With cat sitting successfully arranged by bribing our neighbours with chocolate, Neena and I flew down to Christchurch, hired a car and set off on what is fast becoming our annual South Island road trip.
We headed south and after an uneventful few hours ended up in Oamaru where we stayed for the night. The town is one of our favourite places and has many fine stone buildings, a steampunk museum, an absolutely cracking brewery/pizzeria (Scotts Brewing Co) and blue eyed penguins.
After Oamaru we headed south again eventually arriving in Dunedin which true to its Scottish heritage was cold, wet and miserable. Misery aside, we love the place and have visited the city many times so it was very much a case of the comfort of familiarity of visiting our old haunts, notably the Corner Store Cafe and the Botanical Gardens.
After a couple of days of sampling the delights of Dunedin we could take no more and headed to Wanaka and the promise of better weather. You cant really go wrong in this part of the world and the drive there was fantastic, as was the weather. We stopped off along the way in Cromwell and Roxburgh for coffee and cheese rolls and as you do in this part of the world promptly bumped into one of our neighbours.
Cheese rolls are very much a south island thing and the further south you go the more ubiquitous they become. They are not like your regular cheese rolls, and depending upon the recipe, consist of swiss roll style rolled up sliced bread with a filling consisting of among other things cheese, evaporated milk, onion soup mix and mustard with the whole lot then being toasted - very Kiwi and if you are down south you have to give them a go.
We arrived in Wanaka to glorious weather and quickly made plans to go paragliding, and also in my case, do my first via-ferrata. It was not be however as the weather gods were playing up with rain forecast for the next few days. Plan B was to climb up to Roy’s Peak which literally has some of the best views in the world from the top but it turned out that even that was closed due to the lambing season. I actually wasn’t too upset by this one as I have climbed the peak before and wasn’t looking forward to the murderous 1500m slog to the top - Neena was gutted though.
We killed a bit of time and saw The Good Boss at the Cinema Paradiso (both terrific) and generally moped around Wanaka for a couple of days. At this point I thought to hell with the rain and embarked on a solo trip to Rocky Peak in the Diamond Lake Conservation Area. For me, this turned out to be one of the best days of the trip and it felt so good to get out into the hills and stretch my legs. The first part of the track was great but the second part a little gnarly and exposed in places and made worse by the wet, but to me, this just added to the fun. The cloud was kind enough to lift from time to time and I managed to bag a few decent shots.
After 3 days in Wanaka we set of on the long drive back to Christchurch. For both of us the road trip is a major part of the experience and we frequently stop for coffee and cheese rolls or to just admire the scenery or both. Our route back took us through Tarras and then over the dramatic Lindis Pass accompanied most of the way by snow capped peaks, of which there were more than usual this year as it had been a snowy winter in the South Island, unlike the North Island mountains, which saw little snow.
Christchurch suffered major damage due to earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 and is still in the process of being re-built. This was the first time Neena had visited the city since then and was keen to see some of the new developments, of which there have been many.
Some of the new buildings such as the art museum are spectacular but to my mind most of the developments in the city centre have resulted in a soulless sea of chrome and glass and yuppie wine bars. In all fairness there are still a lot of vacant lots and ongoing construction, so in the meantime, I will assume the worst and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
On the positive side, the parts of the city that were nice before the earthquakes are still jolly nice which for us means the Botanical Gardens, Hagley Park and the River Avon which after the disappointments of the central city were where we spent most of our time.
Our cat Libby was beside herself on our return and was super smoochy and clingy and it was nice to see that she had missed us, although she was back to her mercurial self soon enough.
We hadn’t intended it that way, but we ended up staying exclusively in hostels (in our own room), all of which were perfectly acceptable. Kiwi’s by and large prefer motels and cabins, which is all well and good, but they come at quite a premium and have shot up even more in recent times, but then again, what hasn’t.
