City of London School for Girls New Zealand Tour
Music and Sports Easter 1998
Music and Sports Easter 1998
Thursday 26th March 1998, about 30 girls stagger from the station to school, laden with suitcases, sports bags, musical instruments, and the kitchen sink. (Well, nearly.) They are about to embark on a three week music and sport tour round New Zealand. They have been fund-raising since September, and finally they are going.
First stop- Heathrow to meet some of the rest of the girls and, more importantly, get the plane!
11am - The coach is waved off from school by an assortment of parents, teachers, and other students bunking third period!
12 noon - Arrive at Heathrow to find the rest of the girls arriving in dribs and drabs. Some much later than others (mentioning no names)! A chaotic check-in follows, and we finally get let lose on duty-free!
Eventually it's time to board the plane- a monstrosity of a 747 (Jumbo Jet) in which we are to be cooped up for the next 11 hours and 25 minutes. Will we survive? Or the even bigger question- will the 5 members of staff in charge of us survive?
Three hours into the flight we are flying over some beautiful scenery- Greenland we think. All you can see out the windows are snowy mountains and very Titanic-esque icebergs.
The rest of Thursday, and all of Friday disappear in a blur of transit lounges in L.A., bad films and even worse food!
At about 6am Saturday local time (we all think it's 6pm Friday) we emerge from the plane bleary-eyed and with haystack hair apart from Mrs Donnelly (our music teacher) who looks as perfect as ever. All the make-up redone perfectly (quite a feat in turblence!) and not a hair out of place. She has even managed to change her entire outfit while on the plane! The best the rest of us could do was dragging a hairbrush through the protesting hair, and splashing cold water on our faces. Oh well. As someone clever once said, life's not fair.
Enough about appearances. Just as we arrived at passport control, all necessary documentation at the ready, the fire alarm sounded, and we were herded into the little shack where the baggage handlers unceremoniously dump your luggage onto the back of the carousel. Needless to say it was not air-conditioned. We sat in the sweltering Auckland morning, surrounded by the smell of diesel and the whir of those little airport car things you always see. Eventually we were allowed to return to the terminal building to join a never-ending queue to get a very unexciting stamp in our passports.
About an hour later, after collecting our luggage, battling over the luggage trolleys and clearing customs we emerged into the morning sunshine to be greeted by Miss Reisterer(our group leader)'s parents and a coach.
Grudgingly we loaded the coach, then collapsed into its seats and embarked on a "tiki tour" of Auckland, whatever that may be.
First stop, Mt. Eden, one of 14 extinct volcanoes around Auckland.
Next stop, the beach for a welcome paddle or swim (only four nutters decided on the second option).
Then we bore down on McDonalds for breakfast.
Sufficient time wasted, we could at last go and invade a local motel where we were staying for the night.
This is probably getting extremely boring, so I'll add a link for anyone who wants to find out more about the motel. If you're one of those people, click here.
The actual object of this tour was to visit schools, and play sports fixtures against them, and give a concert for them. So. The next day (Sunday) we went back to Auckland airport, the domestic terminal this time, and set off for our first school- St. Margaret's College in Christchurch. Before we got to the airport we stopped of at a Maori museum.
Unfortunately our flight to Christchurch was cancelled, so we sat around at the airport for hours, and finally they found us a plane- a Jumbo Jet for a one hour flight!? We arrived at the school late, and went in to meet our first billets. Lots of nail-biting followed, but eventually we all relaxed and left for home with our billets.
We stayed in Christchurch for 3 nights. To find out more, click on the picture below.
Wednesday morning up at 6 a.m. to make sure we made it to the station for the 7.30 a.m. train to Picton, and what a fun 5 hours that train journey was!
Before we got on the train however, we did have time to say our fond farewells to our first billets.
Left to right: Shan, Anna, Anna's billet Emma, mine and Shan's billet Libby.
After 5 hours on the train, tons of fun (hmmm), and the most stupid question of the tour
After 4 nights in Wellington it was time to move on. Early on Sunday morning we boarded a flight back to Auckland, but we weren't going to be in Auckland long, only a matter of minutes really...
We got on another coach in Auckland, and began the long drive to Whangarei. On the way we took a 2 hour detour to see a big tree, and it was not worth it! We finally arrived at Whangarei Girls High School, met the next lot of billets, and went to their houses, and to bed!
For more on Whangarei, click on the logo below.
We spent 3 nights in Whangarei, then it was back on the coach and down to Auckland again, but this time to a suburb of Auckland called Epsom, and Epsom Girls Grammar School where our last set of billets were waiting for us.
After only 2 nights in Auckland it was time to move on to the final destination on our itinerary- Opotiki. This time we weren't staying with a school, but on a marae, a maori meeting place. Opotiki is also the home of our group leader, Miss Reisterer, and her father is mayor of the town, so we kind of had to go there! :-)
We arrived on the marae on Friday, and left on Tuesday to travel to Auckland, then endure the monstorously long flight back to London.
We'd only been back in London a matter of hours (barely long enough to show off our newly aquired tans) when it began to snow. Only in England could the weather be this weird. We knew we were back home!
| Maps | Food |
| The North Island | Unusual NZ chocolate wrappers |
| The South Island | L&P- a soft drink only from NZ |
| Northland |
This next page will, eventually, be the difinitive Who's Who for the tour, but it's still in progress!
So. That's basically what happened. Sorry the sub-pages aren't written yet, but they will be soon. In the mean time, please amuse yourself at my homepage or the school homepage
Sign my Guestbook View my Guestbook
This page was written by me, Caroline Smith, who is a bit of a net-head, and went on the tour. In writing this page, and putting up some of the pictures I've probably broken a few copy-rights (as I always seem to when I write web-sites) so sorry to Berlitz, Cadbury's NZ and Coca-Cola Amatil (NZ) and anyone else!
©C.Smith May 1998
