After seeing the seal cub our luck turned. Last stop before Dunedin was already close to town – there are some rock formations called Organ pipes. We parked our car right behind two other cars and went to see the formations. They were supposed to be close, so we left everything in the car. The walk took us merely 20 minutes, but meanwhile someone had time to break into the car and steal two of our backpacks, containing almost all Valeria’s clothes and our most valuable items – passports.

Needless to say, we didn’t see much of Dunedin. We did get familiar with central police station and also local library with friendly staff and free scanning. Most of our time went into figuring out our next move. There is no Finnish embassy in New Zealand, but we had already booked flights to Hawaii, Miami and Chile, so we wanted to find the way to continue our travels. In the end we decided to fly to Australia (closest embassy being in Canberra).

In order to get there we needed an emergency travel document, which we could get from Dutch consulate in Wellington. We got a flight there from Queenstown. Wellington seemed like a nice city, but we didn’t actually see any of it. We went directly to Dutch consulate, where the staff were really nice and helpful. After completing a passport application (in Dutch) we used consulate’s wifi to get a flight to Canberra the same evening. So from the consulate we just hopped again in the airport bus.

We didn’t manage to find any (reasonably priced) accomodation in Canberra for the same evening, so in the end we stayed in a fancy airport hotel. The guy at the reception was really sympathetic and first gave us a little discount and then also upgraded our room. 

Next day we had an appointment at the Finnish embassy. There we met Janne, with whom we had been in contact with in the past week. It was reassuring to meet this relaxed, smiling person speaking on a strong accent from Tampere (although he turned out to be Australian). So there we filled the nesessary paperwork for the new passports. They were made in Finland the same day and would be in Australia in a week. 

We used our time in Canberra mainly for paperwork and shopping. We found a nice recycling center with an infinite amount of cheap clothes. We also got Ville a new phone as his old one broke. It wasn’t that easy since in Australia many phones are locked to a certain operator, and the selection of the unlocked ones was not very wide.

So, we had a week to spend in Australia. There were some interesting things to do in and around Canberra but a big, sold out music festival ‘Spilt Milk’ was coming to town on the weekend, so every hostel was booked. During the week also parliament was sitting, which didn’t help the situation. So we rented a car to head towards Sydney to Katoomba to see the Blue mountains again.

What did we learn of all this? A couple of things. First of all, never leave your passport, even for a little while. Even places like New Zealand aren’t 100% safe. Second, don’t buy flights too much ahead. We lost some flights and had to pay extra to stay on our way. Thirdly, chaos is good. As soon as we packed a backpack more neatly, it disappeared. And lastly, a really positive finding was that all the officials we dealt with (Dutch consulate, Australian border, Finnish embassy) were really friendly, helpful and laid-back, which made the whole experience much more bearable.