Our first four days in New Zealand were spent in the very lovely and very English city of Christchurch. Our first 2 days were spent getting our bearings, the campervan and essential shopping so it wasn’t until the 26th that we got to properly look around the city.
The first thing that strikes you about Christchurch is how quiet it is! When on the aeroplane over to NZ, Naomi was reading the guidebook and read that NZ has a population of 43 million! So we thought it was going to be just like home. But on reading that Christchurch is the 2nd largest city in NZ with only 344,000 population, something didn’t add up. So Chris re-consulted the guidebook, and slight over exaggeration. Naomi had read the population for sheep in NZ!!!! Population for humans is only 4 million!!! Whoops lol!
Anyways, so we headed out to the city in the morning. The only way we can really describe Christchurch is almost like Oxford, just without the big posh university!
Our Lonely Planet guide had quite a good walking tour in it for the city, so we followed that for most of the day. We started off in the Lichfield ‘Lanes’ part of town, which was where all the old mills were that were now converted into cafes, bars and quirky shops!
We then went up the high street which is full of huge sculptures and of course shops but we weren’t really interested in that part of it!
And from there into Cathedral Square, which funnily enough is called this because this is where the cathedral is! There are also a few market stalls and some amazing musical buskers. We sat around here and enjoyed watching the world go by for it! Also the info centre is here, so naturally Naomi had to find out all the ski offers :)
We headed along the tram line (the tram here is only for tourist purposes and costs a fortune but is very pretty!) through the glass atrium of Cathedral Junction onto New Regent Street which is full of pastel-coloured Spanish architecture! Its also full of cafes and bakeries so we thought this would be a good place for lunch.
From here it was now the more natural scenic route, through Victoria Park and along the Avon River down to the Bridge of Remembrance. But we got stuck in the park for a while as Chris was happily watching and feeding some ducklings we happened across.
One thing for sure about Christchurch is that it is a very well kept, manicured city and they are very proud of it. And to be honest, walking around it, you could really feel the pride in all there work!
From the Avon River we went to the Botanical Gardens, pottered around there for a little bit just before it started to get a little cold. Then headed into the museum that is within the grounds of the gardens to learn a little more about NZ and maori culture. Very interesting indeed! We only managed to cover the ground floor before closing time though :(
That evening, we were picking some friends up from the airport (Steph and Steph that we had met in Fraser Island) but they weren’t flying in till 11pm, so we went to the cinema to kill some time :) one thing with a campervan, if you have nothing planned in the evenings, you can very easily be tucked up watching a movie in bed at 7pm!!! So we picked the girls up from the airport, they were starving so we went to a Macy D’s for food and to catch up and then we tucked up into our beds in the hostel around 1.30am! Very late night for us!
Next day we mosied around the city with the girls, we started off over at the Art Centre (next to the museum) and spent an hour or so in there, couldn’t take any pictures of the artwork though as it was all for sale! Did get some good pictures of the outside of the Art Centre which did remind us of Oxford Uni a little bit.
We then went to the museum and got to do the rest of the floors that we had missed out on the previous day :) lots about antarctic explorers, in particular about Robert Scott (he is a big hero here!).
We spent the rest of the day checking into our campsite and going to the supermarket :) best supermarket we had seen in a while, reminded us of a Macro back home :)
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