Dylan Schiemann

On April 12th, I left Tokyo for New Zealand. My lack of understanding of the size of the Pacific surprised me when I learned that the travel time from Tokyo to New Zealand is approximately the same as Los Angeles to New Zealand.

Anyways, after my final hours in Tokyo, I rode to Narita airport and took a 10+ hour red-eye flight to Auckland on an older Air New Zealand 767 with business class service that should really be classified as premium economy. After my awesome experience on Asiana Air, I was a bit underwhelmed with everything about this flight except for the friendliness of the staff which was great.

Arriving in New Zealand was interesting due to the very strong warnings about bringing anything in through customs that might harm the ecological purity of the kiwi nation. After a layover for a few hours in the Koru Lounge, I was on my way to Queenstown. For the non-cloudy portions of this flight, the views were breathtaking.

The landing was particularly surprising as our 737 landed right between two hills on a single runway. At the end of the runway, the plane stops and turns around to head to the terminal. It’s an oddly small airport for such large planes. Air New Zealand did serve veggie chips, my new favorite short flight snack.

Queenstown is simply astonishing in beauty.

I checked into the lovely Dairy Private Luxury Hotel with a nice view of Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu and then headed down to the lake for a quick hand-make fish and chips dinner. I met a few people from Germany and China that were there for a few months studying English and learned more about the town. I’ve been meeting my fair share of randomly interesting people throughout my trip. I then walked around Queenstown, and realized that it also has the requisite Starbucks, before crashing early after the long red-eye the night before.