"Chch!"

    No, I didn't sneeze..."Chch" is texting shorthand for Christchurch. 

    With a stop to have a morning coffee and meet our host for tonight, we drove Elena to the cut-off for her destination, Akaroa, and then continued on to Chch. We got there about one p.m., and found the parking situation for the flower show very confusing, and we were starving so we had some delicious Indian food for lunch. As we were eating, Deborah said, "We've seen flowers...", so instead we drove around Chch to get a feel for the city, and to get an impression of a city badly shaken by an earthquake. 

    I have a distant relative from Scotland, possibly several, who experienced the Napier earthquake in 1931, and I wondered what it must have been like. It was an eye-opener looking at apartments that no-one can live in anymore because of cracks up the walls, and a whole section of the downtown that no-one can enter - called the Exclusion Zone. There's a new shopping mall made of shipping containers, to try to maintain normal commerce. 

    We soon decided that Chch is just a big flat city made even flatter by the earthquake, and other than that, rather mundane and boring.  We headed down the road to Akaroa, which turned out to be a lovely town in a fiord at the end of a very hilly drive through the volcanic hills - a town with so many French names that we wondered if we were in Quebec. 

    We picked up a 35 year old hitchhiker who was on her way there, and she told us she was on leave from her job as a policewoman in Belgium; then we bumped into Elena on the street, holding a puppy - she'd already arrived and had been hired by a hostel owner to work three days a week in return for bed and board.  Her first job was to mind the puppy while he finished his shopping. 

    We drove back to Ashburton - it was a silly thing to do, to arrange to sleep an hour further back instead of continuing forward in our journey - but although it cost us time and gas, we enjoyed an evening of karaoke with our host Mark and his new love interest in a local small town New Zealand pub. I got up and sang Margaritaville with him, and worked in some harmonies. The experience was quite similar to our evening of karaoke with Serena in Paso Robles, California - right down to the youngsters dancing jive and jitterbug along to the songs. 

    Mark drove truck in the U.S. when he was younger, and he would search out the karaoke spots in every small town where he pulled in to spend the night. 

    Saturday: we would've taken the ferry today, but Jeanie warned us that there might be bad weather, so we booked it for Sunday morning instead; today, after pear puff pancake for breakfast, we fed the sheep (very special brown sheep).  We said good-bye to Mark Read and Christine, and drove seven hours to Mark Thompson's house in Blenheim; Mark very kindly allowed us stay here so that we'd be close to get up at 6 a.m. and drive for a half-hour to get to the first morning ferry leaving from Picton. 

    We stopped in Amberley and met Sarah, Isabel's daughter, over her lunchbreak; I forgot to haul out the camera, but Jeanie gave me this nice headshot.  The photos I did remember to take are in two separate albums, here and here.

    On the way we stopped to see Kaikoura, a lovely seaside town. Paua (abalone) fishermen dive the rocks all along the rocky beaches north of town; the paua shell is a beautiful piece of jewelry. They serve freshly caught and cooked lobster (they call them crayfish) at dozens of road-side trailers and shacks along the highway. 

    If you ever want to see seals up close, there is a four kilometre stretch of rocks on the beach just north of Kaikoura where you'll find hundreds of them. At the right time of year there's a nursery of seal pups in a pool at a waterfall and you can get right up close to see them. 

    These are everyone who made and shared dinner together tonight in Blenheim: Mark, his kids Oskar, Bjarki and Birna, Aurelie, his brother Simon and Simon's wife Janine, their kids Niamh and Noah, and Sienna from Wyoming who is a Kiwi/Canadian/American travelling in her gap year before law school.

Next post: back to Wellington and the North Island again