My postcard arrived in my son’s Austin, Texas mailbox a couple of days ago. It doesn’t look exactly like it did when I stuck it in the New Zealand mailbox. Now it is wrapped in plastic, and not one, but two stamps cover up the "anywhere" stamp I paid 2 NZ dollars for. The one you see is from Singapore, but there is Brunei stamp under that.
In 1967 it took about a week for a letter to get from Viet Nam to the USA. With transportation improvements, I thought it would be much faster in 2014. Well, it took a bit longer than that. Let’s see, from October 17 to December 9......that is 7.5 weeks.
The explanation is simple, and had I thought it through I would have expected such a slow delivery. You see, the Maori warriors in New Zealand are out of work. They got laid off when it was no longer fashionable to kill and eat the white settlers. So they have been reassigned, retrained, re-employed as postal workers.
Using their wakas (like dugout canoes but way more sophisticated), they provide courier service between New Zealand and the U.S. To protect the mail from salt spray, rain, etc., during the long voyage, they wrap each letter in plastic.
A typhoon took them off course of course, and they washed up on-shore in Malaysia. The local authorities forced the Maori postal workers to buy both a Brunei and Singapore stamp before they could proceed on their voyage to Los Angeles.
It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.
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