Kaikoura to Christchurch

It rained most of the night. Light drizzle to real raindrops. But the real test was could all three of us sleep in this thing! Katie has the "attic" pull-out bed up above, where only she would fit, and Perry and I shared the double bed down below, which also functions as the living room and dining room depending on the setup. It's really quite cozy.

We made ourselves a simple cold breakfast, and left by 9am. Before we left town we topped at the Lavender Farm just up the road. It smelled amazing!

The drive down from Kaikoura to Christchurch was simply spectacular. I wanted to stop every few miles to take photos, but restrained myself to just twice. It really does look like Middle Earth!

We arrived in Christchurch, stopped off at the grocery for some lunch things, settled into our campground, made a quick lunch al fresco. We then took the local bus down into the center of the city. Perry wanted to see the Art Museum. They were having a special exhibition of Ron Mueck's sculptures. You can see that they are mostly off-scale and very nude.

The atrium of the Christchurch Museum of Contemporary Art

This man with a stab wound was about 24" tall

The baby was at least 20' long.

Such incredible detail.

Wild Man is huge.

A detail of the face.

Perry admiring the level of detail on the feet.

The old ladies were real characters, and only 30" tall.

Floating Man

Very crucifix-ish, don't you think?

Woman in Bed

detail

Then we walked around the botanical gardens, enjoyed the beautiful ancient trees, children's pool, and then I tripped over a metal sign and fell. I was trying to protect my camera as I fell, and instead took quite a bit of skin off my elbow. Lucky for me I had some bandaids and wet wipes in my camera bag, so I was patched up and on our way in no time. (An employee rushed out to see that her sign wasn't damaged! She never asked if I was ok!)

We found a little sidewalk restaurant for a leisurely dinner, and took the bus back to the "holiday park" which is what they call the campground. Tomorrow we're planning to drive pretty far down the south east coast towards Dunedin (pronounced done-EE-din).

Central city Christchurch boasts an old catherdral, a huge "ice cream" cone sculpture and several important government buildings.

Scaffolding was prominent on older buildings with earthquake damage.

Some of the earthquake damage included structural weaknesses of towers and turrets, so it appears they have lowered many of them to street level for repairs, and some of them even sport holiday decorations!