avelog

Liz and I have arrived safely in Christchurch, having flown in on Jetstar from the Gold Coast. We got in at midnight to the quiet YHA hostel on the edge of the big park here, and found that nobody there would talk to us. The next morning, we immediately hiked over to the YMCA hostel, which had much nicer facilities and a friendlier crowd. We then spent the day trying to get food sorted out, having a walk through the gorgeous neighbouring park, discovering new and funny little birds, and having a jaunt through the Christchurch Art Gallery.

I pretty sure that we’ve decided to rent a car down to Queenstown so that we can see everything that we’d like. The rental should only be slightly more than $30 per day (cars are apparently dirt cheap here), but gas is upwards of $1.50 per litre (should be able to drink it at that price, feel bad burning it).

Hopefully we’ll have more reliable access to the internet and I’ll be able to get some more photos up. You may have noticed that I’ve uploaded 8 photos from our Gold Coast adventures to the Flickr site.

We had a nice day-trip down to Byron Bay the third day I was there, and spent the day sunning ourselves on the beach, frolicking in the ocean, and doing a bit of shopping in town. Byron Bay’s pretty touristy, but much less tacky than Surfer’s Paradise and the rest of the Gold Coast area. The first four pics above are from our walk up to the lighthouse in Byron Bay, from which we saw some dolphins dancing about and a couple of turtles floating by the cliffs. We woke early for the sunrise the next morning down at the beach near the grandparents’ place on the Gold Coast, followed by a drive up inland to Springbrook falls for a couple of short hikes out to lookouts. The drive up was quite exciting, both because of the incredible winding of the narrow road, and the proliferation of wallabies crossing in front of us. Fortunately, we managed to avoid hitting any.

Well, we’re off again to do some more adventuring around Christchurch before we head south to Dunedin!