To be brutally honest, the start to our New Zealand tour wasn't the best. It took a long time for us to complete the check-in formalities at the Melbourne International Airport yesterday morning. It took us a while to explain to the lady behind the counter that an Australian visa was good enough to travel to New Zealand during the ICC World Cup.

After successfully managing to get past the consistent inquiries regarding our Bangladeshi passports, we boarded the aircraft. Thankfully there were no further obstacles to overcome. My companion and I in fact were expecting the Wellington wind -- which sometimes compels flights to get delayed and we even heard tales of pedestrians being blown away by it -- to cause some trouble; thankfully though nothing of that sort happened.

The city welcomed us with a gentle breeze and brilliant sunshine. The eye-soothing hilly landscape around the airport, almost at once, made us forget of our bitter experience at the Melbourne airport. As opposed to our departure, we also met a middle-aged gentleman at the immigration office there. As soon as he heard that we were here for the World Cup, he smiled, worked his magic and let us through in a jiffy.

As we landed at the Wellington airport we looked for signs that made Wellington feel like it belonged to the rest of the continent. While we came across a few the one with a big hoarding of New Zealand skipper Brendon McCullum, which had a slogan 'Greatness is contagious' was perhaps the one that caught our attention.

Up next on our schedule was a forty minute flight from Wellington to Nelson, where the Tigers will be squaring up against Scotland at the Saxton Oval. Nelson has a comparatively small airport and there were small hoardings on the roadside as well, to give the city a feel of the mega event.