Hagad: A Sunstar visit to New Zealand

BY THE time you read this Monday morning, my wife Blandy, eldest son Gino and I will be inside a Royal Brunei Airlines jumbo jet winging over to New Zealand.

Our youngest daughter Carla and husband Anton live and work in that country beside the Australian continent, in the university city of Palmerston North. That will be our final destination.

Click here for Election 2010 updates

This first visit to New Zealand has been in the planning board for several months, but the excitement and the challenge that the coming May 10, 2010 national and local elections would have postponed it to sometime in June.

An unexpected event, which I shall however not relate here made us decide to make the family reunion a top priority, so here we are now up in the air and anticipating a month of fun and plain, contented relaxation. And I’m bringing all of you along with us.

For the next four weeks, as my family and I have this grand reunion and sashay all over unspoiled New Zealand, I shall use this column to have Sunstar readers tag along with us. We’ll bring you to the places we will visit, describe to you the sights and sounds that will envelope us first-time tourists to the area, and get you to meet the new friends that we will encounter along the way.

The little that I know about New Zealand at the moment is that it is one of the already developed countries in the world, but exceptional in the sense that it has managed to preserve its natural environment, to an extent that movies like the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” have extensively used its unspoiled surroundings to create an old-world and European atmosphere.

New Zealand is also known as the “safest place in the world”, which goes to show the kind of people who live there and whose culture values peace and serenity at a premium.

Our daughter Carla works as a nurse over there. Her husband Anton is also gainfully employed. About four months ago they finally secured a house of their own. That led to their insistent invitation that we come over for a visit, an “invite” that we are about to accept and, if we cannot take all of you with us physically, at least the Sun.Star publication will allow me to bring you figuratively along.

So come on, join us for the next four weeks as my family and I go see and feel the sights and sounds of this fascinating part of the world known as New Zealand.