Christchurch - this time for 5 nights

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Upon leaving Akaroa, it was time to begin my travels again. Having less than 2 months left, I still have to travel around most of the South Island. However, before venturing out to new territory I’d come back to Christchurch for 5 more nights.

I arrived late in the after on Friday January 29th. After settling in at Vagabond Backpackers, I made my way down to Manchester Street (which apparently is known for its prostitutes) and met up with Kelly who was one of my fellow cell mates back at Napier Prison. Kelly has been living in Christchurch for a couple of months and was working as a pub crawl host. It’s basically $20 for 5 bars/5 free drinks /free finger food/ and karaoke. However, I was able to pub-crawl for only $10 on some sort of “friend of employee” discount. I only made it to 3 of the bars though since I wasn’t feeling very well.

On Saturday I went down to Cathedral Square and Victoria Park for the 2nd to last day of the World Buskers Festival. The festival is a 10 daylong event where street performers from all over the world are invited to perform. I was out all day in the sun from 10am - 4pm (Kelly and her flatmate had joined me for a while as well) watching all sorts of performances. But there were only a couple that I really enjoyed. “Cirque no Problem” is an amazing married couple from Israel who are extremely funny and do excellent acrobatic stunts - and are “the world’s only mobile acrobats”. “Acrobuffos “ also a married couple, however from New York, and are just as funny - if not funnier than “Cirque No Problem” these guys’ main act involves water balloons and are very interactive with the audience. In fact the audience is the stars of the of the show - basically AcroBuffos pull 2 men from the audience and the two men have water balloon fight against each other using different tactics and tools provided by Acrobuffo.

The next day, on Sunday, Jan 30th a group of us, organized by a Tim, a Kiwi whom I met through facebook, took a 1 ½ hour road trip through the Canterbury Plains to a place called Cave Stream. At Cave Stream we went spelunking AKA caving. And into the deep dark cave we went. For about 1 hour our legs were knee to waist deep in water as we trudged along to the other end of the cave. Once we got to the end, the hard part came. We were several feet underground and we had to somehow get above sea level. Thus, we climbed several metal rungs until we got to the top and then we had to crawl through a very narrow space before exiting the cave. Luckily my fear of heights has gone down considerably over the past several years. After wards, we went a couple of miles down the road to a park with GIANT boulders and we all had quite some fun exploring and climbing the boulders. That night a few of us made it down to Bog, a local Irish pub, for Quiz night. Though we didn’t win, we still did pretty well.

On Monday I went to the suburb of New Brighton which is known for its beach. Unfortunately the weather was not so great, so I spent most of the time at the library. However - the library did have some magnificent views of the beach. The library also impressed me since they have individual radio booths so you can listen to music while reading. They also had Play station II for the kids to play.

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