Brunei

Well due to the fact that this is being written from the departure lounge of Brunei airport, this is going to be a story by pictures. I'll fill in some words later, honest.

We arrived at Auckland airport, on time, with 2 hours before departure. The queue took ages, but the lady behind the checking desk took longer. Checking in a "Philip John Rayner" and a "John Robert MacDonald Rayner" totally confused the poor lady. At one stage dad had 3 boarding passes and I had none. Anyway she did such a great job that when we got to the departure lounge they had to re-key in my boarding pass as the info in the computer was incorrect. Later aboard the plane, before they closed the door they took Dad and mines passports for a walk. They returned 20 minutes later after sorting out the administrative error.

Australia, the land of ex-Convicts. We arrived for our transit to find the theiving Ausi's taking candy from a baby. Worse. They were taking the duty free off an elderly couple. It doesn't get much lower than that. Stealing Alcohol, the one joy, off people with not much time left on the planet. Some rule about "anything over 100ml could be a bomb". But we bought it in Duty free. Well it's ours now silly Kiwi's. Imagine how mad I got when the lady wanted to take my tooth paste off me as it was 110g, which means it's over 100ml. The fact it was half empty made no difference. I put up a fight, as I challenged the customs lady to show me where it said that even if the tube was half full it still had to be "quarantined". She got pretty arsey at me (because she couldn't find such a statement in her precious brochure). The head bitch (customs official) was no better, but luckily a man came along who had managed to find the sentence which made my colgate Total whitening with tartar control the Ausies. I bet if it had been Great regular flavour they wouldn't have looked twice at it. Theiving bastards.

Ironically once we had cleared security checks we walked straight back on the plane we'd just walked off. Could have stashed the damn tooth past on the plane. Next time, next time. The old joker in the seat behind me who's wife had lost her 120g $8 a tube denture toothpaste came up with "They asked me if I had any criminal convictions, and I said "Shit mate, I didn't know being a convict was still compulsory in Australia".

The flight was fairly uneventful, the movies being Spider man 3 (ok I guess), and the Hoax (quite good actually).

We arrived in Brunei to discover that the lady in Auckland had been more incompitent than a labour finance minister. My bag arrived, but with Dads tag on it. Dad was not so lucky however, is bag still in Auckland.

We headed out for a quick feed at the food market across the road from our hotel. Aside from mishearing the price of the fish as $2.10, when the guy was trying to say $13, the meal passed with out incident (sorry no photo Graham).