Day 96

---

First full day in Christchurch, so decided to get organized. As we are now really low on money, and there are still 2 months before the flight back to the UK, we decided we need to finish our South Island experience pretty soon, so, after a bit of discussion, we went to reception at the holiday park and booked our ferry home, for Monday evening at 18:05. As a result, we also then booked 2 extra nights in ChristChurch, so the plan is to stay here for the rest of the trip, and drive the 5-6 hours to Picton in one go on Monday. It does mean we’re going to be missing Hanmer Springs, and just passing through Kaikoura, but that just means we’re going to have to come back again to visit these places. .While we were there we also booked Gondola and tram tickets, and, with that, headed off to find the Gondola. The Gondola in Christchurch is quite a way out of town, unlike Queenstown, so it took a while to get there, and we headed up to find the café for lunch as it was that sort of time. The views were good, but we just had time for the time tunnel experience at the top, which is a sit on ride through explaining the history of the region. We almost didn’t get on as there was a school trip up there, and they were trying to get 90 kids through the ride as it was covering what they were going to be learning that term! Was quite funny to see kids all over the place, just like any school trip in the UK, and there were as many helpers and teachers as there were kids. However, we finally did make it down again and then headed off to meet Bevan James Eyles, the man, the legend for coffee! He’d suggested a café called Zeroes, and we had a good hour and a half there drinking coffee and chatting about life and stuff, before we headed back for dinner, which included me making up some of the rhubarb we’d been given free at Dunedin, and then an early night as Helen was feeling tired, so I spent the evening sorted out some more blogs on line, and also trying to fill in the gaps in the blog we’ve got. We had a couple of weeks around Christmas where we didn’t write up any notes, so I’ve been going through the photos to see if I can get reminders as to what we did on each day, and then filling in the spaces. I think the idea is to try and turn the whole blog and photos into a book, so I’ll do my best to get the spaces filled in and, hopefully, we’ll have a travel journal for our entire trip! Fingers crossed, anyway!

---