Day 20: Queenstown - Kaikoura

On paper, this day looked like a day to avoid but there were a couple of highlights along the way with the potential to make this a good day after all.

If you have a look at the map you'll see the enormous distance we had to cover today. I am talking about a 9 hour drive... that's what you do in the whole day, sit on a bus and wait until you arrive to your destination.

Quite a few people were dropping off at Christchurch in order to catch a flight to either Auckland or Australia. The rest would continue in the bus all the way to Kaikoura.

If you remember the news about an earthquake hitting New Zealand a couple of years back. Christchurch was the spot here it hit the hardest. It destroyed a lot of buildings and infrastructure. As of today, the city centre has been fenced and is closed to the general public and all the buildings in there are still as they were left.

According to a reliable? witness (I haven't seen it with my own eyes) you can still see a McDonalds with food and drink on the tables, everything was abandoned and nobody has ever returned because the buildings could collapse any minute.

In my particular case I had a different plan. I was going to be dropped off at Christchurch where I would be meeting Bob (a friend from when I was working in Oxfordshire). He and his family moved to New Zealand 6 years ago.

Bob kindly offered to drive me to Kaikoura so we would have time to catch up and talk about the good old times. :-)

The East coast is not as scenic as the West coast although that doesn't mean it's rubbish.

A couple of bus-shots for your viewing pleasure:

 At lunch time we stopped by a lake with some incredible views. You may have to squint a little bit for the next photo, but if you do you'll see Mount Cook among the clouds (on the background). It was perfectly visible with the naked eye but it doesn't look as impressive on the picture.

Mount Cook is the highest mountain in New Zeland (3754 m).

And a couple of pictures from the lake itself

 After lunch we continued driving all the way to Christchurch were Bob was waiting for me at the agreed spot. :-)

He had the kids and his parents in the car as they were all coming back from a day out, so we went to his place first and stopped for a cup of tea (it's good to see that despite of the distance, they haven't lost all the good British traditions) :-).

Along the way he showed me some of the effects of the earthquake and it seems they were really lucky as their house wasn't very affected (only a few cracks).

Bob is also a very keen cyclist and an obsessive compulsive bike collector. :-) There are more bicycles in his garage than in some cycling shops I've visited. One of his favourite hobbies is to reconstruct old bikes and by old I really mean ancient... from the 19th century or beginning of the 20th), he even has a blog where he goes with detail about his latest reconstruction :-)

I would have put the link to his blog here but I'm still waiting for him to send it to me...

Anyway, I digress... On the way to Kaikoura we talked about the good old days and what the ex colleagues were up to this days, then we found a place in Kaikoura where to have dinner and said good-bye after dinner... as Bob had to drive back home (2+ hours) and I forgot to take a picture of the two of us together!!!

I spent the night in a place called the lazy shag

Not a bad place and I only had to share my room with another 2 people which was good (better two than eight).


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