Confused sense of time!

(Auckland, New Zealand, 5th of January 2017)

It’s easy to get confused when you travel east and have to move the time forward many hours on a regular basis. Eating at odd times of the day gets quite normal but it is harder to decide when you should be sleeping (or absolutely not sleeping …) to most easily get in phase.
When we arrived in Beijing we had change the time on our whatches 7 hours forward and we stayed there for 7 hours in anticipation of the next flight. The airport was very desolate with unexpected few people and we got a seat on some really comfartable chairs. But oh what we got to fight for not falling asleep, something we did quite well after all. It helped a bit that they had screwed down the room temperature, although it was not very nice, it helped us keeping our eyes open.

Our next flight took us three hours ahead in time and the destination was Sydney. Our bodies now thought that it was 10 in the evening while, in Sydney it was 7 in the morning. A bit difficult to adapt to…

At the airport we had to pick up our luggage and then go through customs in order to check it in again for further transport to Auckland, New Zealand. We have heard many horror stories about the customs in Australia and were prepared to have to pack up our bikes and get our luggage checked. Once we went through customs, they did not at all look at our bikes and just waved through our candy bags we kindly and obediently had declared.
At the airport in Sydney, we spent several tedious hours of waiting for our flight to Auckland. Again, we had to fight to keep us awake as we once again almost succeeded. Dinner in the Italian fast food restaurant resulted in soup, bread and pasta. No culinary experience but pretty good and filling.
We arrived in Auckland at 21.00 o´clock th 5 of January and another two-hour time lag was added to our already confused sense of time. Smartly enough, we had booked a hotel very close to the airport and we could even walk with our luggage carts all the way there. Johan had an active time in the hotel room before bedtime and managed to put together one of our bikes for the following day´s bicycle adventure.

/ Christel