Friday 6 Feb 2025 – Well, we’ve been in the UK now for four whole months! It’s definitely time to be on the move again. We both relaxed easily into a nice comfortable routine at home after our last trip, and there are times when I almost get agitated when considering the upheaval of going away for a period of weeks. This descent into a slough of ease and comfort and stagnation is the first step on a road we don’t want to take. It’s time to shake things up!

To counter the angst of preparation, generally speaking packing for us is a repeatable action, whether we’re going to the equator or the poles – we pack enough for a couple of weeks and pray for decent laundry facilities as we go, merely tailoring the sort of tops we include according to the likely weather.  The outlook for New Zealand is for temperatures in the 20s for the North Island and (hopefully high) teens in the South Island. It’ll almost certainly rain on us at some stage. No particularly specialist gear needed then, as far as clothes are concerned, anyway.

Photographically, I have the usual dilemmas about what to include in my camera bag. I call it a camera bag, but actually photographic equipment seems a minority element, alongside laptop, power banks, WiFi hotspot, backup drive, spare batteries and various other supporting paraphernalia that the well-travelled photo blogger takes with him, and so do I.

The wildlife I might expect to photograph see is in some respects limited compared to other places we’ve visited, in that there are no elusive mammals to seek out. I hope there will be a profusion of bird life and that my photographic skills are up to capturing pictures of a good variety of species. There will likely be whales and seals and dolphins, of course, but unless they get really frisky, I don’t expect these to be that photographically interesting. Who knows, I might even put the camera down and just watch! The Big Lens is clearly going to be a must, but I’m not going to have room for a profusion of other lenses or a tripod; and I’ll take a Small Camera for the sightseeing that doesn’t require a Big Camera. Total weight – 11kg. Please don’t tell the airline.

The destination being New Zealand brings with it some wrinkles before we even get through to the arrivals hall in Auckland. The Powers That Be there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, touchy about what gets brought in case some left-field pathogen escapes and wreaks havoc, so we must be able to prove we have scrubbed our boots so that they are the soles of cleanliness; we must show that our medicines (for one can’t get to our age and mileage without being accompanied by some of them) are legit; and we even have to declare our precious cargo of Twinings finest Earl Grey. Look, I know you can almost certainly buy it over there – they do have shops there, I read about them on the interweb – but there are some chances that are simply not worth taking, OK?

We also have to complete an online declaration of our compliance a maximum of 24 hours before we depart for Auckland. That’ll give us something to do to pass the longueurs of the transit

We have benefited from a slight cock-up on the travel front. The lovely Judy, of Spear Travels, who has done such a marvellous job of pulling together these major trips we’ve been on for the last eight years (eight years! Blimey!), settled on Discover The World to handle the day-to-day details of our itinerary, and a very fine schedule it is, too. But a certain amount of embarrassed shuffling of the feet followed their revelation that they’d missed a booking deadline for our flights, which were originally planned to be on Singapore Airlines, which is a decent operator even if they do shift their deadlines without warning. The practical upshot is that we’re now on Emirates, which I think means we’re slightly ahead on this deal. It’s still 23 hours in the air and arriving, probably sleep-deprived, two days after we set out, whichever aeroplane we’re on.

It’s therefore officially two sleeps before we totter into our hotel in Auckland, but it’ll probably be more like one and a half, given the exigencies of sleeping on a plane.  Still, we’re hoping that we can catch up on some of the films we can’t be bothered to go to see in the UK. According to the Emirates website, we get to choose from “up to 6,500 channels of movies, TV shows, music and games, on demand and in multiple languages”, so, with several hundred movies to choose from, one hopes that boredom is not going to be the main challenge. Even looking through the movie classifications makes me dizzy.

Jane regards any flight which isn’t showing Thor: Ragnarok as a dead loss, so she’ll be quids in. I’ll probably find we’ve arrived before I’ve even finished looking through the choice. Something of a first-world problem; I know I shouldn’t complain.

We will have a couple of days to explore Auckland. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong in the next couple of days, I’ll report back from there.