It was long drive from Mt Cook to Christchurch
. We had to wait till morning for the petrol station to open but after that we hit the road and went really quickly to Lake Tekapo. On the way we went next to the canal between Lake Pukaki and Lake Tekapo which is used for hydroelectric power station. It was awesome drive, with the haze coming from the water and the Sun trying to go through. There was salmon farm as well, just closed that early. Fill up our gas tank at Lake Tekapo so we were able to cook tea for a breakfast but found nice place to have it after another hour or so.
Arrived to Christchurch just after noon and went directly to do some shooting at Kaplan Aspect. You can look at our video about studying English in New Zealand. There we also got some basic information about Chch (Christchurch) and we were ready to take some walk around. The city centre is really nice and quite small – we were told that it is around 5minutes to all places, which isn’t far from true. As we got back to civilization after some time we decided to have a good lunch at local food court and follow it with coffee and cake – chocolate death and coffee cakes were just delicious. Shopping followed – Vlada needed a new paddle, Tomas wanted some walkietalkie and another cassettes for camera and we spent better part of the day with this. Even bought a hair trimmer as Tomas felt his hair were too long and were lazy to find some hair dresser.
It was hard job to find our way to the hills surrounding Chch but we made it there and had dinner way above the city. The view Mt Pleasant was just awesome (and windy as well). Fantastic to see how the city starting to shine. Also the dinner was pretty good – we found some preprepared schnitzel and each of us had about 500g or meat for a dinner. Wasn’t bad, even left a bit for lunch tomorrow.
Second day here and the weather is getting worst. Still good enough to have a custard for breakfast or trimming hairs with Tomas‘ new hair trimmer. He almost did it on his own, just for final touches we wanted some help.
Our Newt needed some service after more than month on roads with us. I showed my bad habit, when I ask question instead of answering those other gave me – when Kelly (the nicest guy from Spaceships) asked me when we need the car I reply with question when they close. 5pm – pretty early for us, but we should make it 🙂 We got replacement car and they apologized several time it isn’t clean. We had problem find it out as it was about 1000% cleaner than Newt :-). We prohibit them from cleaning Newt and went to International Antarctic centre.
It was really nice to see penguins feeding and how fast they can swim, the polar storm was really strong (and I made a few amazement when I refused to take the jackets they provide and went inside just in my Axon jacket – felt warm the whole time, this jacket is just miracle), and there was a lot of information about Antarctica. Finally took a ride at Hagglund (really good and with a lot of funny comments – did you know you almost don’t need a passport to visit Antarctica?).
Back to city centre, another huge lunch with coffee, printed our own postcards (we planned it for about 2 weeks and finally did it), get back our car (with new tyres and working as new, mechanist somehow recognized we ride it everywhere and said it should survive another 3 weeks we have it) and it was time to go back to centre and finally look around. It is really smalll but nice and when you get outside the historical part there probably isn’t too much more. I really liked the walk around the water, it is nice and must be refreshing in summer.