Airport Hotel

It would never be my first choice of accommodation, but sleeping in Bangkok Airport is nowhere near as uncomfortable or impossible as I expected. It helps to have a 'borrowed' Thai Airways blanket and pillow. It's straightforward - stake out the comfiest row of seats you can find, use your blanket (or fancy blindfold if you've remembered it, I didn't, the one time I've needed it!) to block out the 24hour bright fluorescent lighting and conk out. Occasionally the mini earthquakes caused by a bus going by wake you up, but a few minutes of piped 'Amazing Grace', 'Greensleeves' or even the odd bit of Copland lulls you back to snooze. On your own and wake up needing the loo? No worries, a trustworthy-looking couple in your Airport Bench Hotel community are more than happy to keep an eye on your bags while you nip off.

Time for check-in!

Sawatdee kah

I'm people-watching in Bangkok Airport. I can't quite believe I'm here. It's so so different from last time. Or more correctly, I'm so diffrent. I've watched numerous young travellers go through with the wide-eyed excitement at the prospect of months of travel in the unknown of SE Asia, just how I felt when I first came here 13 months ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to be here too, but it's different. There's still lots of adventure and discovery to be done, but it's not all shiny and new. I've more of an idea of what to expect, I'm going back to places I've been before and now know reasonably well. And that's a nice feeling too.

Not so nice a feeling is my stomach that's been knotted up by a Thai Airways inflight meal combined with the 12-hour non-stop longhaul (note to self: stick with Emirates, they rock). My ankles are swollen like an overweight granny's, and I'm sleeping in an airport for the first time.

Yep, loving it.

Recurring dream come true

Crowded House were excellent. It was just so exciting to see them on the first night of their 'home' tour. They played for hours, all the hits, and were joined by Tim Finn (the brother who's not touring) for a one-off for some of the real favourites. Bloody marvellous!

The only thing that let it down a tad was the venue - the brand new Vector Arena in Auckland. It always infuriates me that, with all the knowledge and engineering ability now out there, millions are still spent building flawed venues.

Scot in Wellington

I don't want to go back to the mountain. I've only been in this city 24 hours and already I feel the tug of just wanting to stay. A stab of homesickness struck me when I visited Te Papa's wee 'Scots in NZ' exhibition. I consider myself one of those, and it was interesting to explore the history of the migrations and to hear testimonies from Scots who've moved here at various points.

I still can't see myself living in NZ longterm. All the Brits who've immigrated here make me feel like that's something wrong. I don't know how much of it is my subconsciously not letting myself get too attached to the country, because I'm not sure how I'd deal with the concept of settling so far from home, family and friends. However, I've been slowly learning to accept gut feeling and not to try and over-analyse things to the point of ridicule.

I do love Wellington though, and I don't want to go back to the mountain. But leave I must. For now...

The wheels on the bus...

I'm halfway to Wellington - a spontaneous bus trip down to pick up a car for the big boss and drive it back up. I'm reminded of how much I love travelling on public transport. It really is unfortunate that it's almost impossible to satisfactorily travel NZ without your own car. Well, you can do it on one of the backpacker tour buses such as Stray or Kiwi Experience, but I'd rather stick my finger in a mangle than travel on one of those horrendous touristy booze vehicles.

I've discovered a new item to complete my 'top 3 pet peeves on public transport'. The existing two are (obviously) loud mobile phone conversations, and personal stereos set to a volume level where we all get to enjoy their taste in music. The latest entry is: portable DVD players. It seems they either don't come equipped with a headphone jack or, if they do, it spoils the cinematic bus experience if you were to suggest they use it.

New photos from Ruapehu

Here are four new batches of photos for you to enjoy:

Claire's Photos, 27 May - 5 July: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddballproductions/sets/72157602331176623/

Fun on the Mountain, 20 July - 8 August:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddballproductions/sets/72157602331320045/

Parties, 25 July - 9 August:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddballproductions/sets/72157602331662503/

Miscellaneous Ruapehu, 10 August - 6 October:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddballproductions/sets/72157602331831413/

Lahar, lahar, lahardeedar (group email)

Only 4 weeks to go on the mountain... And it was almost over much sooner last Tuesday! One of the disadvantages of working on a live volcano is that that volcano might decide to go off and in doing so wipe out a lot of your workplace. Last Tuesday night, Mt Ruapehu erupted. Only a little one - 2.8/2.9 Richter - but it was still an eruption.

So, what's it like being on an erupting volcano? Well, this wasn't a huge explosive fireworks display - although some pretty big rocks were thrown around (one crushing a mountaineer's leg, and so that rock now dominates most of the news reports) and 2 fairly mean lahars (volcanic mudslides) came down the mountain. One of the lahars went through our ski area and missed a snow groomer by metres. That snow groomer went on to become a local hero, because the crushed mountaineer's friend came running down the mountain to find help, and Shane's grooming cat was that help.

All fairly dramatic. But is wasn't so dramatic further down. Bex woke me up yelling 'get up, get up, get up', the news told us the mountain had erupted and, well, that was about it. We couldn't see, hear or feel anything, so we went back to bed. In the morning it was a bit more obvious - a large area on the top of the mountain is black with ash and the lahar forms a horrible black gash through the far west of our ski area. There are even white ski tracks through the ash where some keen (or crazy?) skier made his mark early in the morning. There's still snow on the mountain, so at night it looks really weird, as though someone's eaten a chunk out of the top of it.

All the staff gathered the next morning to be told we were closed for the day, not to speak to the media, and to come back up in the evening for an eruption barbeque party (very appropriate). We all cheered on the news report at the party, watched colleagues streak in front of the cameras outside, and the next day we were back to business as usual. Very odd.What did I do with the extra day off? Well, myself and 10 pals decided we wanted a different perspective on our newly erupted home, and figured the appropriate response was to strap ourselves to a stranger and throw ourselves out of a plane at 15,000ft. Skydiving. Wicked!

Apart from the dramas of eruptions and skydiving, mountain life continues relatively unchanged. The staff ball was a lot of fun and my twenties dress was AMAZING! We have our department Amazing Race on Thursday which should be good, if all goes as planned. And I've just ordered our department souvenir T-shirts.We're in the middle of school holidays at the moment, and in a week's time about 2/3 of the workforce finish and leave. It's going to be very quiet next week! I'm here for another 3 weeks after that and then it's offski!