Adam's Adventures in NZ: The Return of the Jedi King

That's a lot of angry people waiting to take their fustration
out on some poor airline representative.

I don't know how familiar you might be with Chaos Theory. To state the old cliche: If a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa it has the potential to cause a tidal wave in the oceans of Nebraska (geography, smeography). Wikipedia defines the chaos theory as: the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. Regardless of what how the universe behaves in accordance with a theory based around chaotic determinacy, we all know how the universe acts in accordance to one of its strongest laws, Adam's Law. Thus, in accordance with Adam's Law a volcano erupting in Chile must disrupt an airline flight leaving out New Zealand, so long as Adam is booked on said flight. However, I am getting ahead of myself. It is best to start in the beginning.

I arrived in my final destination in New Zealand, Queenstown. My preplanning for this trip led me to the belief that Queenstown was a city, but what I found was more akin to a main strip of shops, cafes, and pubs (always pubs) along a few main streets. Do not get me wrong, as far as small towns go, this one was situated in the most beautiful mountain/lake landscape you could ever hope ti imagine. My original plan was to give myself three days in Queenstown, as I was hoping to use one of those days to possibly go skiing. After all, it is winter in New Zealand, and Queenstown is closest to the South Pole I will probably ever get in my life, making it prime skiing country. Unfortunately, it is alsoy one of the warmest winters this little island has ever faced in a long time, which is bad when your economy is based on ski slopes. Even more depressing I was in Queenstown for the kick-off of the annual event of Winterfest, which called for tons of snowboarding, skiing, sleding, etc events, as well as ice-skating and all sorts of winter related competitions. All of which were canceled due to the lack of one critical element: snow.

So here I was stuck in this small town. The hostel I stayed at was cramped, overpriced, uncomfortable, and filled with noisy and drunken frat-boys. To further add to my miserable mood, I was exhausted from my non-stop traveling and almost out of New Zealand money. Basically, I knew it was time to go home (and by home I meant Australia, where things still made no sense, but made more sense than the less sense they did in New Zealand.) I do not want to give you a bad impression. In fact, I absolutely loved my time in the NZ, but I sensed it was ready to leave (and that the island might explode at any moment from errant geothermal activity). So when my day for departure came, I readily returned my rental car to the airport and sat waiting for my flight which would take me back to Auckland, where I would wait in the airport for 8 hours for my connecting flight to Australia. I was prepared for the idleness. I had exactly NZ$15 left in my pocket for lunch and dinner, my computer was fully charged, I had a anthology book of Sci-Fi short stories from 1962, and of course there was always something I should be writing. So I collected my boarding pass, went through security, and waited to board my plane... which never came.

Queenstown, there is not a lot there, but there is a lot to see.

The problem was that (and I did not know this at time of setting up my NZ Quest) is that Queenstown airport is one of the hardest airports to get into or out of in the world. The constantly changing atmospheric temperatures and pressures have a tendency to blanket the airfield with heavy clouds of fog and mist. This was the situation on the morning of my departure. The Jetstar Airways plane that was to arrive to collect us could not land (because it is 1942 in Queenstown and no one apparently has instrumentation that can cut through the foreboding menace of heavy water-vapor). Long story short: my flight was delayed an hour. I laughed because it didn't matter to me whether I waited in Queenstown or Auckland airport. I had no worries. So, one hour passed, then a second, and then a third. I was starting to get worried. My flight was scheduled to leave at 9:30 am, it was now 12:30 pm. The fog had not lifted and the flight had still not landed. It was shifted to Dunedin, a city set up by the men who survived the sinking of the island of Númenor. (If you don't get that one, don't even try to figure it out.) We were continually baited with promises of the plane's eventual return, but it never happened. To add insult to injury Air New Zealand was operating as normal and the sound of their screaming engines as they soared off into the sky was understandably frustrating. To Jetstar's credit they give me a NZ$10 lunch voucher for my trouble... of course everything in the airport cost 15 dollars or more and I still had to spend eight dollars of my own money to get lunch. (I mean 4 dollars for 250 mL of coke?)

Finally after, hours of waiting (and pacing), around 2:00 pm we were told that the flight was officially canceled. I was then made to wait for an hour in a line of angry and irritable people (me being one of them) to get our flights rescheduled. I was able to get a flight for the next day and a hotel room for the night. Upon arriving at the hotel I had to scramble to get in contact with the travel company I had been dealing with in Australia to get them to push back my trip to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, which thankfully they managed to do. So no worries, I would be gone in the morning and I got a free a night in a hotel room.

MEANWHILE: Somewhere in Chile, the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano began its eruption on June 4, after more than half a century of dormancy. The volcano is found in the Puyehue National Park in the Andes region of Chile, just west of Argentina (geography smography). Ash was spread as far as Buenos Aires, more than 800 miles away. This happened weeks before my departure from New Zealand and I had known and been monitoring the ash-clouds' movement as I traveled across New Zealand. Several days before I even arrived in Queenstown I was told that the cloud had moved off and flights had returned to normal. On the night of my canceled flight, the ash cloud came back, canceling flights across the region.

Of course, I knew nothing of this, so I woke up the next morning at 6:00 in the morning with hopes of departure. I checked out of my room and boarded the bus for the airport. We sat on the bus for twenty minutes before being told that our flight was again canceled, this time due to the ash cloud. I had to recheck into the hotel, scramble to call Jetstar to get a rebooked flight. (Saturday!! That's three days away!) I then had to get in contact again with the Barrier Reef travel company and explain my situation. They would not let me cancel the trip, but they did push it back again. I was able to canceled my hostel accommodation though, and lastly I checked out flights for Air New Zealand, which was flying at lower altitudes to avoid the ash cloud. (How come no one else thought of that?) Long story short the cheapest flight out of New Zealand was roughly NZ$1,000. So I found myself stuck (still) in Queenstown.

My New Zealand prison cell.

The ironic part is that by "stuck," I mean to say I was put into a beautiful two bed suite (which I had all to myself), where I did nothing but write, play video games, watch movies, and spend my time catching up on the fine programming provided by Nickelodeon (Oh, SpongeBob, you can't catch jellyfish with a butterfly net... that doesn't even make sense.) I was also supplied with a buffet breakfast every morning and a buffet dinner every night. Seeing as how I had just spent the last two and half weeks subsiding off bread, peanut butter, cereal, and noodles, a full (all you can eat) buffet meal with actual meat, vegetables, and assorted pastries was like mana from an Evocation spell. I also had full access to the hotel's gym and spent a few hours each day working out, a feat I have not done since leaving America. So, admittedly, it could have been worse. I did my best to make best of a bad situation, and for a few days it wasn't too bad.

When Saturday rolled around (shockingly) my flight was again canceled. I then had to go through the whole process again. I had to contact Jetstar, and I finally got through after two and half hours on hold. (TUESDAY!! I've been trapped here since last Tuesday! I can't wait a whole week!) Then when I again contacted my poor Barrier Reef travel representative (poor woman she knew me by name), I was told that they could only push it back another day and that they could no longer reschedule it for me again. I was told that if I was not back in Australia by the next day (Sunday) I was going to lose out on the trip (and the three-hundred and fifty bucks I spent.) Now it was at this time that I thought about Adam's Law (If it can wrong it will go wrong for Adam), and I took in all the theoretical data, scientific evidence, and philosophical and religious implications of such a natural law and I came to a realization: Maybe it was not so much a law but a self-imposed (often comically so) theory.

I realized that if I blame all my mishaps on some foolish and imagined rule of my own making I disallow myself from taking any affirmative action to correct it, and thus release myself from all responsibility in my own fate, and simply lay blame for my problems on some cosmic and immutablly set destiny. In the heat of the moment I summed this entire thought process up very succintly with all my wit and command of the Enlish language: I can't %*#@*&^ stay in this country another day. So I got online and found a flight on Air New Zealand for NZ$380 to Sydney. It was not where I needed to go, but it is the biggest airport hub in the South-Western hemisphere, and as the ash cloud had pretty moved beyond Australia air-space, I felt confident I could get a connecting flight. The only snag was that the flight was in four hours. So I booked the flight and then again called back Jetstar, and basically forced them to cancel my current two flights, book me on a 6 am flight out of Sydney for the next day, and refund me the difference. (We don't really do that... I don't care I have been trapped here for 4 days and I won't stay here till Tuesday!)

It looks beautiful, but that red strip along the bottome of the
sky is the Chilean ash

So, that was how I ended my trip to New Zealand. I had two hours to get to the airport to check in for my flight, and being that I was now completely out of New Zealand money, I walked the 10 kilometers to the airport. I made it just in time to check in for my flight, but my plain was delayed another hour (So maybe its not a law, maybe its more like Adam's Theory), but at least this time I boarded my flight, and soon enough I was winging my way over the Tasman Sea bidding farewell to New Zealand. Ahead of me I still had fourteen hours to kill in Sydney Airport before my early morning flight, which included 4 hours of "sleeping" in the McDonalds down the road from the domestic terminal. However, I have a suspicion that I was flagged by Jetstar as "an angry customer," because I was given a free upgrade on my flight to the emergency (Woo-Hoo, free leg room). In the end, I arrived in sunny Cairns in time to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, but that is another story.

For now I bid farewell to New Zealand. It was a land of amazing beauty, hobbits, culture, adventure, volcanoes, earthquakes, and of course, stange flightless birds. I had my fair share of triumphs and tragedies on those two small isles, but despite it all, I find myself coming away with a very favorable view of New Zealand. It is definitely a place I would recommend visiting again. It is also a place i could see myself returning to, and hopefully next time there will more snow and less ash.