Advertisement
Published: October 3rd 2008
Edit Blog Post
.
We hired a good car and headed down the south coast for the weekend to celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary. On Friday night we stayed over in the quiet town of
Geraldine, which was a few hours out of Christchurch and had a good meal in the local pub and a walk around the town in the dark.
Starting out on Friday night gave us the headstart for Saturday's drive down to
Oamaru. We had hoped to stop a few times on the way, but after initial sunshine the weather steadily grew worse and worse.
We arrived in Oamaru in driving rain and headed to a coffee shop to re-plan our day. A big coastal walk was out, but we continued south to see the
Moeraki boulders, a curious set of round alien-looking rocks that we had seen on our last visit, more than 3 years ago. When we arrived at the location, the tide had just come in, so we squeezed our way along what was left of the beach and found said boulders, partially submerged but
awesome nonetheless.
The rain stopped and we continued down the coast to the small fishing town of
Moeraki where we had lunch at the fantastic "Fleur's Place" - a shack from the outside - but an amazingly buzzing place inside. It's a seafood restaurant with a very high reputation - cemented by pictures of Rick Stein eating there on the walls - and at the risk of sounding like a broadsheet food-reviewer, my pan-fried Tarakihi was sumptuous and Emma's Seafood hotpot was devine - we both especially enjoyed picking out and trying the whelks - which we later learned are not actually shellfish at all, but very chewy sea snails!
In the afternoon we walked up to a lookout point above the town, walked along the cliffs and then headed back up north to find the "Old Bones Backpackers", a place we had wanted to stay at for a long time, after seeing that it is one of BBH's three 98%!r(MISSING)ated hostels in New Zealand. And it is a very cool place. Thanks to Simon and especially Humphrey the dog who does perimeter security and meet and greet (which involved sitting on my foot and refusing to
let me move).
That evening we grabbed some food from Oamaru's New World and cooked a gourment anniversary meal at the backpackers before heading into town to catch the New Zealand Warriors v Manly Sea Eagles rugby game in "Fat Sally's" bar.
On Sunday, the weather was bright and sunny. We had to head home, but we decided to take the long way, driving up the
Waitaki Valley through the fascinating old town of
Duntroon and
Omarama, past the hydro-electic dams and lakes and then heading northwards through
Twizel and following our now well-known route past Mount Cook, Lake Tekapo, Burke's Pass, Fairlie and Geraldine before joining SH1 back to Christchurch.
We took a slight detour at the beginning of the journey to check out the 'Elephant Rocks' - now famous for featuring in the Narnia movies - and took far too many photos in this stunning natural location.
We stopped at the end of the day in
Rakaia and bought some fresh local salmon. Otis the otter was extremely excited by the town's giant salmon on a stick and hasn't stopped talking about it since...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.038s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
gayhand
non-member comment
timer function
Tim, Did you use the timer on your camera to take that photo of you jumping? you did a better job of it than in that farmers field in Lithuania