Our final morning in Auckland. We slept deeply and ate a little cereal in the room before heading to the airport. Passports and tickets in hand, we checked in and boarded an Air Pacific 737 to Fiji. Watching the North Island disappear into the Pacific, we waved goodbye to the place where we spent a delightful month.
The flight from Auckland to Fiji was three hours, followed by a nine-hour layover. Since the airport is so small (perhaps seven flights a day), they stamped our passports and kicked us out so they could close up for a couple of hours. Fiji has some gorgeous scenery, but is very much a tourist colony with a stark divide between wealthy tourists and impoverished locals. One result of this divide was an uncomfortably servile relationship on the part of the latter toward the former — much different from what we experienced in New Zealand. We caught a taxi, which took us to one of the large, plantation-style hotels on the beach. Tired from the 100-degree heat, the hotel (despite the socio-economic relations described above) turned out to be an OK place to have drinks, a meal, enjoy the Indian mynas hopping through the open-air lobby and head out to the beach to watch the sun set into the ocean. Eventually the taxi picked us up and returned us to the airport.
After checking in and making our way through the duty-free shops (which cover most of the airport), we boarded the 747 for the long flight to Los Angeles.
In transit. We crossed the International Date Line, experiencing February 25 twice. Since we experienced it entirely in airplanes and airports, it wasn’t particularly memorable. After a late airline dinner, I caught a few hours of sleep on the airplane, but Jen was kept awake by the family in front of us. My conscious hours were spent reading Joe Jackson’s A Cure For Gravity, a slim volume on New Zealand’s environmental history and a copy of the Big Takeover (US-music magazine) found in Auckland. After an eleven-hour flight, we touched down in LAX’s international terminal. Los Angeles was chilly and rainy. We had a ten-hour layover, and (after fetching our bags and checking them onto our USAir flight), we opted to just vegetate in the airport, catching dinner at a sports bar. Our flight was adjacent to the Southwest gates, so in addition to reading and people-watching, we got to experience the Southwest gate attendants’ goofy patter. At 10:30pm, we boarded a capacity red-eye flight back to Pittsburgh and the winter we escaped a month ago.
Piñata Dog in LAX
