Our New Zealand adventure started with a flight from Sydney to Christchurch, just over three and a half hours flying with Quantas. Unfortunately we only had fourteen movies to choose from on this flight and as we have watched so many on our travels already we were reduced to watching rom-com The Love Punch and Wish I Was Here.
Before we knew it we had arrived in Christchurch and this time we didn’t pick up a hire car at the airport. Instead we spent a ridiculous fifty five dollars on a taxi ride to our accommodation as we planned to buy a car in Christchurch for our two and a half month stay in New Zealand.
“We tried booking our first couple of nights accommodation after Christchurch and were surprised about how little was available.”
Accommodation in Christchurch isn’t cheap on a backpacking budget but we found a bargain by staying on a university campus for a few nights whilst the students were all on their summer break. Not only was it easy on the purse strings, it also had the quickest wifi connection ever!
We took advantage of the immense wifi by having a planning day, researching everything on offer on the south island and plotting a route that would take us to all the fabulous places we wanted to go.
Once we had an idea about our route, we tried booking our first couple of nights accommodation after Christchurch and were surprised by how little was available. We then started to look at booking some of the activities we wanted to do and realised that New Zealand was a popular place and we couldn’t book things day to day here like we had in other places!
“We decided to book as much in advance as possible and as much as the credit card limit would allow!”
There aren’t a huge number of roads on the south island and we had a particular route that we wanted to do, so we decided to book our accommodation for the next four weeks, to make sure we always had somewhere to stay.
We also decided to book our Milford Sound cruise, we didn’t want to head over there and not be able to do the cruise and kayak trip we wanted after all. In fact we decided to book as much in advance as possible and as much as the credit card limit would allow!
Once we had our planning sorted Rich and I were feeling really pleased with ourselves! We usually spend a lot of hours on slow internet connections booking the next few nights accommodation and upcoming activities, so we were looking forward to not having to do that for the next few weeks at least.
Our next job on the to do list for Christchurch was to buy a car. We hadn’t done much research on this before we arrived but we thought it would be the cheapest way to travel around the north and south island and there was a car sales garage that catered specifically for backpackers in Christchurch. Our plan was to get a small economical car that would be light on fuel and easy to sell on when we got up to Auckland.
“We had initially ruled out renting a car as it had seemed an expensive option for two and a half months of driving around.”
Our plan was foiled when we found that small compact cars are hard to come by on the backpacker car sales market! The car sales garages we went to only had huge camper vans that were very old and very worn. They looked like they drank petrol and could potentially break down at any moment. I’m sure they could have been fine but with Rich and I having little mechanical experience between us, it felt like a risky move to spend money on a car we had no guarantee would sell on in Auckland or even survive the trip!
Confused and tired from walking around town looking for used car garages, we decided to head back to our accommodation and look at all options available to us. After a bit of research using the super fast wifi, Rich found a cheap car rental company. We had initially ruled out renting a car as it had seemed an expensive option for two and a half months of driving around.
However, this rental company was specifically for backpackers, older cars with a lot of miles on the clock but well maintained by mechanics who knew what they were doing and with roadside assistance available should anything go wrong with the car. It didn’t take us long to tot up the expense of buying our own car (including those things you don’t think about like vehicle registration costs, mechanical checks, vehicle history checks, insurance, roadside assistance cover) and weigh it up against the much easier option of renting a backpacker car. Decision made – renting it was!
If only we had researched this earlier, we wouldn’t have spent fifty-five dollars on a taxi from the airport, we could have picked this baby up from there! Happy with having made a decision, we booked our south island car hire and prayed that the car wasn’t going to be as battered as some of the backpacker camper vans we had seen earlier that day.
“Less than five minutes after driving out of the car rental shop in our sky blue Daihatsu Sirion, we were heading back there.”
The following day we went to pick up our car. The car we were supposed to have had broken down and wasn’t back at it’s scheduled time to the rental shop, so we had to wait an hour and a half for another car to become available for us. Not a good start.
Less than five minutes after driving out of the car rental shop in our sky blue Daihatsu Sirion, we were heading back there. Every time the steering wheel turned left or right there was a loud clunk coming from the front of the car. We might not know a lot about cars but we knew that wasn’t right!
And so we ended up with our third car, a white Daihatsu Sirion and we hoped it was third time lucky! It was in much better condition that any of the vehicles we had looked at to buy and with two hundred and forty thousand kilometres on the clock, we hoped it would survive our trip around the south island issue free.
With all our jobs done in Christchurch it was time to do some sightseeing. I didn’t really know what to expect from a city that was devastated by an earthquake three years earlier but I was surprised at how much ‘quake damage’ is still visible. The recovery from the earthquake is still very much a part of Christchurch’s day to day life.
However, between the streets lined with car parks created from plots where buildings were demolished, there was vibrancy, there was life. Buildings were adorned with colourful graffiti, shipping containers were stacked to support crumbling walls that were trying to be saved, the eye catching Re:START shopping mall was built out of painted shipping containers to re-house shops that were devastated during the quake and even the transitional cathedral was built with a colourful frontage. Every where we looked there were cranes around the city and construction workers in action.
The beauty of the Avon River, with it’s green grassy banks and the beach with miles of sea and sand were havens of natural beauty between the chaos of a city rebuilding itself.
Of all the sights we saw around Christchurch, the most poignant was the installation of one hundred and eighty five white chairs. A memorial set up behind the transitional cathedral to remember the one hundred and eighty five lives that were lost during the earthquake.
Visitors are asked to sit on any chair and spend a moment to think about those lives lost. It was a beautiful memorial and one that certainly made us sit and think about not only those whose lives were lost but all the people affected by the earthquake.
There are parts of Christchurch that are beautiful and parts that look lost, derelict in fact, waiting to be rebuilt or restored. Seeing the city in transition was a strange feeling, knowing that we weren’t seeing the Christchurch that was and that we hadn’t seen it fully rebuilt.
We loved it in parts and hoped that parts would become great in the future as a new Christchurch is being built between the buildings that still stand.
Lambs on the loose 