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13/01/2003

OK I'm sorry - 6 months on and I finally write about Christchurch... insert impressive excuse here ...

People have written to me saying - "well since you've stopped writing you must be having a really good time" - I was having a good time but that wasn't really the reason. Mostly work - I worked on websites and got a contract in Australia - I write this on a train in the UK. Heading down to London from Norfolk for - yep - work. Well not work - lets be completely honest about it all - for money. Money does make the world go round - anyone who tells you different obviously has either too much and can fulfil every aspiration, or no aspirations. My aspirations - right now to travel again.

So back to my last lot of travelling - where was I - Dunedin... after the excitement of Dunedin we drove upto Christchurch.ng. Our first stop over was the Mariaki boulders. The Mariaki boulders huge completely round geode style rocks that drop out of the small sandy cliffs at the beach and gradually roll into the ocean. The ocean works on them over the course of the centuries and some crack open - revealing a hollow interior with a strange crystalline substance inside. A really calm and serene place - apart from the droves of tourists who are there to see the rocks.

We stayed in Tiranu - (I think) - a smaller town near the peel forest. We stayed in a nice hostel - a former hotel - with rooms and interior a lot grander than anything I had stayed in for a while. We played pool.

Drove to the peel forest - the trees were huge and some how ecologically significant - but now four months on the reason escapes me - I do remember a really nice walk through the forest and hugging the trees for lack of better things to do with them.

15/01/2003

Finally arrived in Christchurch - a really lovely city - masses of parks and trees and buildings and buskers - we had arrived in time for the world buskers festival. The highlight of the busking entertainment for me was an act called Skate Naked - all the way from Bristol England. Their daring range of riske humour got the crowd going and they deservedly recieved a good amount of money at the end, maybe they would be able to pay for the return flight.

The hostel - Dorset House - lovely but boring. I met up with a friend of a friend - Sharon's friend - Donna. I gave Donna a picture of me from this site so that we would recognise each other... no help, apparently I don't look anything like my photos, I choose to believe that I'm in fact much better looking in real life. She had recieved some mail for me which was great - and we watched comedy and drank and chatted about stuff - mainly Sharon's antics in Guatemala.

I purchased a ticket to Auckland - for what I thought at the time was a large amount of NZ dollars but bakck in Britain where I can't get anywhere cheaply $240 seems very reasonably.

Flew to Auckland and then to Sydney. But I'll leave the details of this to another blog...

So my alterior motive for posting up this diary is to test out the new enhancements that I've built into travelblog, mostly back end work - but the best bit will be the bigger photos ;) Click the full image to get a 600px version of each image. Another thing is that I've allowed diaries to be back dated, I can now put the correct data for this diary.

A few people are now writing on this site - I hope the community grows and hope that travelblog is a useful tool for them whilst they're travelling.

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