Niue #5: The Gear Arrives!

Friday is airplane day in Niue. The one weekly flight from Auckland arrives a little after noon and about 1/4 of the country turns out to meet it. This is the off-season for tourists, so the flights are running about 1/2 full, mostly shuttling the 30,000-strong Niuean diaspora to and from their ancestral home. My wife, Jessica, was arriving on this flight. So was Taiichi's girlfriend, Cookie. So was our equipment. It was a big day and we were at the airport waiting with everyone else.

After meeting the ladies, we had lunch at Mr. Lee's house, near the airport. Mr. Lee was a Chinese chef who had been stranded in Niue in part of a work-permit scam (long story). He had been fishing the night before and presented us with a wonderful meal assembled from local ingredients. We couldn't stay as long as we liked, though, because our cargo was ready for pick-up and the customs office closed at 16:00, just like everything else.

That evening, we set up the BTS at the guest house to be sure nothing was damaged in shipping. After a visual inspection, we connected the unit to a battery, booted the CPU and then... not much. Asterisk was hanging on DNS because there was no real network to connect it to, so anything that relied on a SIP transaction was timing out. But unlike at Burning Man, we had Tim there and he knew how to fix it. A few minutes later, we placed the first-ever GSM call in Niue. Later that night, Tim made his own blog post, with some photos, too.