OK, we've been travelling for about four months now, going through Nepal, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia. That's a lot of border crossings and going through customs. We've never had any problems before arriving in New Zealand and while those were not in any way major ones, they are still worth writing about.

So first of all, Sini is a self-proclaimed fruit junkie, she's physically depended on her daily dose of fructose. There is no known cure… Anyway, we know that you're not supposed to take fresh fruit into some countries but we've occasionally done it anyway. When going from Australia to New Zealand we took with us an apple and a mandarin, in addition to some bread to help us through a night at the airport before picking up our rental car. We arrived in Christchurch at about 0.15 in the night and filled out our customs declaration forms like always. Only this time they had a couple of questions that we had to answer "yes" to. Do you have fruits with you? Any other foods? Have you dared to touch the soil of another country with the bottom of your shoes?

After getting our bags from the belt we were acutely aware of the big signs showing apples with a $400 price tag on them and saying "Declare, dispose or pay the fine". Luckily we just had the apple and the mandarin, which we quickly disposed of by shoving them in our faces. Then we were off to the "Something to declare" line to show our boots, which we had walked in in numerous national parks in Australia. The person who started the initial search could smell the fruits from our breath and also noted our bread before sending us further to line 4 for shoe inspection. Another person took a closer look at our footwear and declared it safe to arrive into New Zealand, apparently they mainly search for seeds and stuff. After that it was time for another X-ray of all our things, which we thought would be the end of it.

But no, as we stopped to pick up some brochures a customs official came to us with her dog. The animal took a couple of sniffs of our bags and sat down by the one that had contained the snacks. Apparently it was trained to find oranges, and not only that, but bacon also. There were precious few pieces of that on our breads. First of all, what happened to proper drug dogs? The owner of this one seemed particularly proud that the dog had sniffed out the bacon, but c'mon, what dog doesn't smell bacon? As for the mandarin, even the first official had been able to spot that one.

So we were questioned again: is this bacon from Australia? Why have you eaten some of it, why is the package not intact? Apparently New Zealanders are so well off that they don't have hunger here… Anyway, she went to get the guy who had gone through our boots and asked him if we'd declared the bacon or not. We'd only told the first one, who said they were OK, she'd taken a look at the bags that actually said bacon on them. The K-9 unit was unimpressed. We hadn't been particularly worried about receiving the $400 fine since we'd done everything we were supposed to (except that we did bring food from overseas…), but the lady with the dog seemed determined that we had done something terrible anyway. Luckily the shoe-guy, who seemed to be in charge, was a) tired and b) in a deep state of "I really don't give a s**t". He never said that but you could see it on his face. He declared us good to go, bacon and all. The lady started congratulating the dog loudly about finding two of the most odorous foodstuffs available, durian excluded.

So that is how we entered New Zealand. At least it taught us some humility, all of our border crossings had been going too well so far. It also taught us to put Sini on dried fruit from now on. No-one gave our half a kilogram bag of dried dates a second glance or sniff…