By the time you have finished reading the last nine words, an estimated 50,000 sheep have pushed themselves through an impressively expandable aperture into a land so boring and insignificant that anyone playing the Countries game would start making up their own countries starting with 'N' long before they yell out...

New Zealand!

Of course, had the purpose of the trip not been to visit a good friend of mine, I would have walked right from the arrival hall to the departure hall to board the next plane home.

The boredom started from the moment I found my seat on the flight to Auckland. Having flown MAS most of the time, I was used to claustrophobic-inducing seats, hand-me-down movies from RTM1, food that actually causes travel sickness, less-than-pretty stewardesses and aircrafts so ancient you'd almost expect to see a dozen sooted Chinese men shovelling lumps of coal into a huge furnace at the back of the plane.

So when I decided to fly with Emirates, I was impressed by the online check-in service which allows you to select your seat online. The food on the menu looked so good I could almost swear they handed me the First Class menu by accident. I was stoked when I saw the 500-movie listing on the entertainment guide, all of which I could select via a touch screen LCD panel. But hell, was I in for a major disappointment.

You know how you are watching an exciting movie trailer but the damned narrator with The Voice just won't stop talking? That's exactly how I felt.

I select a movie, and right before I can switch to full-screen mode, the public address comes on and an announcement is made, in three bloody languages! The safety video went on for half the entire journey, which rendered it completely useless since the plane could have potentially crashed even before the man in the video had finished illustrating how to inflate your life jacket for the third time. By the time we heard what was on the menu, the captain started announcing that we would be descending and proceeded to inform us what the local weather was.

Auckland - not as Third World-like as Sitiawan, but not exactly what you would call a city of technological marvel either. The city was practically empty and I found myself perpetually asking Caleb whether we were in a rough area since the only people there were the both of us when, apparently, more than half of the 17 people living in Auckland work in the city. Didn't look
like it.

The names of the roads were mostly in Maori. The degree of effort put into pronouncing them was like attempting to unlodge a piece of vegetable stuck at the back of your mouth using your tonsils. Having to quickly spit out the roads while reading the map and trying not to laugh at the same time didn't exactly make the task any easier. There's this mountain called Mount Fuckapapa. No I'd rather not, thanks.

There was a place called One Tree Hill, and it means exactly that. A hill with one tree standing at the peak, until this bloke woke up one morning in rage and decided to chop it down for firewood, after which they still stuck with the name but built an obelisk in honour of the Maoris. You see the correlation too, don't you? The problem is that the main feature of the hill wasn't the fact that there was once a tree standing there. Nor was it that the obelisk was pretty to look at, because it wasn't. No, people were taking pictures of the gazillions of sheep wandering around the hill, grazing the faeces-infested grass. That sight alone was amusing enough. It would be like Malaysians taking pictures of motorcycles and hazy skies - they are already everywhere.

Having said all that, the three weeks spent there were not that bad after getting used to Auckland's quirkiness. As long as you bear in mind that everything doesn't work like you would expect, you will get by just fine. For example, it's spelt Whakapapa.