Campercan Day 5

It was another summery-feeling day today!  We walked to Cathedral Square in downtown Christchurch to visit the information center to get some advice on the best way to see the city.  We were trying to decide between a walking tour, bike tour, bus tour, or the grand tour which used all modes of city transport including the tram, punting boat, and gondola.  We ended up doing part of a self-guided walk and got a quick lunch from a greek place before we departed at 2pm on a 1964 London double decker bus for a tour of the city, some of the older homes like Mona Vale and Deans house, and Sumner beach and Lyttleton harbor.

 Earlier in the morning, after coming out of the visitors’ center, we heard a street performer guy speaking through his microphone getting set up and ready to start his show so we decided to stay and watch.  He advertised as the show as being comedy, magic and doing freaky stuff with his body.  He was from Scotland and so he changed into his costume of this goth-looking kilt, knee high leather boots and some random spanish bullfighting jacket.  His first act was to make a burning cigarette disappear inside of some woman’s sweater he borrowed from the crowd...pretty impressive.  Next he blew up a rubber glove with air on top of his head until it exploded (after about 4 tries)...not as impressive.  Next he swallowed an entire 4 ft long skinny inflated balloon...just plain weird!  And his finale was having a random good-sized man from the crowd stand on his chest while he was laying topless on a pile of broken glass...just crazy really.  When he stood up, some of the glass was actually stuck into his back and he was bleeding from a couple places, ouch.  Oh and he also made this cute little girl copy him for a little while and paid her $5.  He believed his show was worth $5 and asked everyone to put that into his bag if you enjoyed the show, or if not a couple of gold coins.  I’m sure he came away with a decent amount of money for doing some pretty random things.  For a pretty small square, there were about 4 or 5 different kinds of street performing or preaching going on at the same time!  I’d never seen so many different acts in such a small space! 

After our bus tour we did a bit of shopping, although there was not much open still at 5pm, then decided to do another bit of the city walk, along Cambridge Terrace along the Avon river to the botanic gardens.  Christchurch is known as New Zealand’s garden city (and most English city) and even won the world title, I believe in 1996, to prove it.  I’m pretty sure we now have photos of almost every plant in the garden!  Luckily there were also some adorable ducklings with their mother playing in the Peacock fountain to observe as well.  One duckling nearly walked over the top of my foot while making its way into the water. 

After the gardens we walked back through town and to Little India for dinner.  We walked in just in time (at about 8:30) because the place was packed and there happened to be one table open in the corner that we added a third chair to.  A lot of people kept coming in after us as well!  The food was delicious, which explains why it was so busy!  After dinner we walked back to Stonehurst, where we were staying, and happily climbed into bed.  Another full day meant another night excited about bed time!

Home in Christchurch

Campervan Day 4

Finally a nice, cloudless day!!  It was nice to be able to see the view when we woke up in the morning.  Our Holiday Park was right near the ocean with a great view of the mountains as well.  We decided to go and get an activity booked before starting our exploration of Kaikoura.  Because the conditions were near perfect, all the whale watch tours were completely booked for the day.  We decided to add ourselves to the waiting list for the 4 afternoon tours because the guy said the chances were pretty good if we came back at that time.  We then drove out to South Bay to begin the peninsula walk to see the entire peninsula of Kaikoura along the coast and right out to Point Kean and the seal colonies out there.  The views were beautiful but some of the hills were pretty steep as we had to get up onto the cliffs that overlooked the ocean.  We had some pretty close encounters with a couple of seals and boy are they smelly!!  Usually, in low tide you are supposed to be able to walk around the shore a bit after climbing down some stairs out on the tips of the peninsula and eventually find the stairs to get back up again.  Well the tide had come up far enough so that we weren’t able to get all the way around.  By the time we were informed of this, we had walked so far from the place we had gone down onto the shore we just decided to find our own way up.  We started on what looked like it could have been a path used a couple of times, but close to the top as it go steeper the gravel and sand had slid down making it pretty difficult get a grip with our shoes.  We made it to the top were some people sat wondering where we’d come from!  by the time we had finished this section of the walk we were getting pretty hungry and we were running out of time before we had to go back to the whale watch place to see if we could fit onto one of the tours.  We had to be back there by about 3pm.  After a slight delay following a supposed walking trail to take us back to where we’d parked the campervan, only to find out it led us no where, we decided to walk straight to the cafe where we’d planned to have lunch, and worry about getting the van later (though we’d end up a few miles away from it at the cafe).  It turned out this was a great plan in the end!  We ate a pretty yummy lunch.  I had the vegan option of a lentil burger made with cashews and coriander served over toast with hummus and a small salad topped with avocado and beet root chutney.  We made our way back to the whale watch place from there and there was space for us on the 3:30 tour!  It’s possible that the worsened sea conditions and their warming of a high chance of sea sickness is what turned people away.  Being a water-loving family we weren’t scared away by it.  The swell was pretty large out on the water and there was quite a lot of sitting and waiting while they were trying to locate the whale.  About half of the boat were sick...I definitely would not have liked to be the “sea crew” on that vessel!  One guy’s job was basically to pass out sick bags and collect used ones and clean up after people who missed and try to keep people as comfortable as possible...yuck!   We were all fine, but at one point when we had to come back inside the boat and sit down it was not fun having to listen to all the seasick passengers!  On a better not though, we did see a massive sperm whale!  He was at the surface when we first went out and dove down showing a nice view of his fluke.  We also saw lots of playful dusky dolphins and an albatross while waiting about an hour for Tiaki (that was what this particular whale has been named) to resurface.  We were lucky enough to see him again and then dive again before we returned to shore (though I’m sure there were many passengers who wouldn’t have minded missing the second viewing)! 

Luckily, the whale watch departed from South Bay (where we had abandoned our campervan earlier) and they bused us over there!  So we just didn’t take the bus back and saved probably an hour long walk.  We instead hopped right on the road to Christchurch, about a 2.5 hr drive away!  Making a quick pitstop at McDonald’s to use the free WIFI (when I posted yesterday’s blog, it’s really a day or so behind...) we arrived around 11pm, checked in and went to sleep!  Finally, we had a nice full day of activity with nice weather, but it was pretty exhausting!

Home in Kaikoura

couldn't go up the path cause the tide came in and blocked our way!

Tiaki

Campervan Day 3

The rain continued to fall pretty hard this morning and our Myths and Legends Eco tour people called and said it would probably be an experience we could do without in the weather...luckily as we headed down to Blenheim it brightened up and warmed up a bit for our wine tasting at Wither Hills.  It was delicious and we ended up with 3 bottles, the 3 that were for sale at the cellar door only.  We chose the Riesling, a Sauvingnon Blanc (a different one than we had at the restaurant yesterday) and the 2003 vintage Pino Noir.  The building certainly was as described in the book, “an architectural gem!”  They dining room was all booked for the day for lunch, so we continued on to Cloudy Bay winery for another complimentary tasting.  There we tried some of their famous bubbly, some more Sauvignon Blanc (including their oaky Te Kako), Chardonnay, Riesling and Pino Noir.  We also tried some extremely sweet vintages of whites that tasted almost syrup-like!  We asked for a place they recommended for dinner, and looked through some menus to find this excellent-sounding Italian place.  When we found it in town, we were surprised to see they were already open mid-afternoon (because we were expecting to have to wait until dinner time).  Turns out, they didn’t have much of a lunch menu at all and weren’t even open for dinner tonight, but tomorrow night they would be....so far, not our day for finding a place to eat!  Oh and before that, we though we’d try to find a bakery that the Lonely Planet book recommended and walked up to the street to address.  We ended up asking a guy at a motel desk...turns out it was on Main Rd of a town about 40km away...oops, it was just listed with places in the region I guess!  So we continued on our drive south to Kaikoura.  It was another really pretty drive, especially when we got to the coast and saw the huge surf!  It was extremely windy and by the time we got here the rain had picked up again and was really coming down hard.  We parked and plugged into power then made a run for it to a recommended cafe right across the road.  Turns out they were booked for the night as well!  We’re learning that apparently we need to make bookings for everything!  We tried the place next door and luckily they had space for us (although they did ask if we had made a booking as well).  The food at Tutis was actually pretty yummy and filled us right up!  The rain had stopped by the end of the meal and by nightfall the skies were crystal clear, hopefully a sign of a nice, warm, sunny day tomorrow!  Tonight is still pretty chilly outside but I’m hoping we get some more summery-feeling weather soon!!  I’d actually like to have to use my sunscreen please.

Campervan Day 2

Rain, rain, GO AWAY!  Well, we had a pretty wet day for exploring today!  Coming in on the ferry was really pretty, but would have been way nicer if the sun was out.  After we’d got settled in our campsite and had some breakfast it started to rain, so instead of heading out for a little hike we just explored the shops in the town.  There were lots of nice souvenir shops in the town center for browsing in and lots of nice cafes along the way.  We came back to the dry campervan for a bit and then decided to head back to try out a place for dinner.  We ended up trying a cafe with a nice view of the harbor, Cafe Cortado, and had some delicious pizza and a sauvignon blanc made here in Marlborough.  The sun even looked like it wanted to come out as we were finished eating!  We made our way to this little aquarium that is supposed to have a penguin parade with lots of little blue penguins, but they don’t have a large population at the moment, so we just got to see one of their babies who they are trying to train to swim by watching an adult they are rehabbing.  He was a cute little guy, but we only got to see him being held, not waddling or attempting to swim or being fed.  Oh well, hopefully on our Eco-tour tomorrow, weather permitting! 

As the weather looked like it was trying to clear up, we decided to hike some of the Snout track anyway, starting at about 7pm, but shortly after we got going into the woods on the trail it started raining harder than it had all day!  We carried on to about halfway, but seeing as we could barely see down to the water due to wind and rain and nightfall, we decided to turn around, head home and dry off and get a good nights sleep for tomorrow’s adventures!  It seems as though the country has sensed two new people who are supposed to be having winter now and cooled down and given them some rain instead of snow!  Hopefully it changes its mind and returns to that nice hot sunny weather they had on arrival day! 

 Hopefully some more pictures taken from Mom's fancy camera will follow soon...McDonald's free WIFI won't let me use that much data!  This country needs to get up to date with their telecommunications speed and such!

Headed to Wellington

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Ferrying to Picton

Rainbow from the ferry to Picton (unfortunately that meant rain...)

Picton from the ferry

Our home in it's 2nd campsite

Daddy and Peanut, bird at Eco World in Picton

Baby blue penguin just learning to swim

Part of our hike on the Snout track in Picton...in the rain...

Would have been a MUCH nicer view if the sun was out!