Shopping Singapore, Crazy Christchurch

There are a couple of things to remember when traveling with John. One of them is that forgetting or losing stuff is at the order of the day, or night for that matter. So when John checked in at Schiphol airport he very conveniently forgot to put his wallet in his carry-on luggage. Therefor when we arrived in Singapore on a 12 hour transit, he had no money or creditcards on him. Luckily I was loaded so we were able to each buy a new Sony DSC-WX1 camera at one of the tax-free electronic shops. This amazing piece of new technology even has something called ‘smile detection’.

This makes sure that a picture is automatically taken when a person smiles at the camera. Very conveniently when you are either dealing with children posing for the camera, or with John.
We  took our brand new cameras for a little try-out at the Singapore airport butterfly garden. Since the smile detection function didn’t work on the butterflies we just used our macros. As you can tell by the pictures, it’s passed its exam!

 

After a whopping 36 hour journey we finally landed in Christchurch early in the morning of the 31st of January. We got a real lucky break there, because it was the last day of the World Buskers Festival. A 7-day long festival of the best street artists in the world!

Christchurch had a very relaxed atmosphere. It felt more like a big village, than a city of 350,000 people. Nevertheless, this feeling changed a bit when the next morning we went to pick up our SUV at Europcar. We made the booking with HolidayCars back home, so all we were supposed to do was show the voucher and drive away in our Pimp-my-Ride style 4×4. Unfortunately, this is not how the story went.

The employees of the Europcar branch in Christchurch told us they couldn’t accept the (prepaid) voucher. Apparently HolidayCars hadn’t been paying its bills to Europcar so they decided to have a little payback of their own. The Europcar people told us they only would let us have the car if we would pay (again) for it on the spot. Since we had to be in Kaikoura later that afternoon for our Whale Watching trip we really had no other option but to agree. Nevertheless, we told them we would only accept this deal if HolidayCars would reimburse us the money paid. After 1 hour of phonecalls and emails to HolidayCars it was agreed that John and I would pay for the car and they would reimburse us later on.
It felt a bit like a tricky deal, because we were told by Europcar that HolidayCars probably was going down the toilet. They apparently had 250 thousand euros worth of unpaid bills with Europcar alone!
Hopefully we will get the money back. Until that time I would recommend everybody NOT to book with HolidayCars.

After this early morning madness we stepped in our souped-up car and cruised on to Kaikoura for some major marine life miracles. More on that in my next post!

More photos of Singapore and Christchurch:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_dude_in/sets/72157623214371897/

John’s blogpost on Singapore, Christchurch and Kaikoura:
http://www.oldenhuizing.com/2010/02/03/nz-christchurch-kaikoura/

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