NZ 1: A long flight

Sydney, Australia (May 26, 2008)

In May/June we went to New Zealand. Mayli had a neutrino conference in Christchurch, in the South Island, and I joined her for a vacation. I arrived there as her meeting was concluding, and then we rented a car, and drove for 3,000 km through the roads of the South Island. I took about 1,500 photos, a hundred of which are perhaps worth showing. I will be do that in the next posts, so stay tuned if you want to have a look at where we went, and what we did.

This image is from the airport of Sydney, Australia. I am usually a little wary of shooting pictures in airports (you never know how the security people may react), but in this case there was this huge window looking towards the city, with the beautiful colors of sunrise, and I couldn’t resist. And I wasn’t alone, as many other passengers were taking out their cameras and doing the same.

Sydney was one of the many legs to get to New Zealand from Boston. There are direct flights (on the way back we flew through Auckland), but when we finally got the tickets, flying through Australia was considerably cheaper. Cheaper doesn’t mean painless, though, as flying through Sydney adds ~3,000 miles to the trip. Plus, even if one doesn’t have to do immigration (one never exits from the international terminal), if you are not from the European Union, US or a few other selected country, you still need to get a transit visa on your passport, before leaving. Which is what Mayli needed to do, and that ain’t completely free.

So I first flew to Los Angeles, then Sydney, and finally Christchurch. I travel quite often to Los Angeles, and I always think of that as a pretty long flight. Well, in this case was just one leg of a much longer trip. Which at the time it really seemed never coming to an end.