenges. Our exit from Nadi was great, but when we arrived in Sydney, we had to run across the airport and through customs to arrive at our gate in time. After extreme cardio exertion, we were told by a friendly stewardess that we could not travel to New Zealand from Australia without visas. Now, the details of this were very confusing to me at the time, so there’s probably more to the story than what I just explained, but the bottom line is that we had to wait for 3 hours for the next flight to Auckland. I was okay with this since there was some delicious sushi waiting for Page and I in the international terminal, but our leader Mac struggled during this time with a slight fever and severe headache. The only option we had was to make it fun, so I along with the group had a very pleasant time after just a few moments of frustration.
Unfortunately our luck did not change immediately once we got to Auckland. The airline lost our baggage. However, the following morning our other awesome leader, Gwen, carried all of the bags up to our common space at 8 in the morning without waking up anyone. We are very thankful to Gwen. What a weird 24 hours we had! The next day was a well deserved free day in Auckland. We used that time to rest and replenish our supplies and most importantly, to slack line. We had a great time exploring Auckland. And then we went to the sky tower, and we played in parks and pretended we were small children again. It was fantastic.
We loved Auckland so much
Liz