Held up in Sydney

A quick note to anyone flying to New Zealand on a one-way ticket:
Make sure to have proof of your flight out of the country before you try to check in to your flight into it.  Despite Jeff's careful visa research back in February and March, we arrived to the Sydney airport late (not our fault) and unprepared to meet the one requirement for entering New Zealand beyond having a ticket (totally our fault).  We ran into this same sort of trouble before, on the very first leg of our journey in fact.  We were forced to print a falsified ferry ticket in a small office behind the Asiana check-in desks in Sea-Tac just to get them to print us off boarding passes for our flight to Osaka, Japan.  Once in Japan, however, immigration didn't even mention the need to have onward travel planned.  The folks in Seattle insisted we had to have proof of onward travel, but we weren't pressed at all coming through immigration in Osaka.  Leaving Sydney, this time with budget airline and Qantas affiliate, JetStar, we were forced to purchase onward tickets before our boarding passes were issued.

The situation was tense, with one gal behind the counter yelling at the two helping us and another young lady in the same boat to hurry up and finish because they had to start boarding.  This caused Jeff to sweat profusely, and Annette to cringe as she realized he had forgotten to put on deodorant.  Being on the wrong side of security while three agents try frantically to jump through the hoops necessary just to get you HEADING in the right direction turned out to be pretty stressful.  But, in spite of all of the excitement, we made it to the plane with enough time to board  (not even the last ones on) and even take a few deep breaths before the plane started moving.  The Jetstar gals must run into idiots like us a lot because they led us into refundable tickets that (only) set us back $50 each in handling fees, the receipts for which we filed in the, "Well, that's what we get" category of our 2011 Grand Adventure.  New Zealand immigration was a little more on the ball than Japan's, as we were grilled extensively on several topics as we tried to enter the country, including, but not limited to, our onward travel plans.

The two and a half hours between leaving our Sydney hostel and boarding our flight to Auckland brought above average stress levels.  First, the airport train was broken and we were forced to take a replacement bus, which was slower in picking us up and in making its way to the airport.  The onward ticket out of New Zealand added to our stress, especially since the long line to check-in and slow counter work (presumably due to other morons blowing off NZ's visa rules, just like us) meant that we would have been cutting our timing very close even if we had an onward ticket and obtaining our boarding pass had gone smoothly.  Ending our time in Australia on such a hurried, stressful note led us to skip the all important, "Awe, we're so sad to leave," moment.  Exhausted, it was all we could do to watch the Hangover on our net-book while our stomachs reminded us that we had failed to get dinner (budget airlines only serve meals if you are willing to part with vast amounts of money in exchange for barely edible food). 

It wasn't until that evening, around 2am, when we were in our Auckland hotel, that we were able to stop, realize we had left the wonderful land of Oz, and reflect on how much we had enjoyed that rough-and-tumble, hard-drinking, hard partying, kind-hearted country.