Entertainment: No screens on the back of the seats or quirky quiz to be found. There was a Where's Wally picture in the magazine which was a nostalgic plus — I didn't manage to find him though which put yet another dampener on proceedings. More about dampeners in a moment ...
The toilets: Clean and freely accessible.
Luggage: It will be no surprise that my stunningly cheap fare didn't include check-in luggage, but I was happy to learn I could pay an extra $30 the day before flying to upgrade from 7kg to 10kg carry on.
The real story: Forget about the actual flight for a second — I forgot about it when I became convinced I wasn't going to make it on the plane.
Somehow after my last international excursion, my one-year-old smart passport found itself in the washing machine, an odd place for a passport, I know. I'm talking full one-hour, warm-water, suds and all.
Once this was realised I did all the things you do when you've wet any sort of paper material that's not supposed to get wet. At least an hour with the hair dryer, then into a bowl of rice (well, it's meant to work for mobile phones — and I was desperate). The result was that I had a mostly dry passport that resembled more of a fan than a book, with more crinkles than your favourite variety of potato chips.
Logically then, it went under a massive pile of bricks for at least half a week. As it started to take something closer to its more usual shape — faded as all hell, but definitely its more usual shape — I was convincing myself it would work just fine, it's electronic these days anyway, right? To ease my nerves I rang the Department of Internal Affairs, who passed me on to the Customs service. They seemed very lackadaisical about the situation, and even told me an anecdote about a passport that had been worked over by a canine but still functioned just fine. Brilliant.
The week before I flew I took another look at my uniquely worn identification and in a moment of weakness decided I should seek yet another opinion. Immigration New Zealand and the Passport Office fielded my slightly needy call with nothing but certainty: if it's been damaged or wet, you'll need to send it in to be checked but to be on the safe side, we advise you should just go ahead and order a new one. Right, $190 for a new passport, bugger. Oh wait, I was flying in six days; how much does an urgent passport cost? $390. Double bugger.
After a lot of deliberation and the thought of parting with nearly $400, I was getting desperate. A few days before the flight, I went out to the airport to seek advice. A helpful lady at a vacant Qantas desk, with some of her colleagues doubling as keen observers, took a look and agreed it was moist but not mangled. She scanned the chip and it yielded a satisfying "Bleep". "It's still alive and kicking as far as I can tell," she rejoiced.
After then receiving some extra advice on how to hold it to hide the worst of the damage from any over-cautious Customs officers, I was feeling comfortable. Of course, I still had to actually go through all of the processes on the night I flew. I won't pretend I wasn't packing myself either, but as hoped the machines read the chip and no one with an official uniform blinked an eyelid. Hurrah!
The bottomline: Is there a moral to this story? Probably not, I'd recommend just not putting your passport in the washing machine to start with.
But this did have a happy ending, my slightly wet passport avoided leaving me high and dry.
