Behind The Lions: Auckland to Christchurch, Christchurch to Wellington, Wellington to Christchurch, Christchurch to Dunedin, Dunedin to Christchurch. Five travel days in a week, the other two being match days. See New Zealand through the window of a plane? Breathtaking as the Southern Alps were as we flew in to Dunedin yesterday, it's been a week of match venues, new press boxes, packing, check-in desks, airport lounges, airplanes, baggage carousels, taxis, hotel check-ins, new room keys, unpacking. Tough for the players too, presumably.

What room are you in? Haven't got a clue.

What sets Christchurch apart, according to the week's first taxi driver, is that it's New Zealand's only "flat city". Population edging towards 400,000, it's the capital of the South Island, where despite their smaller numbers, they call themselves the "Mainlanders".

Dunedin, where about one-sixth of the city's 120,000 population are students, is a good place to visit on a Friday or Saturday night. Yet the rest of the week it's deadly quiet. Somehow, you'd imagine that if Ireland had a students' town it would be livelier throughout the week. We'd pace ourselves better to make every night count.

No Super 12 game has been a sell-out at Carisbrook this season, and this morning's match was still 4,000 short of a 38,000 sell-out by yesterday; tickets flogged on the internet weren't fetching half the face price. But for its size, that's hardly surprising.

It's colder too. The taxi driver apologised for the weather and acted as a sales rep for Speights ale as a warming form of compensation. "That will put hairs on your chest like rhubarb stalks." Thanks, but no thanks.

Rewind to last Sunday morning. Auckland airport was surrounded by fog, again, delaying departure further. It's 9am and two teams of four, dressed in replica black gear, are playing four-a-side tip rugby in the car park. On tarmac, two four-man teams of baggage handlers are doing the same.

You can't pick up a newspaper without the Lions and/or the All Blacks being on the cover of the main section, and they usually dominate the first few pages of sports sections as well. You can't turn on the telly and flick through the stations without finding rugby.

You can sense the heat is being turned up as the first Test nears. On Thursday night, the former All Black winger turned TV pundit Stu Wilson could be heard attempting to mimic an Irish accent when he quoted Brian O'Drsicoll talking about the Lions sticking together and keeping patient for 80 minutes against Wellington. Wilson then commented: "Well, diddley-do, diddley-do potatoes."

Not that there's much in the way of paddywhackery going on.

Nonetheless, on another television rugby discussion with journalists, one of the home media happily admitted "our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Lions".

Granted, some of his fellow guests looked a bit taken aback by this admission.

Until this week the Lions had been losing the media phoney war, but Woodward is a wily, experienced player of the media game and well able to fight his corner. During a crisis meeting with members of the visiting media on Wednesday, he appears to have been genuinely astonished at the list of grievances.

Over-the-top security at the team hotel in Wellington, which several of the media were - unusually - also booked into, was one thing. No scheduled access to the players save for the post-match press conference over the next four days; holding the Lions' pre-Test players' interview session at the same time as the All Blacks'; a general air of dissatisfaction over constant rescheduling, and other grievances, were quite another.

Suddenly glasnost prevailed, ironically all while Alastair Campbell was back in England. Wednesday's team were made available on Thursday, with those media whose scheduled flights clashed with this invited by Woodward on to the Lions charter. The same again on Friday. As it's a 747, with ample space, it sure took the hassle out of travelling. And today's squad was made available en bloc also after the training run at Carisbrook.

So Woodward has his press corps back onside, and the Lions head coach was entitled to reflect on the noticeably less vocal contributions of the touchjudges in Wellington, especially Steve Walsh, when he observed that Wednesday's referee, Paul Honiss, "at least didn't have a jukebox playing in his ears, which maybe proves somebody was listening to us."

However, the Otago coach, Wayne Graham, upped the ante in the build-up to their encounter with the Lions in Carisbrook today by launching a broadside at the tourists for their lippiness with the referees, their supposedly illegal tactics at the rucks, their negative approach to the scrums and the contact area, and their attitude toward off-field community activities.

"That's definitely something we are not allowed to get away with in New Zealand, especially at NPC level," Graham said of the backchat to referees. "There's a lot of yak from all directions on what should and should not be happening. I think the referees are having trouble coping with it. It's a very difficult job to maintain consistency when you've got players talking in your ear."

Any stick will do, of course, and the announcement that the Lions would be cancelling a school visit as part of their revised community schedule in Dunedin this week was used by more than just Graham.

In response, Woodward smiled wearily during yesterday's visit to Carisbrook.

"May I knock this firmly on the head. All we've done is rearrange the community stuff down here. We're on a rugby tour, not a community tour. I think the Lions are absolutely doing a fantastic job in terms of community work. I'm not here to justify that; I'd just ask for some fair reporting on what we're all doing.

"Certainly I'm doing various things tomorrow and we've rearranged a couple of things from Saturday to Sunday, just to allow the guys coming down later not to be quite as rushed. I think we've actually put on more community stuff rather than less. But like I said, there's been some fairly crazy reporting on this tour so far, so I look forward to the rugby as opposed to the community work."

Woodward understandably feels that the greater effort made by the 2005 Lions on this score deserves more credit than it gets.

"Community work back home, by the way, is a (prison) sentence," he quipped.