Christchurch – The Experience

Later edit: after I wrote the article, a few hours ago, more replicas of the initial earthquake have been reported and right now the situation is much worse than I initially depicted it. There is a huge demand for helping people trapped under collapsed buildings, for bringing in supplies and for starting the recovering process. I left the post published in the initial form only to keep the beautiful image I was able to see during my trip alive in the minds of my readers, but my heart is going with the people of Christchurch right now. They need help to rebuild the city in the form I was able to experience it in this post.

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Author’s note: As I write this, reports from a second earthquake in Christchurch are coming in. This one was even bigger than the last one in September. The city has many more buildings down this time. But, as one who has been in Christchurch just two days ago, and experienced its peaceful and joyful side, I know they’re going to build it back again. They’re great people and they deserve a fantastic city. What you’re going to read relates to my pre-earthquake experience of Christchurch, as many parts of the article were wrote a few days ago.

I always wanted to go to Christchurch, on the Southern Island of New Zealand. In fact, I always wanted to go to the Southern Island of New Zealand and, since Christchurch is the biggest city on the Southern Island, it always made sense. So, here I am, boarding on a JetStart flight from Auckland to Christchurch (129 NZD, including a checked in 20kg luggage). I checked in online but I still had to go through the counter, to check my bag in. It didn’t take long, though, and after I passed over the security control, I was ready to go.

The domestic terminal in the Auckland airport is pretty neat, although I wasn’t quite impressed about the quantity of liter floating around. As a matter of fact, I think that terminal was the most dirty one I saw in years. It doesn’t go like this in any other area of the airport, or of Auckland, for what matters, but this is how it was.

After around half an hour, I boarded an Airbus 320 and was ready to fly. In a matter of minutes, we were up and flying over Auckland. The scenery made up for any bad impression I may have had.

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Once in Christchurch I made a short phone call to the motel I previously booked, just to confirm and ask for some directions. and then took a shuttle to it. I learned that in most airports shuttles are a way more convenient way to get to your hotel than taxis or buses. They’re small, fast, and usually cheaper than a taxi. Sometimes, if you travel in small groups, they may be even cheaper than a bus ticket.

The Aotea Motel

Once I got to the motel, I tried to check in. It took a good quarter of an hour to the owner to make his appearance, despite the fact that I conscioulsy rang a few times. To make a long story short, in just a matter of minutes I was checked in, in a small one bedroom unit (their name for a one bedroom apartment), unit that I will have to share with my travel buddy (ironically called the same as me, Dragos). The motel was pretty standard, but clean and relatively large.

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We made a short stop to eat at a local restaurant (quite an expensive one, but apparently a very old and well established one too) and then we walked downtown.

From this moment on, I started to have short, unexplainable deja-vu sequences. We had two ways to go downtown (both were involving walking, not buses) and we took the one following the local river, Avon.

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Christchurch is a silent place. It also exhales a feeling of space and well-being. There are a lot of tourists going around downtown, but they are usually polite and relaxed. Being so far away, Christchurch is selecting his visitors using a very simple filter: money. It’s really, really difficult to get there if you’re not having enough money to spend just to go to a silent place.

As we walked down, signs of the recent earthquake were visible everywhere. But it seemed that not only the locals were quite used to those quakes, but they’re also expressing their feeling towards it with a lot of humor:

the building is affected, but the church is fine...

you call that a quake?...

Downtown Christchurch

The city center is formed by a large cathedral surrounded by a generous square, surrounded by hotels, shops or cafes.

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The square is pretty animated, with fairs or other entertaining activities (I saw a huge chess game going on and some comedians too). There is also an old but completely functional tram line which encompasses the whole area. In fact, the tram line is a little bit bigger than the square, and the entire area surrounded by the tram line is formed by small shops, restaurants or cafes. Nothing has more than one level, because of the earthquakes, I presume, but the overall feeling of this center is very pleasant.

On one side of this area there is the Avon river, filled with small boats. You can actually rent a short ride on Avon, if you want to, in one of the gondola-like boats, slowly pushed by people dressed like one century ago. The overall feeling is of people having good time and enjoying life.

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One thing that you cannot ignore is that Christchurch has a much more unbalanced population, in favors of locals. I rarely experienced the same street race mix I experienced in Auckland, people were overwhelmingly on the white side.

Eating Out

You can find pretty much everything you want, from Japanese to Chinese, from Italian to Greek and from fast food to more exquisite restaurants. I tried a few of them, including a small Chinese eatery and a much more classy restaurant near the upright zone near Avon. Everywhere food was delicious and served reasonably fast.

If you’re not into eating out, you can get your food from one of the many supermarkets around. Each neighborhood seemed to have a small Chinese shop every few blocks. The problem is that you cannot always get a receipt there and you may have quite a difficult time making yourself understood.

Earthquakes

Christchurch is sitting on a long fault formed by two huge plateaus. So, the earthquakes are pretty common here, In fact, when I arrived, last week, the September quake was still spitting replicas and I actually felt a couple of them. First one came while I was sleeping, the second while I was in the shower.

Both times I felt like I was on a child swing, only I was standing. I actually didn’t know about the first replica, it was Dragos that warned me. It was like 8 AM and I was sleeping like a baby when I heard Dragos asking if I felt the quake. “They may bring in the mother of quakes, I will continue to sleep”, I said. I may have said it only in my mind though, that’s how sleepy I was. The second replica, in the shower, was almost pleasant. Just a few shakes and then nothing. It wasn’t serious enough to damage the water system or anything.

Just two days after I left Christchurch there was a really big earthquake. So big, that the cathedral tower was torn apart. Many buildings down, airport closed and phone lines closed. As I write this, they don’t yet know the real extent of the damages but it seems there are no human casualties. I feel from the people there and I also admire their courage and determination.

Activities

Back to what you can do in Christchurch – apart from living a great life as a local, that is – there are plenty of outdoors activities. First of all, there is that gondola thing. If you’re into sight seeing from a slowly sliding boat, then this one is for you. There is also sky diving and ballooning, if you really feel the need for a short shot of adrenaline.

But these are more like on the tourist side. To be honest, you can do sky diving pretty much everywhere in New Zealand, provided that you’re in a tourist area (and pretty much the entire New Zealand is a tourist area). There are some things which are part of Christchurch unique location and lifestyle culture.

One of them is surfing. You can do surfing pretty much all year round. In winter, you can also do a ski session in one of the close by mountains and then get back to city and do a surf session. I think this is something extremely rare to find.

Another thing you can do pretty much all year is paragliding. There are a few flying spots around Christchurch and a few paragliding schools, all of them pretty active. I did a tandem flight too while I was there. Needless to say it was a life changing experience (just read that blog post).

The Overall Impression

The moment I started to walk on Christchurch streets I had a very intense feeling of deja-vu. Also, I thought that somebody went very far away just to find heaven, found it, packed it up in a container, loaded it up in a plane, flew all the way up over here, unloaded it, unpacked it and gave it the name of Christchurch. Yeah, I am a little bit biased, I admit it, but the you got the main idea.

Christchurch is an incredible place to stay. As a matter of fact, despite of the recent massive earthquakes, I’m seriously considering changing my base headquarters for my future New Zealand stayings to Christchurch instead of Auckland. It’s true, Auckland is a little bit more cosmopolite, vibrant and noisy. Sometimes this mix may be motivating.

But it’s equally true that living in a city with all the modern amenities, with great food, with almost everything within walking distance, with silent surrounding and with a plethora of outdoors activities can be even more motivating.

Can’t wait to get back there. Honestly.

Learning To Fly. Literally

So here I am, in the middle of Christchurch, New Zealand, in a place called Cathedral Square, trying to find my way into a city I barely came in, a day ago. It was around 11 o’clock in the morning and the square was filled with people visiting a trade fair. Comedians, little things for sale and a vibrant atmosphere of good time.

One of the things I planned to do in Christchurch was paragliding. Back in Romania, before I left, I made a list with all the potential paragliding companies I could work with. Among them there was one called Nimbus Paragliding. After five minutes of watching the crowd in the Cathedral Square, I decided to enter in the Visitor Center (something like the Tourist Center you can find in every decent city).

Setting Things Up

I sat in a queue for about 15 minutes. A lot of people were hunting activities and they seemed to have quite a hard time picking up the best one. Eventually, I came in front of a middle age lady called Jan.

“I would like to do some paragliding”, I said, “do you know a company called Nimbus?”.
“But of course, she answered” and she picked up a phone. She rang the guy in charge and asked if he can offer me a tandem flight today. Apparently, the guy was free. After a few more questions, Jan filled up a voucher and asked me to pay for the ride.

“He’s going to pick you up at 1:30 PM form the tram station, be there on time” she said and that was basically it.

I still had a good one hour to spend before 1:30 so I returned to the motel and left all my heavy belongings there. My laptop and all the chargers, for instance. Instead, I took a sweater and some sunscreen. From my previous visits to New Zealand I learned that every time you go out in the wild, sun screen is a compulsory item to carry with you.

At 1:20 PM I was in the tram station in the same Cathedral Square. There were a lot of vans already parked, waiting for their passengers. None of them was from Nimbus though. “Excuse me”, I asked one of the drivers, “do you know if this is the place for Nimbus vans too?”. “Of course, mate, it’s right behind us”. In the second row of vans, a little bit hidden by the crowd, I saw a white, little and kind of an oldish van with the Nimbus sign on it.

I went straight to the driver: “Hi there!” The 50-something, still green looking (like pretty much everybody in New Zealand) driver smiled at me and answered: “Hi, mate! You for the tandem flight?”. “Yeap”. “Hop in, we’re going there now”.

The Meeting

As I was hopping in the left chair (they drive with the steering wheel on the right in New Zealand), the first impression of the van being oldish, well, just vanished away. It wasn’t oldish. It was a wreck. But, surprisingly, this observation didn’t have any impact whatsoever on my decision. As I sat on the chair, I had my first stomach butterfly: “Shit, I’m going to really do this…”.

He started the engine and we left the parking behind us.

“Where are you from, mate?”
“Born in Romania”, I answered, “but travel a lot”.

The guy frowned for a second, like he was trying to remember something. Then he smiled and as he turned to me he said: “You’re the first person from Romania I ever met”. “You sure, mate?”. “Of course. I’ve never met anyone else from Romania in my entire life”.

As we were getting out of the city area of Christchurch, we started to chat a little bit more. It turned out that the guy was a programmer too and he was quite proficient in PHP. “That’s my second job, you know, I build websites and stuff like that. But I like to fly so much. I keep programming on the second place, but I don’t know for how long”.

At this moment I think I had the second butterfly in my stomach because I heard myself asking: “Is this paragliding thing safe?”

Steve (will call the guy Steve, for the moment) looked at me and answered in a quite relaxed voice: “Well, flying is perfectly safe, it’s the crashing that may be dangerous.”

The next moment I felt like the car windows are going to blow away, that’s how hard I laughed. And, from that moment on, the butterflies in my stomach went away for good.

The Place

In ten minutes we arrived at some sort of a mountain. The road became narrower and we started to face quite a bit of steep curves. We were going up pretty fast. There was no protection on any side of the road, but, somehow, I didn’t feel the need for one. The valley walls were quite steep and if the wreck we were into would fall over, well, that would have been really bad. Somehow, I had the distinct sensation that this won’t gonna happen.

Eventually, we arrived at a point with a little bit of a parking space and two small billboards confirming that you reached a paragliding take off place.

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From the parking space there was a hill going down really slow and I knew that this was the place from where we’re going to take off.

As we parked, I saw a guy resting 30 meters down the hill. “Do yo know him?”, I asked. “Yeap, he flies too”. The guy approached and started to talk to Steve in a respectful voice. The language they speak in New Zealand has little to do with English, although it’s still advertised as such. Although I know they’re talking in English, I somehow have an incredibly hard time to understand what they’re really talking about. That was one of those moments.

I don’t think I understood more than “flew for two hours”, “a little bit of thermal” and “cool”. I asked Steve to translate this for me. “Well, it seems that there isn’t enough wind. If there’s not enough wind, we can’t take off. Are you in a hurry?”. I wasn’t, so we decided to wait a little, just to see if the wind will straighten up.

Meanwhile, the other flier started to prepare his glider. “Good, let’s how he does, and if he’s taking off, we’re flying too” said Steve.

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The other flier seemed to do a good job, but Steve wasn’t impressed. “He’s not taking off”, he said. It certainly looked that he was taking off to me. A sudden intuition made me ask: “What is a thermal?”. “Well, when the sun heats certain spots, the air becomes hotter, creating ascendant currents. If you hit one of those spots, it’s like taking an elevator. You take off”. Now I understood what he meant my taking off. Although the flyer was certainly doing his moves, he wasn’t higher than 50 meters. “No thermals today?” I asked. “Nope, not too much”.

In 20 minutes the other flier landed. At this point Steve told me: “Look, I’m going to do a solo flight, to see how it’s up there. I’m going to the end of the valley, hopefully the wind will be more powerful there. Then I’ll be back to tell you if we can fly or not. Hopefully.” he added with a smile.

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The Preparation

After Steve landed I went straight to him and asked if we’re going to fly. “But of course, get ready”. So, it was finally happening. Steve started to unpack the tandem flying glider and gear.

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In a few minutes I had a helmet on and my own harness. Steve put me in position, which was basically head down to the hill. “Now, I will be staying at the same level with you, only with my back on the hill. I will lift the glider up. When I’m saying: 1, 2, 3, you run two steps and then you get back another two. That’s because you’re going to create tension in the glider. It will pull you back. You understand?”

“1, 2, 3” I thought, it’s not that bad.

“After that, I will rotate with my face downhill too, right behind you, attach myself to your harness and tell you to run. When you hear me ”run, run“ you go downhill with all your power, chest forward and try to jump into the valley. Don’t worry, you won’t fall down. When you feel the lift-off, pull yourself back into the harness seat. Hopefully, we will be up and flying at that moment. Everything clear?”

Didn’t looked like rocket science to me. “1, 2, 3 and then run, run”. Easy.

“Ok, let’s do it!”.

Flying

He stayed next to me, with the face back and with the hands on the gliders controls. “You ready?” “Yes”.

“1, 2, 3 now!”

I made three fast steps and then I felt like a hurricane was pulling me back. “Back, back” yelled Steve. I did 2 steps back. As I looked over my shoulder I didn’t see the glider on the hill anymore. It was up.

“Good, yelled Steve, I’m getting behind you now.” In just one move, he was behind me, attached my harness to its harness and started to yell “run, run”. All this didn’t take more than a second.

I pushed myself forward as far as I could and started to run. It felt like I had to carry a huge weight and like I wasn’t making any progress. After the first two, three steps it suddenly started to feel easier. Three more steps and then I heard Steve: “push yourself back into the seat! Feet up! Feet up!”.

Instinctively, I followed. At this moment, I watched how my feet were loosing contact with the ground. There was a huge second in which I didn’t realize what’s happening. There was a fantastic tension lifting me up but at the same moment my entire history as a walking creature was pulling me back to earth, in a desperate attempt to find comfort. I’m a walking creature, I don’t fly, my entire body seemed to scream.

I tried as much as I could to lose the tensions in my muscle and to avoid looking down to my feet. As I did this, I literally felt a huge part of me going slowly down, over my feet and into the ground. At this moment, what was left of me was flying.

That was a feeling I will never forget.

From that moment on, my history as a flying creature started to unfold incredibly smooth. I was watching the valley behind us and was feeling the wing above floating and carrying me. I had an incredible sensation of safety and deja vu. Like I did that before. After we had like 20-30 meters of altitude, Steve started to teach me how to steer the glider.

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We were doing small “walks” on the sky, just like the other flier did, at 50 something meters high. When we reached the end of such a “walk” we usually lean to the left or to the right, and the glider was following. We were using the wind to help us turn around and change direction.

After 10 minutes of doing this, Steve yelled: “There aren’t many thermals here, let’s go to the end of the valley and hopefully we will find some.”

He steered the glider straight forward to the end of the valley. We were actually sailing this time, using the wind to push us forward. In a few seconds we flew like 500 meters in straight line. Once we reached the end of the valley, Steve tried again to put the glider under the wind, in search of some thermal ascendant current. As I was looking down to the bottom of the valley I saw a few abandoned cars. “Stolen and abandoned” explained Steve.

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After a few “walks” on the end of the valley we finally catch a thermal. In fact we catch a few thermals and we started to lift off, but the higher we were going, the stronger the horizontal wind from the sea was becoming. We were starting to experience some strong bumping. To be honest, I quite enjoyed this. Apparently, Steve didn’t. We were like flying horizontally and then, all of a sudden, we were receiving a push from the bottom. The glider was actually stretching our shoulders up. But at the same time, these very ascensions had the tendency to switch the glider on his vertical axis. I could feel Steve fighting really hard on the controls to keep the glider steady.

“There is a combination of directional and ascendant wind”, he told me after a few minutes. “We’d better find a place to land”. “We’re going back?” I asked. “Nope, we’re landing here. You see that horizontal part?” “The one in front of me? Like right here?”. “Exactly. Hold on and run when you touch the earth. Don’t stop until I say so.”

In just a few seconds I saw the earth coming towards me. Steve was steering the glider down. I had some mixed feelings squeezed in those 2-3 seconds: my flying creature part was not agreeing to this, but my walking creature part was suddenly waking up, making me move my feet in the air, in the anticipation of the contact. The glider went ahead and down just like an airplane when it lands and then my feet started to move on solid ground. We were down.

“Run, run!” I heard Steve. I continued to run until I felt the tension from my shoulders going down to the point it disappeared. The glider was on horizontal position behind us. We landed at approximately 1 km from the place we were taking off.

That was it.

I left Steve packing his gear, and started to climb up the hill, with my own harness. It seemed so difficult to do this by walking. Only seconds ago I was flying over these hills. Now I had to walk my way up.

The rest of the day went ok. Once we were downtown, I had a short cup of coffee with Steve and chatted a little about business, blogging, programming and alike.

We parted ways as friends.

That was my first lesson of flying. The first from a long line. That I can tell you for sure.

The Trip To New Zealand – Waiheke Island

The best part of my trip to Japan was New Zealand. I’m joking of course. After I finished my staying in Tokyo I took the plane for Auckland. I had to stay 2 days in the “City of Sails” for some business related tasks. Part of my relocation process to New Zealand is setting up a company there and this trip was supposed to add the final touches to this project.

The flight from Tokyo to Auckland was on a Air New Zealand cruise and was quite busy. Never had a flight over that part of the Pacific and this one proved to be quite a shaky one. Out of 11 hours of flying I don’t think we had 2 hours without turbulence, if we sum up all the small, 5-7 minutes of smooth going. The good part was the plane had a working entertainment system, and the captain was a rather humorous guy.

I took the opportunity to watch “Bedtime Stories” with Adam Sandler, and two movies with Will Smith, both equally bad. There was “Seven Pounds” – good plot and theme but extended way over my supportability threshold – and “Hanckok”. If it wasn’t for Charlize Theron, I would have switch instantly to “Ikegami” a Japanese movie about an orwellian, highly productive society in which people were programmed to randomly die by the age of 22. I eventually saw “Ikegami” on my flight Auckland – Hong Kong, but that’s another story.

After I landed in Auckland, and passed the security control – for some reason they thought it could be a good idea to search my luggage, because I was staying only 2 days, which was kind of suspect – I finally checked in to my hotel, 3 minutes walk from Auckland Sky Tower. The rest of the day was dedicated to the business part of the trip, and, most of it, to the jetlag, as I surprised myself sleeping without even noticing it.

Waiheke Island

I spent the next day socializing with friends in Auckland. Part of my new world there was described in another post about what you know is what you get. I had a good time seeing them again, connecting, telling stories and catching up. I was also much better from the jetlag which made me an almost bearable person.

The next day I had to check out from the hotel and take the plane on my final destination, Romania, via Hong Kong and Frankfurt. Check out was at 10 AM and my plane was at 11 PM. So I had more than 12 hours to spend in Auckland before I was actually living. And I decided to spend that time on Waiheke Island.

Waiheke Island is located north east from Auckland and is a little bit far away than Rangitoto island, the one you can see from anywhere in Auckland. Waiheke is inhabited – as opposed to Rangitoto, which isn’t – and is also famous for its wines and wine tours. Is also a destination for rock stars like Peter Gabriel and Kylie Minogue who reportedly have bought land or houses there. Haven’t seen a sign with “this is Peter Gabriel house” so I will just take this from granted for now.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is the fact that Waiheke holds one of the most precious spots on Earth for me. I already wrote about that, it’s a small beach called Little Oneroa Beach and it was one of the most enjoyable places during my first trip to New Zealand. Only the thought that I will be able to stay again on that beach made my heart go a little faster. Can’t explain this strange vibration for this place, but that’s it.

So, after I checked out I left my luggage at the hotel to be picked up in the evening and headed for the harbor, down Queen Street. I was there at around 11 AM, just in time to catch a ferry for Waiheke. The city was slowly behind us.

Auckland Harbor leaved behind form the ferry

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The Trip To New Zealand

Today is the last day of my trip to New Zealand, my plane leaves tomorrow at noon, taking me on another 37 hours travel. It’s been one of the busiest and most exciting weeks in my life so far. There was so much information to ingest and process, and so much interaction to sustain. I can’t really claim that I processed all the information and I’m sure there will be weeks, maybe months in which this processing will continue. I think it’s a good time though to make a first round up of what I touched the most during this visit. It’s not gonna be complete, I’m sure, and it will only be a reflection of this moment, but it will help me organize my thoughts and maybe will help other people interested in living in New Zealand, or just visiting it.

Ambiance

The strongest sensation challenges when I arrived here were related to the senses of smelling, viewing and hearing. I don’t know the exact order, and I guess they must be somehow related, but the first thing you’ll notice is an unparalleled clarity of the air. It’s like the sun light is two times more powerful than anywhere else in the world – and in some respect it is, we’ll talk about later. There is a flow of light and a powerful shading contrast you will see even in the cloudiest day. That’s even more intense near the ocean, at the beaches or in the ferry, and I guess is because of the water reflections. You will have to wear sunglasses. Here more than anywhere else in the world, sunglasses are not a fancy accessory but a must have in order to protect your eyes from the unusual strong sun light. The other thing you must carry with you, especially during the summer, is the sunscreen lotion. It’s common to see people stopping on the street, taking out from their pockets or bags a sunscreen tube and rubbing their face and hands.

And this leads to the smelling area. People smell differently, but usually very nice. There are some exceptions, of course, but the main point is that the clear air makes so easy to pick up smells and most of the times those smells are nice. Everything has a smell here, and if it doesn’t, it will just smell like the ocean. Because the level of humidity is very high, the vegetation tends to be luxurious, and even the backyard grass of every house just grows almost by itself. You have to cut the backyard grass pretty often, and that makes for a steady – not very profitable, but steady – business for some people here. Along with the grass, in every part of the city – Auckland, that is – are spots filled with flowers which spread a delicate fragrance. The humidity in the atmosphere gives also some volume to the odor, and I surprised myself several times stopping in the middle of the road and just smelling the air. Maybe this sounds a little bit too enthusiastic, but believe me, there is a huge difference in this regard between Auckland and Bucharest. And on top of this, I haven’t had any moment at all the feeling of pollution in any way whatsoever, nor visually, auditory or by smell. The continuous wind that blows over the shores of those islands is acting like a non-stop cleaning agent.

And the third sensation challenged was related to the sense of hearing. All the noises have a different, usually higher, volume here. I noticed that in my first night, when the noise of the cars passing near my bead and breakfast accommodation was perceived closer than usual. I thought it was because of the flight and all, 37 hours of continuous traveling might affected my hearing somehow, but the next day we went to a reserve – a park – with a view to the ocean. At more than 500 meters from the beach there was a sailboat, and we clearly heard the noise made by the sail when it was hit by the wind. It was like the boat was 5 meters away from us. Pretty scary in the beginning, but you get used to it in a few days. Anyway, all the noises are more intense than usual, and, in combination with the stronger light and the abundance of the – usually nice – smells, this makes for a very intense sensorial experience.

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iPhone as a travel mate

Initially, this post was written during my first trip to New Zealand, September 2008. But since then I had several other long trips, including Switzerland, Thailand and Japan. Each of these trips added some value to the way I’m using my iPhone, so I felt the need to share what I’ve learned during those trips. You’ll easily find which application was used in which trip, but I guess the most important is to find some help and make your travels more enjoyable.

During my first trip to New Zealand, which is more than 20.000 km away from my country, Romania, I had the chance to use my iPhone as a travel companion. What follows is a compilation of what I tried, learned and used during that trip and the nex ones.

Maps

The first and one of the most important things about iPhone as a travel mate is the Maps application. Although I don’t have permanent internet access (I followed Apple’s advice about turning data roaming off, “to avoid substantial roaming charges…”) but I do have a decent WiFi access at my bed and breakfast facility here in Auckland. Every time I have to go to an area I don’t know yet, I open Maps and try to familiarize myself with the surroundings. I suppose that if I have data access everything would be even simpler, because I can just use the GPS facilities and find my way out in real time. But even without the GPS functionality, the Maps application is extremely useful. In the picture below you’ll see the very beach where I took the sunrise picture in the first post about the trip to New Zealand:

You can even see the tree under which I sat while I took the photo. I admit. sometimes this is spooky… But sometimes is just useful.

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Trip To New Zealand – first impressions

It’s my 3rd day in New Zealand and I finally found a little bit of time to blog about my impressions about this. First of all, this is what I call a “pulse taking” visit, in which I will try to incorporate as much information as I can about this country, while trying to understand at the emotional level how can I congruently vibrate with such an environment. The complete move, including my family and all the stuff I consider necessary to take with me will take place in 2-3 months. So I don’t have any specific goals for this visit, just trying to enjoy as much as I can.

Traveling

I had around 22 hours of flight in order to get here from Bucharest, and after adding the checkin times and other amounts of time spent in airports between flights I come up with a total of 37 hours of traveling time. Quite a lot. I had to go to Vienna first from Bucharest, from there a I took a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, and then from Bangkok I took the last flight for Auckland New Zealand. The last 2 flights were around 9 hours each. The second was with Thai Airlines, my first flight with them, and I had to say that I was pleasantly surprised about the quality of services. From the way the plane was prepared and presented, to the steward’s care for the passengers, everything was nice and easy. I even got a bunch of salads for dinner after I told to a steward that I am trying to keep a raw food diet, and I won’t eat the chicken whatsoever. Very nice .

There is another point that is worth mentioning about the travel and that is the very strict control about biosecurity. New Zealand is making a public statement about keeping the Earth green, and especially about preserving New Zealand natural habitat, and they are respecting it. You have to declare all the food you have with you, or any other plants in any form, even woodcrafts. You also have to declare even if you had camping in the last 30 days or if you have hiking boots with you. This is making even more difficult to enter the country, once you are in the airport, not to mention the time spent to get there, of course. If you are messing around with those things they can fine you up to 100.000 New Zealand Dollars. Auch!

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Why Going To New Zealand

Once my business completely sold and after all the other assets will be transformed into money, we will move to a new country, New Zealand. This announce made quite a bit of shock among my current circle of friends, business partners and relatives. For those of you who don’t know, New Zealand is almost exactly under Romania, the Eastern European country in which I was born and lived up to my 37th year. Basically, if you put a long enough sting into an Earth scholar globe, and start from Bucharest, it will go out exactly from the Auckland, New Zealand, the other side of the planet. I guess it’s more than 180 degrees of change, if you know what I mean… So the surprise and shock were understandable to some point.

Most of the people were puzzled by the size of all the involved changes and, most of the time unconsciously, made the assumption that the decision was a sort of escape, a “take the money and run” attitude, in which we try to move from a difficult country as far as possible. Living in Romania is hard these days, it’s an evolving country, and its evolution is accelerated. There is an incredible diversity of attitudes and people, from the consumerism and deception, to spirituality and compassion. The proportion of these ingredients varies drastically though, and this mix makes up for some pretty interesting rollercoaster. I was living here all my life, and for the last 10 years as an entrepreneur. It’s not easy, and I know a lot of people who got really sick and tired of all the moral problems like corruption, deceptive politics, economical instability, and ran as far as possible from them.

Well, is not my case. I know it’s difficult to live in Romania, but I’m not going away because of that. From some very practical approach, living in a new country, whatever country that might be, is far more difficult than living in a country you do know for more than 30 years. The main point is that I’m doing it out of intention, not out of reaction. This is a very important difference and I will try to make it as clear as I can below.

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