April 3, 2012

Welcome to New Zealand!

We arrived in New Zealand yesterday evening (Monday, 2 April 2012) at Christchurch around 6pm, picked up our car and headed out to the hotel on Panpanui Street. Thrifty didn’t have another CPS device available; so we got a good map and eventually found our way. The hotel even had a hot tub (albeit a smallish one); after a dinner of pizza and beer, we took a dip and then settled in for a long, night’s rest.

We intended to get an early start this morning (April 3, 2012), but didn’t get started until about 10am. The hotel breakfast was expen$ive, so we swallowed our pride and got a “Huge Kiwi Breakfast” at McDonald’s (they are everywhere in Australia and New Zealand, it seems. In the process, we learned that McD’s often provides Wi-Fi access for free—useful information for
the days ahead. (Most hotels charge $5 for a half-hour or hour of access; it always makes me angry.)

Several of our friends visited Christchurch previously and gave enthusiastic reports of its beauty and charms; so we decided to take a look for ourselves—in spite of the reports about the earthquake damage. Sure enough, we entered the City Center and found ourselves confronted by one dead end after another. Finally, we parked the car and tried to explore the area on foot. After about ahalf-hour with no success, we stopped at a gated construction zone and asked a
young soldier on duty about ways to view some of the sights—even at a reasonable
distance. He pointed out a couple of things down the street, like the Christchurch Cathedral now hunkered down without a steeple or windows. But he wasn’t at all encouraging about seeing much of anything and advised us to explore other areas of the city, or the country instead. So that’s what we decided to do.

We finally got on the road and headed out of the city on route 73 (later to become route 72). Today’s objective is Mt. Cook, a 12,316 foot mountain in the Southern Alps region of
New Zealand (near the western side of the south island). The route, known as the Southern Scenic Highway, passed through several small towns, such as Geraldine, Fairlie and
Lake Tekapo—the latter of which offered the Church of the Good Shepherd, a lovely little one-room chapel perched on the very bank of the alpine lake, with turquoise water surrounded on three sides by foothills of the incredible mountain peaks forming a solid line across the northern view of the lake. Without a doubt, this drive was one of the most beautiful we have ever seen, with the views changing from evergreen forests to agricultural fields stretching into the distance, to green covered hills falling over each other in a jumble and dotted with sheep, cows and yes, we
even think we say herds of domesticated deer in a couple of places.

Finally we rounded a corner and caught our first sighting of Lake Pukakai, a long, turquoise body stretching from the road for several miles to the very foot of Mt. Cook. We stopped numerous times to take photos and capture the beauty and grandeur of the towering mountains, but the camera never seemed to do it justice. As we approached our destination, a local hotel complex known as the “Hermitage” we found ourselves fully in the mountain’s presence. There it stood with a white crown of glacial snow shining in the late afternoon sun.

Later, as the sun set, the mountain top turned pink then rose-colored and draped with similarly-tinted clouds blowing across its shoulders. According to one of the staff at the hotel, the
ability to view this kind of show only occurs a few times a year—if that! We thought ourselves very fortunate to be here at just one of those rare moments.

Tomorrow, on to Dunedin…..!