Some days traveling is easy – of note the day of our trip back from a week-and-a-half on Nanuya Laila Island in Fiji (comfortably staying in a beachside bungalow) to Nadi on the mainland. We had a home cooked breakfast of Donuts, packed at our own pace, were taken by boat to the larger ferry by our hosts, had a great dinner at the mainland port and checked into our hotel for an early bedtime with no problem. Kaitlin even made friends with some girls from a local high school rugby team on our ferry ride, traveling from the Yasawas to play their rivals over the weekend.
The very next day, we had a much more hectic experience.
Granted, our plans for the day weren’t “hang out on a small remote island” so some more stress was to be expected. We were traveling from Fiji to begin the next leg of our journey in Auckland, NZ. Flights, customs, unfamiliar surroundings, etc. comes with the territory. Even still, we contended with several unexpected issues throughout the day.
The problems started early – New Zealand is in process of opening back up to the world after a 2+ year COVID lockdown, so (apparently, we’ve learned) the rules and regulations change frequently. We learned of 2 new requirements at the check-in gate for our flight – a second “passenger declaration” document and confirmed booking on a flight out of New Zealand – both required before we could receive our boarding passes.
They took our bags off the conveyor belt and we went off to the side of the check in line. We connected to the (very very spotty) Nadi Airport free public wifi and attempted to complete the declarations, but both could not (for different reasons, I couldn’t upload the image of my vaccination card and Kaitlin wasn’t receiving a confirmation email).
We did secure booking on a (fully refundable) flight from Auckland to Sydney to show the gate attendant, though, and took this and our issues with the passenger declaration website back up to the desk. Fortunately for us the man said “okay” and gave us paper forms for the declarations – upshot being we had boarding passes and our bags were checked in to the flight.
I’ll stop here for a travel pro-tip – ALWAYS get to the airport early. Even in a “small, not busy” airport (Nadi only had 8 gates) unexpected things can always happen. We arrived to the airport at 7:15 for a 10:00 flight – this whole extra process took 45-60 minutes for us; we would have likely missed our flight if we’d casually rocked up to the airport just an hour or so before boarding time.
Once we got through security, calmed down, got food and coffee, and sat down to await boarding we were both able to fully compete the passenger declaration forms – all good there. Of course, on the other end of this flight literally NOBODY checked or asked about the passenger declaration. For my own sanity, I have to assume we would have been flagged at the passport scanner in Auckland – otherwise we had a lot of stress for no reason.
So, we made it to New Zealand. We got to our AirBnB in the city center easily – couldn’t connect to the internet right away but a quick message to the host got us the password – and all was good. However, on our first walk around town – the second street we walked along actually – we witnessed an attempted robbery in broad daylight.
It started with loud noise. We both turned around to screeching tires and several loud bangs across the street and behind us. It was kind of surreal, our understanding of exactly what was going on catching up to what we saw. About 7 masked teenagers in a car had driven up to a jewelry store, got out, and were attempting to smash the doors and windows with metal pipes. I guess we can say “innocent until proven guilty” here, but I presume the intent here was to steal merchandise.
Fortunately for the store (and its patrons) the glass held, and it didn’t look like any of the teenagers actually got inside to steal anything. Further, bystanders on the street actually got involved to intervene.Several people helped security guards tackle and detain one of the robbers, and even more threw things (bags, traffic cones, etc.) to disrupt the robbery in progress. One man even got hit in the head during the scuffle.
When the police ultimately arrived, everyone we saw was more than willing to show their videos – yes of course almost everyone not intervening in the scene was taking video – to help out. The one teenager apprehended was put into a squad car, and the street returned to normal.
Needless to say witnessing an actual attempted violent crime within hours of arriving in the (reportedly) safest country in the world shook us a little bit. We’d started our walk searching for a cafe, but decided to walk a little bit more and changed our goal to a bar after watching this unfold.
Fortunately that part of the day went well – this was our view from the bar – Dr. Rudi’s Rooftop Brewing Co. in Auckland:
I’m writing this now from the desk at our AirBnB – we’ve got a good internet connection, some groceries for breakfast, and are doing our laundry from Fiji. All is well now, but this was definitely a hectic day on the road. Time to explore New Zealand!
