The hope was that with a decent night of sleep in Singapore, and some napping on the plane, I’d be able to go and do something during the layover. I’m not sure why I didn’t do an overnight layover in Fiji; Maybe the flight times didn’t work out?
Well, neither of those things happened, and I was running on fumes by the time I got to Nadi at 4am. To wait for my flight to Auckland at 7:30pm. While trying not to fall asleep too much in the departures hall.
I’d considered hotel day rooms, but the only references I could find to them were in the rumour & ‘I think you can do this’ department, and it was really hot out there, so the idea of trudging around trying to find a place, and trusting that I wouldn’t oversleep? Not that appealing.
Though it could be argued that I was pretty sleep deprived & making bad decisions at this point.
So I hung around for half a day. Read a lot, dozed off a few times, and wondered why exactly I’d thought this would be a good idea. Oh, and muttered darkly about the awful hostel in Singapore.
Eventually they opened check-in & bag drop for my flight. I did try to do online check-in, and it sort of worked, but not well enough that it would give me a scannable boarding pass; The kiosk eventually worked enough to print me a boarding pass, but not a baggage label, so I still had to join the thankfully short queue to get that done.
I had a window seat, and there was nobody in the middle, so Aisle & I had a buffer zone to put blankets & pillows in.
While we were still at the terminal I experimented with leaning myself & the pillow against the wall as a sleeping position, and woke up just as we got to the runway, having slept right through taxiing & the safety briefing thing.
Got a bit of a second wind at that point, so I mostly read for the rest of the flight.
Arrival in Auckland went about as well as you could expect. The baggage collection hall seems oddly small & cramped to me, but I’ve been through a lot of airports recently, many of them huge, so AKL may just be small in comparison? Probably didn’t help that the biosecurity/customs bit has eaten some more space in the hall, meaning that the people who crowd around the baggage things had even less space for their carts, and as a result created a barrier that stopped other people getting to the bags, and then from getting out.
Does that sound mean and uncharitable? Good. It was nearly midnight, and I’d had no decent sleep since Bangkok. My least favourite types are the ones who bring the entire family group right up to the edge of the conveyor, plus multiple carts, and just hang out there, taking forever to get themselves sorted even after they have all their bags, while everyone else has to work around them.
Biosecurity went with the honour system & took my word for it that I had no anything to declare, so that bit was fast, and my hotel was in the carpark directly outside the terminal, so I was probably in my room within half an hour or so of landing, and asleep by 1am.