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Published: December 27th 2007
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The Sunny
Our vehicle for the next two weeks. Today is the day we left Christchurch. We picked up our Nissan Sunny Super Tourer from Apex Rentals. We had the same car on our North Island trip last year. They’re a great car. Plenty of room for us both, and does about 6L/100km - even when you’re going over hill and down dale, in which there are large quantities in NZ. And that’s handy when fuel is NZ$1.75/L.
Our mission for today is to see the Banks Peninsula, the main town of which is Akaroa. After that, drive on to Kimbell - a ‘wee town near Fairlie’, as our host described it to us. We set off for the Banks Peninsula and on the way saw an interesting detour which would take us to Diamond Harbour via Gobbler’s Pass. This was a lovely drive, and there was more turquoise coloured vistas which greeted us at each turn. We got to the end of this road near Port Levy and thinking that there would be another decent road to get us back towards Akaroa we went in search of such a road. We were mistaken. The maps we had did not provide detail to tell us that the roads back
Banks Peninsula #1
Gobbler's Pass looking towards Diamond Harbour. to Akaroa were rather poor gravel roads, one of which seemed to use boulders as road base. Deciding that seeing the same scenic route twice is a cardinal sin of touring, we opted for adventure and took a very narrow, wet, slippery gravel road that hugged a cliff to Cooptown, hoping that someone wouldn’t be test driving their new Hummer in the opposite direction. It was a beautiful drive, albeit taking 35 mins to drive 13 kms.
Once we made Cooptown, we made straight ‘way for Akaroa. When the empires of Europe were racing to get their hands on land for future colonies, England and France both dashed for New Zealand. France arrived a few months too late, but liked the place so much that they stayed and set up a whaling colony called Akaroa. The French influence is obvious as many of the streets have names such as Rue Lavard etc. We stopped for lunch with a very non-French feed of fish’n’chips. Matt had his inaugural taste of two NZ longings…kumara chips and L&P. L&P is short for Lemon & Paeroa and is “World Famous in NZ”. Tastes fantastic, and beats what they call Coca-Cola over here. Coke
& Pepsi here taste downright weird.
We walked the shops and Emma picked up a Christmas present for us…Yahtzee. A holiday Yahtzee championship has since ensued.
Once we were done in Akaroa, we hit the road again for Kimbell which is the town we used as our base whilst exploring the high country. It was a fair drive, and we stopped on the way at Ashburton to pay homage to the McDonald’s where Mum first ordered “blick coffee” on our holiday in 2000. We were again being thrown off by how light it is here during summer, as we felt like some lunch at this point….it was 5pm on Xmas Eve…McDonald’s was nearly the only thing open.
We arrived in Kimbell, and topped up with fuel and some emergency food supplies since we expected most things to be closed the next day. We stayed at the Mount Dobson Motel, which was fantastic. Plenty of space, and despite being a little dated, had absolutely everything we needed to have a comfortable stay.
An early night to ensure that we were asleep for Santa’s arrival.
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