Travel Journal

Another thing I like about New Zealand cities are the lack of real suburbs, which makes them really easy to drive in - something I discovered in Christchurch. We had barely passed the 'welcome' sign before we were in the city centre, had found our hostel and settled the old tin can into the car park. Actually, to be completely accurate we didn't drive quite to the centre as our hostel was just outside, but as the official centre only takes up a rectangular kilometre I reckon it counts. In fact our hostel location was perfect, as we soon discovered. The building itself was pink, always a good start, and right across the road from the botanic gardens and two attractive former university buildings which now house the Canterbury Museum and Arts Centre. The street was lined with similarly appealing houses, restaurants and a 'gentleman's club' (feminist peuh), and led straight into Cathedral Square, the tourist hub. We were near enough to the centre not to get bored of the walk, but far enough out to get a great night's sleep and avoid the over-sized, under-dressed bunnies and nurses that could be found swaying through the streets after dark. In short, our area was pretty classy.

So on to Christchurch itself. The city likes to compare itself to Cambridge, although few people with working eyes who have been to the latter will see much of a likeness. To be fair there are some attractive neo-Gothic university buildings (unfortunately often dwarfed by more recent architectural monstrosities), and the river Avon is pleasantly green. There are even punts (proudly est. 1994) poled along by men wearing boaters - you can't punt yourself as you might be crushed by a rented kayak containing two squealing Japanese women (I honestly have never seen such a total lack of understanding of how to steer a boat. Some of them just circled in front of the boat house until their time was up and they were rescued). Otherwise the usual grid layout and abundance of corrugated iron are pretty far removed from anywhere in England.

By now you have a pretty good idea of the sights we took in with the help of our 'city walks' booklet, so I will spare you a detailed analysis of the route and skip to the next day. We were fortunate in that this was a Saturday and there was a fantastic market on at the Arts Centre. We spent much of the day browsing, sampling some good foreign food (I was unadventurous with Chinese fried noodles and Belgian Waffles, but Chris tried Lebanese) and watching the entertainment. Our favourite was a dog dressed as a clown who could ride a scooter and honk the horn before collecting money from the floor with his mouth and putting it in a bucket. While we were there we also stopped in at a free exhibition on the city's most famous scientist Ernest Rutherford, the first person to split the atom (although he did this at Cambridge). There were lots of fun atom toys that made loud noises, and we made crayon rubbings of one of his medals. We ended the day with a trip to the great single-screen art house cinema, where we saw a quirky BBC film called 'History Boys'. Much fun was had all round.

The only other thing I should mention about Christchurch is that we said goodbye to the old tin can. For the next leg of our journey we had decided that the railway was once again 'the only way to travel'.

Emily