Waipara to Christchurch + 1 day in Christchurch

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Spent Friday biking into Christchurch. Took much longer than anticipated. The area around Christchurch is the Canterbury Plains, a very fertile region, and hence home to many orchards. There were a lot of roadside stands along the way, and I stopped at nearly every one I saw. Loaded up on plenty of fruit- mostly apples, but a few nectarines and plums, and some tomatoes and potatoes. Found a new type of apple called Cox Orange. It was tart, not extremely juicy, would almost be a better baking apple than just for eating. They were delicious though. The lady I got them from gave them to me for free because she so admired my touring the country by bike.

Bananas are an essential energy food.


Lot of vineyards in this region.

Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island, weighing in with between 300,000 and 400,000 people. It is reputedly New Zealand's most English city- plenty of parks, nearly all of the rivers and streets have names like Avon or Oxford, and a plethora of bagpiping. When I was biking in on Friday I saw a bagpiping band practicing in one of the parks close to my hostel. Then on Saturday I passed a huge crowd gathered along one of the main streets. I stopped to see what was going on, and a bunch of pipe bands were parading along. Apparently it was an (inter)national competition between bands from all over New Zealand and Australia. The bands themselves were comprised of people of all ages; I checked with one of them to see whether the bands were from schools and universities but he said no, they were all just people who had gotten together for fun.

Christchurch Cathedral.


One pipe band practicing in a park.


Marching bands.

Also went to two musuems. The first was just an exhibit at the Arts Centre detailing the life of Ernest Rutherford. He was born in Nelson, figured out that atoms are made of clouds of electrons surrounding a nucleus. His portrait is featured on the $100 bill here. New Zealand is very proud of him. The other musuem I went to was the Air Force Museum. More of a musuem of New Zealand's airplane history than solely focused on the Air Force. It was really nicely presented; there were working condition planes of all of the WWII and previous aircraft in the New Zealand Air Force. Also got to see some of the planes that were outfitted for the first Antarctica expeditions. Took a tour of the restoration facility and saw a couple of planes that the musuem is working on restoring, which was really neat to see. Definitely worthwhile.

Part of the restoration room.

Symbol of the NZ Air Force, featuring- what else- a kiwi.

In terms of food... besides fruit I am eating a potato/chickpea/tomato curry that I made on Friday. Had enough leftover for Saturday too. It was pretty simple. Easy to cook up. And delicious. An excellent combination.