Wellington to Christchurch

Saturday 18 September

What a long day!  We were up at 6:00 and on the road to the ferry by 7:25, and arrived at our hotel about 7:00 tonight. 

The ferry crossing took about 3 hours, we arrived on the South Island at Picton about 11:30 after a very smooth crossing, despite the very dire warnings of gales and high winds from Steve, our North Island driver who has now left us – or rather we left him on the North Island and will have a new driver on the South Island.

We came to Christchurch on the train which is running again after having been out of operation for a time due to a landslip about halfway along its track.  We saw the place and there’s a picture in the gallery, taken through the window as the photographers’ car was out of bounds during that part of the journey for safety reasons – they weren’t taking the chance of having rocks fall on the passengers.

I think we all enjoyed the train ride, it made a change from the coach and a lot of people took the opportunity to spend some time in the open photographers’ car.  It was a bit cool and breezy but some great photo opps.

Everyone was ready for an early night, and a bit of a sleep in tomorrow.

Sunday 19 September

The sleep in was great, and we spent the morning on a sightseeing tour of Christchurch, which is a very pretty place, on the coastal plain backed by mountains which are snow-capped at the moment.  There was fresh snow a couple of days ago and we believe we will have snow when we travel further south from here.

We saw some of the earthquake damage in the streets near our hotel this morning and also on our city tour.  It seems to be quite scattered, with damage to one or two houses in an area, a lot of collapsed chimneys, and then nothing for a while.  There are several streets blocked off in the city and a lot of businesses are operating in temporary premises.

We were upgraded to the Millenium hotel because of damage to the Copthorne where we originally to stay.  It’s right on Cathedral Square in the middle of the city, so we’ve taken advantage of that this afternoon.  We rode around the CBD on the tram, which makes several stops on its circuit.  We hopped off at the markets and walked around for a while checking out the various stalls and so on.  We met a few people from the group there and decided to have lunch and be serenaded by the busker who was singing and playing the sax (not at the same time) on the footpath near the coffee shop.  She was very good and we all put a few coins in her case.

A bit of history about Christchurch.  The original settlers arrived in four ships and were all selected by the Church of England which had been given authority in the Canterbury district of NZ.  The Presbyterians were given authority in Otago, which might be further south, will have the find out, and selected the people to go there.  Many of the streets are named after towns and districts in England and Ireland, so we have Worcester, Armagh, the River Avon, Heathcote and so on.

The city is built on very flat land, the people go for Sunday rides instead of Sunday drives.  Geoff told us that many children ride their bikes to school, and going by what we saw today, they start at a very early age.  We saw lots of families out for their ride, and also lots of road bikes on the steep roads on the hills behind the city as well as mountain bikes on the hillsides.  There are quite a lot of tracks for mountain bikers and hikers, the hillsides are quite steep so they work hard at it.

Tonight after dinner a few of us are going over to the Irish pub across the square for a Guinness or something similar.  They have Kilkenny on tap too, not sure about Smithwicks yet, will have to check that.