Homeland Security Threat Level Orange!

It has been a recent discovery of ours that there are many kinds of airports. Glen and I, being relatively unseasoned airborne travellers, have only encountered a couple. They contained restauraunts and duty-free shops with remarkably overpriced goods available for purchase. Our flight to Melbourne had us experience no less than four airports – Vancouver, San Francisco, Auckland, and Melbourne. We spent approximately 24 hours on planes and in airports and while it must be said that both the aircrafts and airports were far more comfortable than the buses and stations of the Greyhound bus line, they had their own peculiarities.

Actually, there were only two airports that struck us as having anything really peculiar, but we shall get there in time. Photo evidence of some of the airport shenanigans has been provided for your amusement.

First up was the Vancouver International Airport. This is a rather nice airport with an alarmingly confusing flight ticket-wicket area. It took us a while to figure out where it was we needed to go to pick up our tickets, as the rows and rows and rows and rows of wickets are somewhat befuddling. Eventually we made it through and had to fine ways of amusing ourselves for the next two hours.

As with pretty much every airport worldwide, the Vancouver International Airport is jammed with retail spaces devoted to hawking kitschy souvenir crap.


I found the largest piece of Canadiana I could find and said a wretched goodbye to my home country.

Afterwards, Glen and I acquired some free Starbucks coffee (gotta love coupons) and my already jangling nerves were put on high alert thanks to a Venti portion of caffeine. Being utterly unable to sit still, I proceeded to harass Glen by stacking stuff on him.


It started with a coffee cup…



and quickly escalated from there.

At this point we went for a walk. It was either that or I would have chewed off the headrest of the seat in front of me.

The flight from Vancouver to San Francisco was brief and uneventful. As we had a three hour layover before our plane for Melbourne-via-Auckland left, we were hoping to find some form of diversion.

We found it about two minutes after disembarking from the plane. The public announcement system crackled into life and a female voice boomed:

Attention passengers: we are at homeland security threat level orange. Keep your luggage with you at all times. Should you see any suspicious persons or packages, call 911 immediately.

Cheerful, no? This ringing endorsement of pointless vigilance paranoia repeated itself every ten minutes. I kid you not – we must have heard these words no fewer than twenty times while we waited for our next plane.

As we were hungry and bored, we went in search of something to eat. The Japanese restaurant – which was my initial pick as you can usually expect reasonably fresh ingredients and a fine portion of veggies from these establishments – had a nightly “special” of four pieces of sushi and one piece of maki for $15 USD. This was clearly daylight robbery, so we tried to find sandwiches. The average price of a limp and anemic panini was $12 USD, so we avoided the sandwich stops as well.

The final choice was a Mexican restaurant. The space looked pleasant enough and the entrees were a reasonable price, so we settled for that. Glen and I each decided to order a burrito platter, as they came with a side salad. Wanting more veggies than the salad provided, I elected to get the grilled veggie burrito. Glen and I discovered something strange almost immediately after I cut into it. Here’s a clue:



Did you spot it?

WHERE ARE THE VEGETABLES? I’m sorry, but a couple pinky-nail sized squares of bell peppers (not present in the photo), some burnt corn, and a few slivers of zucchini lost in a half-ton of black beans and refried rice does NOT a "grilled vegetable" burrito make! Nor does the absence of meat immediately imply the presence of vegetables! I ate the salad and about a third of the burrito and abandoned the rest. The remainder of our time was spend listening to the repeated howling about orange security threat levels and wondering where the nefarious "persons or packages" were.

The flight from San Francisco to Auckland took 12.5 hours and was punctuated by two meals, each of which managed to contain about fifteen times the vegetables as that burrito. There was an 1.5 hour layover in Auckland, where we discovered our second airport peculiarity: the multiplying duty-free shops.

Truly, folks, you will never see the same number of duty free shops anywhere in the world as we saw in Auckland. They were so densely populated that you could touch two at one time. And each different brand of duty free shop had a clone somewhere else in the terminal. It was bizarre. But there was some good stuff to be found, if we were in the market to purchase overpriced airport goods. The MacGregor sweaters (containing merino and silk wools) were beautiful and wonderfully soft. And you had your choice of at least five identical stores to buy them at.

We then spent about four hours flying from Auckland to Melbourne, where we were inspected by the most cheerful customs officer ever. Fearful that our two chocolate bars and one camping knife would get us into trouble if we didn’t declare them at customs, we filled out the customs cards truthfully, meaning that our bags needed to be searched. Neither of us had a problem with this – if the stuff got confiscated, it was no big deal. But the prospect of slipping up and getting into trouble for having stuff we weren’t supposed to was scary. Improper customs declaration = substantial fine + possible time = early and pathetic end to adventure. I’m certain I was acting with a fine helping of paranoia, but it’s better safe than sorry. At any rate, the customs officer was relentlessly cheerful and we had a splendid conversation with him, wherein he told us his own favourite places in Australia (namely Tasmania, which is where we are headed to once we are "done" with Melbourne).

From there we took cab to our hostel. I wanted to take a picture of us leaving the airport, but Glen said the picture would be a lousy one.



He was right.


Stay tuned for more Melbourne adventures!