Today was the day! After two months of planning, it was time to begin our adventure! Having rattled our way to Heathrow T4 on the Tube, we made the most of my BA Bronze status to skip the check in queue and drop our bags. We flew with Malaysian Airlines this time, owing to them being substantially cheaper than BA and it only taking one stop to Auckland rather than two.
The first leg of our flight was on the main deck of an A380. The Malaysian planes look good in their blue, black and white livery. The flight to KL was pleasantly uneventful, although I struggled to sleep for any meaningful length of time which was a little frustrating. Our flight itinerary only allowed us an hour to connect to our flight down to Auckland in KL, which wasn’t helped by us landing into KL 30 minutes late!
After dashing through KL airport, we found our gate and made it onboard to settle down into our seats. It turned out that this flight was also delayed, which probably helped with our making the transfer but meant that we didn’t make it into Auckland until 12.30am on the 8th October.
Once at Auckland, we made sure to get our passports stamped (rather than go through the automatic gates) and recovered our bags. Then it was off to biosecurity to have our hiking boots looked at before being let loose in New Zealand. Given it was now 2am, we headed off on foot to our nearby hotel to get a couple of hours sleep before heading back to the airport for our flight down to Christchurch. Night night!
