The Flight Delays and Fiji, or Trying to Get to New Zealand (Jan 28th-31st)

I climbed off the shuttle to LAX and walked to the Air Pacific counter, only to find the line abuzz with news of a cancelled flight. Everyone in line received a typed apology and vouchers for one night's stay, breakfast, and dinner at the LAX Hilton, along with the assurance that our flight would leave at 9am the next morning. I took it in stride, seeing as how I didn't exactly mind a night at the Hilton and I figured a 12-hour delay made little difference.

Once at the hotel, I ate dinner with a philanthropic consultant in the same situation, who informed me that the flight had been delayed another 8 hours, according to someone at the front desk. I went to the desk to ask why we all hadn't been informed, and they said that was the airline's responsibility. Stellar customer service all around.

I fell asleep early, woke up in time for breakfast and a late check-out, and spent the early afternoon on the computer in the hotel lobby. Imagine my disappointment in discovering that, despite the availability of free wifi in just about every $8-a-night hostel in South America, the Hilton charges for wifi within their rooms. On top of that, I had to print out a boarding pass for my next flight and had to pay to use the business center in order to do so. Ridiculous.

At the airport I discovered that I wouldn't arrive for my layover in Fiji until 1am and that I wouldn't know anything about my connecting flight until my arrival there. Once on the plane, the fun continued, as my movie monitor malfunctioned and the person in the seat next to mine spilled orange juice all over me.

Upon our arrival in Fiji, those of us proceeding on to other destinations were herded onto buses to spend the night-- or six hours of it-- in a dinky motel 20 minutes away before returning for our connecting flights the following morning.



It wasn't exactly the Hilton this time.


In fact, they didn't even have bottled water available when we first arrived, even though Fijian tap water isn't potable. When I asked the barman when the porter who had been sent to fetch water would return, he simply shrugged and said, "Island time."

The next morning, our bus ran late in leaving the motel, as the motel staff had told half of the passengers the incorrect time for the morning pickup. As I viewed the rain-soaked Fijian landscape passing by in the windows, I thought how lucky I was not to have planned an extended stopover there during such torrential storms.

The flight to Auckland was blessedly uneventful, and by midday, I had made the bus journey to my hostel in the city center. I had passed over the international dateline during my first flight and skipped over a whole day, so it was by now January 31st. Jet-lagged, exhausted, and not exactly tempted to exploration by the drab weather outside, I picked up some groceries and cheap sushi from across the way, grabbed a bunch of flyers from the hostel information desk, burrowed into my bed, and began planning my next 5 weeks in the country.

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Location:Los Angeles, Nadi (Fiji), and Auckland (New Zealand)