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Published: March 4th 2010
Our flight from Fiji was good. Once again we were impressed with Air New Zealand. The highlight of our flight was the food. We had fish cakes! Why fish cakes I hear you ask. Easy, they run out of pie before they got to us. We managed to eat it but Sandra was utterly devastated when pudding turned out to be a little, dry chocolate brownie instead of the gloriously sumptuous ice-cream cone she had become accustomed to. We arrived in Auckland at about 22:30 but only got to the hotel at about midnight as we got delayed going through quarantine. It turns out that if you have a tent and are trying to enter New Zealand, you are automatically subjected to additional quarantine inspections. They asked for our tent, gave us a little receipt for it and said we could pick it up in about 10 minutes in the arrivals hall. We go through and wait patiently. When we push the button to get our tent back the quarantine official shows up with a mass of green fabric bundled in his arms. He then says that they don’t re-pack tents so that we can make sure all the equipment is
Mount Eden
View from the lower edge of the craterthere. This meant we had to re-pack the tent into its bag and then try re-pack our kit bag. I have since decided that I need a sticker to put on the tent that says: “Nice to look at, nice to hold, if you unpack it - put it back together you lazy bum.”
The next day we were up early once again to make full use of our only full day in Auckland. We had decided to explore the city centre briefly and then do a “Coast-to-Coast Walk”. Auckland city centre is quite nice and relatively compact. In the middle is a complex called Sky City. This is where all the “adrenalin events” take place. It is a tall building (shaped like the stratosphere in Las Vegas) and you can jump off it or walk around the top about 100m up. We didn’t do any of this as it was quite expensive and we had to get started on our walk. The coast-to-coast walk is a 16km (10 miles) long march and takes in most of Auckland’s main sights and gardens. The 1st part of the walk started in the city by the harbour but wasn’t particularly well
1 Tree Hill
No - that is not the tree marked so we got lost quite a bit and added some extra mileage to our walk. We eventually started heading out of the city centre and walked up Mount Eden. This is a volcano (status unknown - sleeping while we were there) that provides a great lookout over the whole of Auckland. From the top the crater is also very clear and you can picture where the lava would spew out. The next significant milestone on our walk was 1 Tree Hill. There used to be a tree that stood on top of the hill. The hill is of great cultural significance to the Moari and the “1 Tree” that had been planted was unceremoniously removed as it was considered an insult, but the name - 1 Tree Hill - has stuck, I suppose it is better than “No Tree Hill”. With all the detours and scenic stops we had, the walk as a whole took about 6 hours. We were pretty tired at the end of it but decided to head back into town as it was the Chinese New Year and they were having a big Lantern Festival to celebrate. We caught the bus back into town and
had stiffened up quite a bit by the time we got off it. The festival consisted of a number of food stalls, cultural stands and everything else you could imagine. We sat watching/listening to some Chinese opera for a bit but as I am not that culturally inclined and my ears were bleeding from all the high pitched wailing we made a hasty retreat and decided to get some dinner. Sandra had a hankering for some pizza hut so we found the nearest one on the GPS and headed off, walking of course, to get some tasty sit down pizza. To our horror when we got there, after what seemed to be a long walk to pizza, the Pizza Hut was a take away only (same as in Sydney). With our dinner plans ruined we called it quits and headed back to the hotel to get some sleep before our early flight to Christchurch the next day.
The next morning we were on the 06:45 flight from Auckland to Christchurch. When we arrived we decided to store our bags at the airport for a couple of hours and go straight to the International Antarctic Centre (IAC) which is only
a short walk from the airport. The IAC is where the majority of the scientific expeditions and travelling scientists going to Antarctica depart from during the summer. We saw the big Hercules plane sitting on the runway which takes them and any equipment down to the bottom of the earth. The Visitors Centre at the IAC consists of a number of presentation rooms that describe what life in the Antarctic is like and give you a history of the continent. They have movies playing showing you the scenery and they have a freezing room which sits at -8. Once you are in they let you experience what a slight wind in Antarctica would feel it like and this drops the temperature down to -18. We also got to see penguins and ride in a Hageland. This is a type of vehicle they use at their Antarctic bases to get around in the snow. It has tracks like a tank and is able to go up and down steep inclines, cross small crevasses and can even float. Our driver took great delight in showing us all of these abilities as she took us around their obstacle course. It was all very
informative and quite a bit of fun.
From there we collected our bags and headed into Christchurch. Our taxi driver was a nice old man who took great delight in advising us of the previous nights rugby results, where the local Canterbury Crusaders beat the Sharks. The campsite was great and was made even more beautiful by the fantastic weather. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was relatively warm in the sun. After pitching the tent we needed to get to some shops for supplies and lunch. To our amazement we spotted a Pizza Hut restaurant and Sandra convinced me that we deserved to treat ourselves, especially after the disappointment of the Auckland pizza debacle. We sat down to an all you could eat buffet of pizza, salads and pudding. When we first went up there were no pizzas available so Sandra got some salad and I got some nachos. Sandra advised me that it would be a great addition to my nachos if I added some of the cheese sauce up by the bowls. Being the trusting husband that I am I dutifully pour some of the sauce all over my nachos. Imagine my surprise
Slide of Death
Billy braving the 50m vertical drop slid of imminent death (ok maybe 5m) when I tasted, what can only be described as nachos with chicken soup. Yes, that’s right, the cheese sauce was in fact chicken soup. Anyway I finished them. We then proceeded to stuff ourselves with pizza and ice cream. We spent the rest of the day doing absolutely nothing. I think a combination of an early start and a lunch our bodies are no longer used meant we were a write off for the rest of that day, but we had every intention of making the most of the next day.
And so we did, sort of. As it was a Sunday and most things wouldn’t open until a bit later we only got up at about 7:30am. As we weren’t picking up a car until the following day we had to catch a bus into town. Buses on a Sunday aren’t as frequent as you would hope. We had the option of catching 2 buses, both of which run 1 per hour. We had to wait about half an hour for a bus to finally arrive. Christchurch is a very nice city. At its centre is the Christchurch Cathedral which has various gardens and parks dotted around the
city. We were unable to explore the Cathedral as there were church services going on. Is it just me or is it a tad bit inconsiderate to hold church services on a Sunday when tourists want to walk around and gaze at your building? Just me - I thought so. From there we headed over to the Science Alive building. This is kind of like a science museum but all the displays are interactive. They had climbing walls, glow-in-the-dark adventure golf, human gyroscopes and a 5 meter vertical slide. Due to the unrealistic weight limits they had I was unfortunately unable to do the climbing wall or the gyroscope, otherwise everything else was great. It was a lot of fun being able to play with everything in the whole place and see the interesting science facts in action. The Science Alive building is nearby Jade stadium (where the rugby team is based) and we heard that New Zealand were playing Australia in a 20/20 cricket game later that day. We went along to see if we could get tickets. The prices were just above what we were willing to spend so we declined and headed back into the city (NZ won - inflicting Australia’s first defeat of the summer). We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the city and lying in the Botanic Gardens along side the river Avon, listening to a philharmonic concert the city put on. As a side note, we were going to go see a place called Sumner on the coast just outside Christchurch but due to an earthquake in Chile, NZ was on a tsunami alert and Sumner had been evacuated.
Christchurch is a very nice city. It is not to small but not to big either and has a very relaxed feel to it. This is what I expect to find throughout the rest of New Zealand but we will have to wait and see. We head to Mount Cook next in the Southern Alps which could be something completely different.
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Duncan
non-member comment
I love your idea of the sign for the tent, i just hope they not going to do the same in America. The Science museum sounded cool!