Steve and I found Christchurch to be very compact. It was extremely easy to walk from one part of downtown to another and pretty soon we knew the lay of the land. We took the Hop-On/Hop-Off tram when we first arrived just to get an overview of the city, but we really didn't need to as the stops were just 1-2 blocks apart.
Because of the devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, many residents have permanently fled Christchurch to other parts of the country. Thus property values relatively inexpensive there compared to other parts of the New Zealand.
At the Christchurch's Canterbury Museum on the edge of the botanical gardens, Steve and I learned a bit about the area's history. New Zealand, completely unlike Australia, was first settled by humans only about 800 years ago. By contrast, Aboriginal culture in Australia goes back as far as perhaps 50,000 years! The first inhabitants of New Zealand came in canoe-like vessels from Polynesia and called the land Aotearoa. For food these early settlers, later called Maori, relied heavily on the flightless moa bird which was abundant and very easy to hunt. So easy that the birds were quickly hunted to extinction.
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| Poor Moa |
The first Europeans arrived in the early 1800s, and the first organized migrations from Great Britain to New Zealand began in the 1840s. The country soon also started attracting whalers and sealers from Australia.
Meeting our Tour Group
Steve and I met the folks we would be traveling with for the next 15 days on Sunday evening. We are very fortunate to have a small, cozy, and compatible group. We booked with Kirra Tours, a company that specializes in New Zealand only. While there could have been as many as 40 participants on our tour, there turn out to be only 14 of us. Steve and I are the only Americans, there are 5 Aussies, 4 Brits, one Israeli, and two Finns. Our fearless guide and driver is David. We feel quite luxurious spreading out in a full-size, deluxe coach that's so new it still has the new bus smell.
After welcome drinks and introductions on Sunday, we began our tour in earnest on Monday morning, October 29. After leaving Christchurch we headed towards Mt. Cook, the country's highest peak at 12,220 feet. There we visited the Sir Edmund Hillary Centre in honor of the famous Kiwi who practiced scaling Mt. Cook before conquering Mt. Everest in 1953.
The next day, Tuesday, we rode from the village Omarama (whose name in Maori means "place of light") to the shores of Lake Te Anau, New Zealand's second largest lake. Along the way, we passed some lovely countryside, including an important goldmining region near Arrowtown. Gold was discovered in the Arrow River in the 1860s, and the area boomed. Today there may still be plenty of gold remaining, but the area is now a heritage site and no more panning or mining is allowed.
What we did find in Arrowtown, surprisingly, was a French crêperie! Not ones to turn down a good galette no matter what country we're in, we ate a delicious lunch and practiced our French!
After lunch, we passed field after field of grazing sheep and lambs, reminding us we are actually in New Zealand, not France, after all! It's sheep-shearing time down here and some herds are newly shorn while others will be getting their haircuts soon.
We also saw something I have never seen in the US -- deer farming. In addition to pastures of sheep and cows, we passed fenced-in fields of deer. Apparently, venison is quite popular here and as deer are not an indigenous species, they way to meet the country's culinary need is by farming them.
Up next -- visiting glowworm caves on Lake Te Anau!
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