Kia Ora from Aotearoa (Hello from New Zealand)

The flight over to New Zealand was good and i got some amazing views of the large lakes and snow capped mountains on the way, I arrived in Christchurch just before 7pm although i thought it was 6pm (I got confused with the time difference being 12 hours ahead but because of DST it was actually 13 hours) i caught a bus to the city centre which stopped about 5 mins away from my hostel so i didn't have to lug my things too far. I booked myself in at the Christchurch City YHA as i knew i couldn't go wrong with YHA as they have all been really good so far and this one didn't disappoint, the staff were really friendly and the hostel was very clean and modern looking. It soon dawned on me the irony around where i was staying as the region was called Canterbury (Where i was born), the main river flowing through Christchurch was called the River Avon and north of here there is a place called Hamilton. There are many cities and towns in New Zealand named after English places and Christchurch had a very English feel to it both in the style of the buildings and in the weather as it wasn't uncomfortably hot but more like a summers day in England.

The day after i arrived i got straight on with looking for a job and this time tried kiwifying my CV, before i could work though i had to apply for a work visa as i didn't get one before i got here, i picked some forms up from the immigration office but realised i had got the wrong ones and by that time (4pm) the offices were closed so i went back again the following day and spoke to someone to check i had the right ones, the guy was really helpful but informed me without proof i had enough money to support myself without work i.e. at least $4000Nzd i could only get a permit to do fruit picking which was better than no permit at all but really limited my options after explaining my situation to him and him speaking to his boss he said if i could get back the same day with the money for the visa and all the relevant things than they'd be able to sort it, so after a frantic rush around i went back and managed to get a working holiday visa which allows me to do any work i want. On the way back from the office i saw a large group of people watching a street performer and decided to watch, it turned out that the world buskers festival was on all week. I sat down and watched a few of them perform and they were really good, there were loads of different acts including acrobats, magicians, sword swallowing, jugglers and one guy who did a bit of everything.

After blanketing Christchurch with my Kiwified CV i finally heard back from one place.....Greenpeace :-) I had a short telephone interview and they asked me to come to a group interview two days later. First we had to stand up and say a bit about who we were, the best experience we every had (So i mentioned Skydiving) and our biggest concern about the environment which i think i did ok on, for the next part of the interview we had to go out on the street and get people to sign this sheet with there name, signature and a comment on how they think I am with talking to people and i managed to fill the whole thing up and i got some really good comments (My tactic was to ask the people sitting at the bus stop as they had nothing better to do). For the last part of the interview we were given a made up scenario about a town where there was some woodland that was going to be bulldozed and have a shopping complex built on it, but the council agreed that if we could raise a third of the funds then they'd buy it and make it into a public park, so our task was to convince the interviewer to donate money to the cause. I did really badly in this and had to start over twice! But through some act of god she offered me the job!!!! So i've been out on the streets in Christchurch trying to save the planet one person at a time for the last few weeks, and i've really enjoyed it although you do get a few people that give you abuse, most are really concerned with the environment and the people i work with were awesome.

Unfortunately (and it wouldn't really be in keeping with the rest of my travels if there wasn't a problem) my boss at Greenpeace was fired because she didn't meet target for 4 weeks in a row so they shut the Christchurch team down so i was out of work again, and the really annoying thing was that i only needed one more weeks wages to have enough to travel around. One of my old work buddy's called Chris managed to get me a bit of work doing some gardening at this guys house. The guy owned 20 acres of land and each acre was divided by massive 12ft high hedgerows which he had recently had cut, so our job was to rake all the hedge clipping into piles and load them onto a trailer to be taken to the dump. It took us just over 6 hours to do 2 acres worth but the guy was really nice and his wife made us some really tasty lunch and at the end of it we got $90 each.

On one of my weekends off (Before I finished working for Green Peace) i met up with a girl called Emily who worked at the YHA and we went and did all the touristy things around Christchurch. We went to the old University where they had a small exhibit about Ernest Rutherford who was the guy who split the atom and he's on the New Zealand $100 bill, the old university building was beautiful and again very English looking.
After that i went to Canterbury Museum which was really good, on the first floor they had a lot of exhibits on the history of the Māori which i found really interesting, there were also lots of fossils including one of a Moa which was a very large bird that lived in New Zealand but was hunted to extinction by the Māori. There were so many exhibits that i can't go into all of them but all in all it was fantastic.
The Week before i left Christchurch i went to Chris's house because it was his Birthday, to cut a long story short we all got very drunk and i stayed the night, luckily i couldn't have made too bad an impression on his mum because she practicly adopted me and i spent the last few days at their house hanging around with his brothers and Chris's Girlfriend Marie. When i told them i was leaving to go to Kaikoura Chris's mum insisted on driving me! But i'll tell you more on that in my next blog.

Hei konā rā (Goodbye in Māori)

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