We left Sydney for New Zealand at about 6pm and arrived in Christchurch at 11.30pm local time. We got our bags from the plane pretty quickly and got to immigration at  11.45pm. The immigration officers asked us briefly about the last country we had visited before Australia and how much time we had spent there. We answered all their questions and thought nothing of it! We got into the queue for customs and exiles and declared our spices and tea that we brought over from Thailand and Laos. We were ushered into a waiting room to wait for an officer to come and inspect our dried products, or so we thought? Nyima was called first by an officer. He led her to a table and told her to place her bags on the table and not to touch any of her belongings. She had to sign a form saying that she was not carrying illegal substances. Her customs officer pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and asked her if she had any sharp objects in her bag. Nyima said she had nail scissors, the customs officers fixed her a steely glare and said no I meant like needles and syringes! He then started to empty out her backpack, piece by piece, looking for any suspicious items. At this point both Martha and Laura were called by different customs officers to have their bags searched! At first we were all still under the impression that it was a routine, if not very thorough, check because we were bringing in tea and spices into the country! Nyima’s customs officer then started questioning her on how long we had been in Vietnam for and if we had met many people there such as Kiwis. Nyima told them that we had worked in a bar and had therefore met lots of people. Martha was asked the names of all the people she had met and went on to list Phil, Bin, Buu…! They also took Martha’s phone away to be searched. When the customs officers got to Nyima’s tea leafs from Laos they took swabs of the packaging without opening it to do a drugs test on. They put the strips in the machine to be tested and it immediately flashed red and beeped! Her hearts sank, had horrible Laos come back to haunt us one last time!? All eyes were on Nyima as the officer came over to give her the news, traces of marijuana had been found on the tea… was there anything she wanted to tell them? At this point Nyima thought it was all over and she was going to jail for being a drug smuggler! She thought she had accidentally bought marijuana from the nice old lady on the tea selling stand in Laos and now she was going down for it! The customs officer boss then came over and opened up the bag of tea leafs to do a further drugs test. This time the machine did not beep when the swab was tested and we all breathed a sigh of relief! She was told that the person who packages the tea in Laos had drug traces on their hands and passed it on to the bag. Even though she did not want to contaminated tea back they insisted that she took it! The customs officers then started to be a little bit more relaxed with Nyima and Martha as they started to believe us. They also asked if we knew anybody else in the room, we didn’t. Nyima’s customs officers said that he was sorry that he could not tell her why they decided to search us but once it was over he would explain the reason.

Laura on the other hand was having a harder time of proving her innocence! She was on the other side of the room to Nyima and Martha and could not talk to anyone else. She was still very confused as to why we were being searched and she asked her officer if this was just a random check. Her officer waited before saying to her “Yeh… usually”. Laura’s coffee from Laos was then given the swab test. Hers too flashed up with drug traces but Laura found it much harder to convince them that she in fact was not a drug smuggler that their bosses believe that she was. All of Laura’s belongings were meticulously searched, even more so than Nyima’s and Martha’s, and a CD of pictures from our camera was taken away to be inspected. The officer came back and asked Laura why there was a picture of hash on someone’s hand on her photos. She thought about it and realised that they must have seen a picture of a tiny frog on Martha’s hand in Cambodia! Laura was interrogated for a further half hour after Nyima and Martha were let free. She asked if she could go to the toilet but her request was denied unless she wanted to be escorted by a customs official. Finally after 2 hours in the customs office an official told Laura that her story was unconvincing but they had decided to let us all go! It was the most petrifying experience of our whole trip! We found out later that the reason we were given a drug search was because there was a known drug smuggler on our flight who had been in Vietnam at the exact time we were and left on the same day. They believed that we were working with him. We later saw the man in question being taken out of the airport by police.

We left the arrival hall already deciding that we hated New Zealand and wanted to leave straight away when we met a very lovely lady in the currency exchange booth !It was 2am in the morning and we didn’t know where to stay so she suggested that we should stay in the airport that night for free. We thought it was a ruddy bloody good idea. We decided to sleep in the middle of the brightly lit departure hall with all the tramps who can’t afford a home round the outside of us! We had a shower in the toilets (we didn’t actually dip our heads in the pan there was actually a shower cubical) and then slept for about 30 minutes before being woken up at 5.30am by airport security as the first passengers were getting in!

We spent the day in the airport trying to leave without success but eventually at about 4pm we headed to a lovely hostel in Christchurch. From the hostel we were able to rent a car to take us all the way up to Auckland at a cost of 2.50 a day each! Cheap as chips matey! We headed for Queenstown the next day in preparation for our next few days of breath taking, heart stopping adrenalin rushing activities! We will write again from there.