Day 1: Travel Day, Auckland - Adelaide
Nau mai
Yesterday we travelled from Auckland, New Zealand to Adelaide, Australia.
It was a grim time to leave the house, four and a half hands past the hour of twelve. The sky was black and a light drizzle accompanied me as I walked out to join Tristan in his taxi. The glorious logistics of our journey to Australia began with this taxi ride to Karangahape Road where Jonathan and Liz were already at the business of carrying gear down the staircase from the studio and preparing to load it into our shuttle.
The Mainfreight sign on the side of the company logistics building on George Bolt Memorial Drive was a beacon, ripping apart the darkness of the Māngere sky and broadcasting its message proudly to all morning travellers. “It’s not the time of your life. It’s the life of your time”. Profound and as impactful as ever. There needs to be a live webcam of this installation so this wisdom can be spread to all corners of the globe.
Here it is again presented in one of Squarespace’s quote blocks.
““It’s not the time of your life. It’s the life of your time”.”
I thought that taking a video would be the go since taking a photo in the dark from a moving car can be a challenge. In the end my phone was completely defeated as the autofocus struggled with light reflecting off the inside of the windows.
We arrived at the world’s busiest New Zealand airport and found it uncharacteristically calm. It was 5:30am. Airport staff were having at their jobs like this was a perfectly regular hour to be awake. Bleary eyed we attached tags to our black protective equipment cases and they were all swallowed by the oversize x-ray machine without protest, to make their way to Adelaide by methods that did not concern us.
Tour logistics - behind the scenes: The author gets pulled up by aviation security with three false positives in his cabin baggage.
The Koru lounge was already serving breakfast, we were grateful to learn. There was an omelette expert behind the counter, and we queued up to receive one of his works of art, a canvass of egg spattered with mushrooms, onion, capsicum, spinach, and cheese. Next to this on my plate I enjoyed a serving of sweet potato hash, and some vegetable and tofu stew, topped with a spoonful of tzatziki. On top of it all I draped a few strips of streaky bacon.
In the lounge there is always a selection of liquid beverages, or liquid-adjacent meals, served in small glass tumblers, and I took three of these options – a carrot, turmeric, and ginger booster, a rhubarb, coconut, and sesame granola, and an orange and cardamom smoothie.
I was still famished even after this considerable serving, so I went back for a second course, spotting Tristan next to the pancake machine, and being lured in to the convenience of this culinary robot which dispensed fresh discs of cooked batter onto my plate with the press of a button. Butter, maple syrup, whipped cream, and berry compote went on as toppings.
We boarded our Air New Zealand Airbus A330 and I was asleep before take-off, deep in the throes of a pancake coma, and I didn’t wake until we began our descent. We were east of Adelaide, coming in over wide plains hatched neatly into farmland, gradually transitioning into squarely laid out suburbs punctuated by schools, sports fields, Bunnings Warehouses, and Kennards Self Storage facilities, the four pillars of any enlightened society.
Tour logistics - behind the scenes: Seated up the front of the aircraft, Tristan makes it off the plane very quickly and has most of our baggage stacked on trolleys by the time we reach the carousels.
We were welcomed to South Australia by this challenging artwork, something that in 2026 could easily be described as AI slop, but given the age of the airport is more likely to be South Australia Tourism Board slop, created very intentionally by a human graphic artist.
The logistical challenges of tour now continued. How many of our cases could we fit inside the capacious boot of a Kia Carnival multi-purpose vehicle? All of them - would seem to be the answer. Scenes of command, negotiation, cooperation, and stacking, were seen in the pickup area of Adelaide Airport as our rental vehicle was packed to bursting. Only two seats were left for human passengers so the rest of us caught a taxi into the city, another Kia Carnival, which carried us with the same ease with which it could have transported a heavy load of musical cargo.
Tour logistics - behind the scenes: the first pack of our fourteen equipment cases into the rear of the Kia Carnival is attempted.
At our hotel we unloaded the gear into an unused conference room and headed out for a badly needed lunch, exploring the Adelaide Central Market in its historical brick building just across from our accommodation. Look at us here enjoying a casual and social dining experience at the bar of this Algerian restaurant.
The climax of our day was a very pleasing stroll, a walking tour through the CBD that took us to the locations of some the best public sculpture the city has to offer. Here are the highlights.
The Beths: ready to walk to see some sculptures!
'Pigeon' by Paul Sloan.“A homage to those feathery urban dwellers that inhabit many city centres, including our own Rundle Mall”.
Golden Rhombohedron (Acute) by Jason Sims. The shape of the faces represent the golden rhombus, described because its diagonals are in the golden ratio.
The interior of Golden Rhombohedron (Acute) by Jason Sims. Probably worth seeing after dark to enjoy the lighting elements.
The Knot by Bert Flugelman.
Onion Rings - Greg Healey and Gregg Mitchell’s simple organic form references an onion. At 1.8 metres high this work is a noteworthy presence in the streetscape with its circular form allowing several bikes to be locked to it.