The World’s Most Expensive Banana

Our round the world adventure began in earnest on 17 January 2024 with an evening flight out of SFO to Auckland, New Zealand. Just before departing for the 2:30 pm Sonoma Airporter, I pushed a banana in Tom’s direction as he has not eaten much all day.

We sailed into SFO in about an hour, checked in and headed for the United Airlines Polaris lounge (the only Star Alliance lounge at the G gates). It’s an attractive lounge (much nicer than the Polaris lounge at Heathrow terminal 2B), but the buffet looked a bit sad, so we opted for the sit down restaurant and had a nice leisurely meal (with decent gluten free options!) before boarding started at 7:05 pm.

We flew business class on Air New Zealand. We didn’t love the seats [United Polaris business class recliner style seats are much more comfortable, private and offer much more storage space], but everything else was leagues better than United. The food service was quite good—linen tablecloths & napkins, and tasty multiple courses, even with the GF meal. Compared to the GF meal I got on United [a plate of dried out chick peas and yellow rice] it was Michelin star. The flat bed was comfortable enough and I (though not Tom) got a few hours of decent sleep before we landed at 5:50 am on Friday, January 19^th.

We had filled out the customs form on-line on the plane—Air New Zealand offered free wifi for the entire flight (!)—and declared the sweets and snacks we had brought with us but wrote no for all the other questions regarding fruit, veg, meat, farm products etc.

Somewhat groggily we made our way through the passport and border controls where we said we had nothing declare, got a sticker for the express lane, picked up our bags and headed for the exit, passing by the same sniffer dogs you see in the baggage area of SFO.

One of the dogs got very  excited around our luggage cart and we were asked very nicely to move to the side so they could take Tom’s passport and inspect his carry-on backpack—where they found….the banana.

The dog was rewarded for identifying the offending fruit and we were made to sit in a side room while a stern looking fellow attended to some paperwork. Eventually, Tom was called up and shown his on-line declaration in which he had sworn he had no fresh fruit, told he had committed a border crime and was fined $400 NZD.

Tom had just paid for the world’s most expensive banana—and he didn’t even get to eat it!!