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Published: March 15th 2010
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Marlborough Sounds We have a new addition to our travel party: Angelique's mom, Nancy Regan (yes, that's her real name). It's Nancy's first trip to New Zealand and, in fact, her first trip outside the United States. With all of her passport stamps in order, she's joined us for our last two days in Wellington and will be with us for the next week.
Nancy's visit coincides with one of our roadtrips and so we'll be able to show her quite a lot of the South Island. As we've mentioned before, our master plan for New Zealand is to base out of four cities. Queenstown is our next base but it is several hundred kilometers south of Wellington and so we've planned a very fun four-day roadtrip to get there.
We left Wellington early on the morning of February 3rd and crossed the Cook Strait via car (and people) ferry to Picton, a tiny town on the northeastern tip of the South Island. From there we drove through the famous Marlborough wine region, stopping for a quick lunch at the Allan Scott Winery (suprisingly, in New Zealand, most wineries have restaurants on site and many of them are very good).
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Lunch at Allan Scott winery in Blenheim From there we drove south for about four hours to Christchurch, the most populated city on the South Island.
Christchurch has the reputation of being New Zealand's most English city: a well-planned and easy-to-navigate downtown grid, exquisitely manicured gardens, the pretty Avon River snaking its way through downtown, lots of pubs, and a bit of a conservative slant in cultural and political attitudes.
In total we spent only two evenings and one morning in Christchurch itself and we like it. The downtown is bustling with large Cathedral Square acting as the center of things. It was filled with people and trams (proper British looking trolleys). The botanical gardens are just gorgeous (we wished we'd had time to see the bonsai gardens too). One of our favorite spots was the old Canterbury University campus in the downtown area that has been converted into an art centre. It was fun to walk through the old gothic buildings with "Chemistry", "Zoology", etc elegantly engraved in grey stone above their main entrances and peek into artists' studios and browse in their shops. A great idea. In fact, the only downside that we saw to Christchurch is the suburban sprawl that goes on
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Akaroa harbor for miles and miles outside the downtown core.
Nancy loves animals, especially aquatic mammals, so we spent one full day visiting the tiny French settlement of Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula, about 1.5 hours away from Christchurch. The Banks Peninsula is an extraordinarily popular getaway for wealthy Christchurch folk; by one estimate, over 75% of the houses on the Banks Peninsula are vacation homes. Here's why: stunning scenery. Akaroa and a few other quaint little villages hug the shores of a gorgeous bay that is filled with sealife, including dolphins, penguins and seals. We've seen few places in our travels that are more picturesque. What makes the Banks Peninsula even more interesting is that its bay is essentially a big crater, created by two huge volcanic eruptions, which has filled with water.
But what makes Akaroa unbearably cute is its French influence. Back in the days when New Zealand was being colonized by the europeans, the French planted their flag on Akaroa soil, not realizing that the British had already claimed the entire landmass (this is actually still under debate - the sequence of events and purchases from the local Maori tribes is still unclear). There were some
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Blue penguin struggles over the years and the French eventually decided to leave New Zealand, except for a small community that remained in Akaroa. So now the street signs are marked as "rues", there are several excellent restaurants and French-themed shops, lots of French architecture and we think we even saw one or two French flags flying.
Most visitors board a boat or kayak shortly after arriving in Akaroa and we were no exception. Our three hours on the water of Akaroa's Bay is definitely one of our cooler New Zealand experiences to date: we saw the tiny (~4 feet in length) and very rare Hector's dolphins (several up close), several blue penguins, and many fur seals (cute but smelly). An excellent day.
The South Island is known for its remoteness (only ~1/4 of New Zealand's 4 million people live here) and its majestic mountains. Tomorrow we head to the mountains, including The Mountain, Mt. Cook.
p.s. A note on petrol (gas) prices. It is easy to look at the big gas station signs and think "Hey, what a bargain!" when you see the price as $1.80. However, the price is per LITER and not gallon. There are ~4.5
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Hector's dolphins. Only found in New Zealand. liters per gallon which means that one gallon of gas in New Zealand costs approximately $8.00 NZD or $6 USD per gallon. Not exactly a good deal!
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