We heard on the news this morning that Katy Perry’s latest album triggered a biosecurity alert from officials in Australia, because the album contained flower seeds that were not native to the country. Timely setup for this post. Australia and New Zealand are very sensitive to invasive species, including seeds and insects.

Ryan and I, being the honest people that we are, declared all the odd places visited in the last 30 days (elephant sanctuary) and crazy stuff we were carrying (dried fruit, nuts, lots of wood souvenirs) and were subsequently pulled over and inspected by customs upon entering New Zealand. The nice official took everything out of the bag I had so neatly packed and decided that two untreated wood souvenirs from Cambodia required fumigating. After about 30 minutes, around 1am, we were finally allowed to collect all our belongings and catch a cab to our hotel for the night.