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Mrs A continues her account of the last few days of Tessa's stay in Australia.
I finally understood that Tessa decided to leave NZ in a hurry. She did not want to be there any more; and having realized that she could not travel to the UK, she bought a ticket to Sydney. She tried to get rid of her personal belongings, but could not. So on the day of her travel, not understanding anything much about traveling, she turned up at Auckland Airport with what I estimate to be around 200kg of luggage! Upon being told that she could not travel with all this, she checked in a suitcase, cargoed a second suitcase as unaccompanied luggage at a cost of $NZ80, then caught a taxi from the airport with the remainder of her belongings and went over to one of the shipping companies near the airport. She must have looked totally lost and confused. She said to me: "These people were really nice to me and I really appreciate what they did!" They must have realized that she was confused and told her: "Leave us everything and we'll repack it and send it for you and you can pay for the cost when you collect your belongings."
In the meantime, she had lost the airweigh bill for that shipment — the company's name is Emery — and her receipt for the suitcase that had been sent unaccompanied. It took me a while to piece all this together, while she was still insisting that she knew what she was doing. You then called
and spoke to her. After that phone conversation, she said: "I don't want to travel tomorrow. It is too rushed." She wanted to go and retrieve her suitcase and other luggage from the shipping company. I tried to explain to her that there was a number of issues involved: Firstly, she couldn't get them to ship things back without first paying for them. She then asked me to pay, and said she would reimburse me. I tried to make her understand that her air fare would be $574. If she wanted the luggage, I would have to give her another $700 ($270 Auckland-Sydney, $180 customs clearance, another $270 Sydney-Wellington) and that I could not afford that.
She then said: "Let me stay until Monday. Then at least I'll go and see them and sign some papers." I told her: "There're no papers to sign. They will not send anything back to NZ until everything is paid for." I then explained to her that the best thing for her to do was to return to NZ, settle down, get some money, then go to the company with her passport or any suitable ID, and explain the situation. And upon her clearing whatever money she owed them, they would then dispatch her things back to NZ. First, she said: "Yes, that's good." Then, after two minutes, she would say: "How about I go and clear them from customs myself?" I would then remind her that she didn't have the money, and that, once she paid for them, she would have to physically take possession of 150kg of goods and move them from one place to another, and that this involved too much. Adding to all these considerations: upon asking her what was in these packages, she said: "Actually, nothing really important — just clothes and other things I wanted to get rid of. But I didn't have time, so I just brought them with me."
Continued...
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