Earthquake Tourism, Skydiving and Estate Agents

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Hello again, now noone can complain that I haven't updated this recently 😉

After splitting from Andrew and the kids at the airport, me and Mary got a shuttle to the 4* hotel on the park she had booked us into (she was paranoid about Earthquakes and refused to stay in central Christchurch or in any old buildings). We dropped off our bags in the hotel and headed out through the park into Queenstown, where our first point of stop was the Mauri museum, including the Paua Shell House. The museum was quite interesting, with lots of cultural Mauri stuff going on; the Paua shell house was just strange - basically some strange Kiwi people covered their whole house in the NZ Paua shells. Then we did some "Earthquake tourism" - looking for which buildings had fallen down and which where still open. It was a bit random as to which shops you could go into as probably 1/4 of the shops had red notices on saying they had failed their inspection for earthquake damage and were therefore shut - we decided it was like modern day Nazi Germany - with all the buildings displaying either red or green notices. For dinner we left our fate in the hands of Lonely Planet and headed to their "our pick" restaurant which turned out to be an amazing Burmese restaurant called The Bodhi Tree, serving yellow split pea tofu chips (delicious) and other weird but really nice stuff e.g. semolina cake. Afterwards we went to the cinema to see Animal Kingdom which was a very good film by David Michod about happy things such as drugs and armed robbery - we were the only ones in the cinema which was cool - though Mary started to think it could be that the film was being shown in an old historic building and that most people were too smart to risk going in after an earthquake. Then we had to get a taxi back because the hotel receptionist had scared Mary into thinking that there were all sorts of men of disreputable intent in Christchurch park.

Breakfast the next day consisted of a massive portion of pancakes, banana, berries, maple syrup and cream - turns out travelling with Mary has benefits afterall 😉. Then we spent the morning shopping for brown boots for Many to no avail, eventually giving up in favour of the Ron Mueck exhibition at the art gallery. Turns out he creates insanely lifelike scupltures out of fibreglass and resin, to the point where we thought the picture on the front of the leaflet was of Mueck, when in actuality it was one of his sculture: "Wild Man". My favourite was "Pregnant Woman". When we got out, Mary finally decided which pair of shoes she wanted to buy (red plimsol type things), so we did that, and later on returned to the Bodhi Tree for more awesome tofu chips, paid for by $50 I found on the floor 😊.

The next day I was forced out of bed at some unreasonably early hour of the morning to get the train up to Kaikoura - there is only 1 a day and it leaves at like 7am. In Kaikoura we started off by going on a dolphin-swimming trip. This began by a video-recorded briefing (something methinks should be introduced at Southwater), followed by an overly enthusiastic instructor who said "ok team" "right team" before and after every sentence, leading us onto a bus, then the boat taking us out to the dolphins. The dolphins we swam with were the Dusky dolphins and were completely wild (a fact emphasized roughly 20 times - no exaggeration - by the briefing and the guide). When we got out to sea the boat stopped near a pod of about 5 dolphins and we all jumped off the back of the boat to go swim with them. They're quite playful, but only if you entertain them so we all looked like complete idiots snorkelling round making dolphin noises and trying to dive under water whilst wearing super-bouyant 10mm wetsuits, but the dolphins were amazing, and once you attracted their attention they would swim in really tight circles round you, whilst you would be desperately trying to keep up! After a while Mary got cold (the water was freezing) and got out and not long after the dolphins swam off so we all piled back onto the boat to try and find some more and go again. The second attempt the dolphins swam away almost immediately, but on the third try we found some more playful ones - a group of about 4, who stuck around playing with me and a couple of guys for quite a while - the rest of the group were pathetic and stayed near the boat hoping the dolphins would come to them. Then it was back on the boat to warm up with hot chocolate and biscuits, and then we went up to the very front of the deck and watched/photographed a massive pod of dolphins (about 10?) playing in the bow wave of the boat - jumping and diving around. Once we were back on dry land, and just because the day so far had been so rubbish 😉, we decided to go skydiving - by which I mean I went skydiving whilst Mary stayed firmly on the ground with some binoculars. We got picked up from the i-site by Henk (a Dutch skydiver), and driven to a cute little airfield with about 2 planes in it, and a lovely wooden chalet as a base. There we met Sarah (Henk's wife), and we discovered that I would be the only person skydiving and we would be going up (and jumping out of) and plane barely longer than me. Then I got kitted out in the skydiving gear that made me look about 12, then we did some test runs involving crash-mats, posed for the Sarah's camera, and Henk's handheld video recorder, and went out to the plane to meet Joseph the pilot. Once we'd squeezed into the plane, we took off and circled up to 13000 feet, which took ages but was amazing, and we had incredible views of the snow-capped peaks of the mountains once we'd got above the clouds. Then we shuffled about a bit, getting in position, clipping me onto Henk's harness (seeing as how he was the one with the parachute), and playing with the video camera, and Joseph opened the door. I had to sit on the edge of the plane and put my feet on the little metal step, a task easier said than done as it was so windy my foot was getting blown off it, then Henk knocked us out into a minute of freefall which was the best thing ever - it didn't feel like we were falling at all due to the wind resistance, though in reality we were falling at 200km per hour, covering 9000 feet in a minute. Then it was a nice chilled out parachute ride back to base, during which Henk let me control it. Once on solid ground we headed back up into the office to watch the DVD, and then we headed back to the hostel, having had quite a bit of excitement for one day :D.

The next day, Mary was bored of Kaikoura so we caught the train up to Picton - this time we didn't have to get up so early so we were more awake and headed out onto the "viewing deck", which was basically a carriage with railings along the edges about halfway up, and no windows, so you could look out at the scenery (beautful) and the random sights that the driver slowed down to point out (e.g. grape vines, the occasional river, the place where an old bridge used to be - not so interesting). Then, in Picton we had a fun day walking round houses and talking to estate agents (where being a bitch seems to be in the job description), followed by a recovery drink and a 4km walk into Waikawa to see a house that Mary wanted to rent for a week (having given up on finding somewhere long-term). By the time everything there was sorted we decided to find somewhere serving food - which turned out to be relatively impossible due to complete lack of shops in Waikawa, so we walked back into Picton. To start off with we walked along the footpath through the trees, but as it got dark Mary got more apprehensive, and upon accidentally going up a dark tree lined road, and discovering a sign reading "ENTRY ONLY", she insisted we walk the rest on the lighted pavement. When we got to Picton we were both hungry and ready for food, only to discover that the entire town shut up at about 8pm, and only a few bars were open, and one restaurant which we went to (and luckily didn't want dessert as the chef packed up and went home after serving us). However, breakfast the next morning of "french toast" or eggie bread with maple syrup, banana and cream more than made up for the night before, and we spent more time looking at houses, hired a car, and met up with Andrew, Arlo, Martha and Carmel (who had driven them over from Nelson). We then had a chilled out day, going to the school playground, buying food, and later me and Andrew drove back over the mountain to stay with Andrew's relatives: Alistair, Carmel, Patrick, Alex and their 3 dogs - 2 old and pathetic and 1 scary hunting dog belonging to Patrick, and then go on a 2 day kayaking trip along the coast of the Abel Tasman.

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Comments

[GDM]

Awesome!...What's next? --Deep sea diving? - Walking on the moon? xx GDM

[KatieHedgecock]

Deep sea diving next - just finished the course - how did you guess? ;) May have to wait a while for going to the moon though K xxxxxx