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Published: October 29th 2008
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Ross:
A further couple of hours down the coast from Kaikoura is Christchurch, a fairly large but surprisingly English city, with a lovely park to the west called Hagley Park, and a massive beach on the east coast called Brighton Beach. We arrived as dusk was drawing in so headed straight for a campsite in South Brighton on the spit of land between the estuary and the beach. After eating macaroni cheese and leeks (one of my latest specialities!) we went for a stroll to have a look at the beach, then headed back to crash for the night.
The next day we got up slowly, made the most of the shower facilities at the campsite and with fully recharged batteries, headed off. Having not updated the blog for a while we were feeling the need to at least make some headway into the backlog of photos accruing on our memory cards. First we headed to New Brighton local library to make use of their free (but limited-access) internet before having a bite (or should I say byte!) of lunch on the seafront in the Queenie. We then made it about as far as the city centre before parking
up and heading into a net cafe for a marathon 6-hour blogging session, interrupted only by a short power failure. By the time we left it was dark and our eyes were glazed over so we drove straight back to Brighton Beach, this time parking up at the side of the road, and turned in (probably after some noodles or more cheesy leeky macaroni, I can't recall exactly...)
Waking the next day, we felt we hadn't really seen much of Christchurch so vowed to spend an hour or two in the city before departing.
We had been having a few niggles with the Queenie, including broken cupboard door latches (resulting in the contents of cupboards emptying on tight bends), a broken light and a slow puncture, plus we wanted to swap our DVDs so we headed to the Explore More depot to resolve the issues. Explore More were good and sorted the minor niggles out, but sent us down the road to Firestone who changed both rear tyres due to a nail in one and generally low tread on both.
After getting the vehicle maintenance errands out of the way, we headed into town for an hour.
Christchurch city centre is actually quite compact and we were both impressed by the selection of shops and cafes. The centrepiece is a large church and square with street artists and giant chess boards. The three main streets which run parallel with each other are Worcester Street, Gloucester Street and Hereford Street! On our drive out of the centre we past through Hagley Park, which is a mixture of large open grass spaces, botanical gardens and sports pitches (much like most parks actually!)
An hour outside of Christchurch on the way to Lake Tekapo is Ashburton, not a particularly popular destination with travellers and tourists but home to a well-known kite company called Peter Lynn. Having used Peter Lynn kites for both kiteboarding and kitesurfing in the UK, we thought a stop at PL HQ was in order. Peter Lynn Kiteboarding (www.peterlynnkiteboarding.com) is actually a Dutch-based company, a licensee of Peter Lynn's patents for the twin skin arc design of kite. However, Peter Lynn Kites (www.peterlynnkites.com) in Ashburton are the southern hemisphere distributors for the kiteboarding equipment and also produce the large display kites, seen at kite festivals worldwide. They also hold the world record for the largest ever
Worcester, England?
No, Christchurch, New Zealand... kite, the Megabyte.
On arriving in Ashburton we could clearly make out a 30ft fish-shaped kite hovering in the sky above the Peter Lynn offices but getting there proved a little trickier. After obtaining directions from a local i-Site (Tourist Info) we headed down a track at the side of a builders yard to the prefab unit at the back. The impromptu stop was well worth the effort after we were given a full tour of the kite production area, stores and kite buggy workshop. We were also told that the man himself, Mr Peter Lynn was about but was flying out to Bali that night, so after a bit of mulling around we were given a run down of all Peter's latest projects by Peter himself. Currently, he's working on an altitude record using 140 11 & 14-square metre kites and is carrying out research into kite power generation in collaboration with a university in German. He's also still trying to master the art of kite-sailing.
After showing us his 'History of Kiteboards' fence (and the Jesus Feet!), and his other non-kite related projects (antique cars, hot air cycle engines, etc, etc) we bid our farewells and
made a sharp exit...
Another 2 hours on the road, we arrived at Lake Tekapo, nestled in a valley between the lofty peaks of the Southern Alps and not far from the foot of Aoraki Mount Cook. We camped up for the night in the corner of a deserted car park overlooking the moonlit lake, and cooked up a tasty dish of local lamb with sweet potato (kumara), more leeks and salad. Mmmm...
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