A quick 2-hour flight took us from Auckland to Queenstown. Folks, if you ever take an Air New Zealand flight, do yourself a favor and watch the inflight safety videos – they are hands down THE most entertaining safety videos of any airline I’ve taken to date. In fact, I find myself looking for their past safety videos on YouTube and watching them from beginning to end even when I’m not on the plane. They are that awesome. Check out their past videos:
The “body paint briefing”:
An Unexpected Briefing:
The latest version seen on our flight had Bear Grylls (from “Man VS Wild”) take us through all the safety features. True to form, he even ate a glow worm while at it!
Bear teaching us the “bear” essentials of flight safety
Queenstown was grey with heavy clouds when we landed, but the place still looked stunning in the riot of autumn colours. Since it’s May (ie. late autumn/early winter), the sun set at around 5pm and we headed to bed soon after dinner, ready for an early start tomorrow to Arrowtown.
A huge part of travel in New Zealand is about enjoying the great outdoors so it helps to monitor weather conditions. If possible, keep your itinerary flexible and always, always check the weather forecast for your next destination. If need be, change your plans to maximize the good weather conditions wherever they are. That’s exactly what we did when we found out that the Queenstown area weather forecast was near-perfect on the day we were originally scheduled to leave. After a few quick calls, our stay was extended. As you will soon see, it turned out to be one of the best decisions of the trip.