Tag: Christchurch

End of Tour

On By rrainefioreIn New Zealand, Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Our last full day on the tour we went to an old Chinese settlement.  It was from the gold rush days. Apparently the Chinese were allowed to come over and mine, but only mine claims that had already been mined.  They weren’t allowed to live in the English settlements so they created their own settlement.   After that we went to ride bikes on the Otago Central Rail Trail.  It was a nice, easy, pretty ride on the trail of an old railroad.  The tracks are gone.  We only did a 2 hour section.  The overall trail is longer.  We stayed in a tiny town with an old hotel.  Most of the group was very unhappy with this.  They made us sit outside for dinner since the bar was crowded with other guests and townspeople.  Some of the people were talked to or treated like they were teenagers or second class citizens.  I didn’t experience this, but that’s what they were talking about.  The dinner wasn’t very good.  Most of the group was upset that our last dinner together and was so disappointing.

 

Our last day we went back to Christchurch. On the way we stopped to see Moeraki Boulders, large round rocks on the beach.  They were pretty cool.  I can’t quite explain them so if you want more info, see this:  http://www.moerakiboulders.com/

A lot of people on the bus were sick, theory that it was the horrible dinner from the night before.  I was glad I had chosen the vegetarian option.  We got to the ghost town, I mean Christchurch early evening.  Since the tour was over for me, I stayed at an airbnb.  It was luxury to have my own room with a double bed!  I got a bus back downtown and went out to dinner with a couple of the people from the tour.  We walked around the deserted ghost town of Christchurch.  At one point we heard music coming from a small alley.  We walked into the alley and it opened up into a courtyard with 4 or 5 restaurants and some live music.  Since we had already eaten, we walked through the alley coming out the other side into the ghost town again.  I wonder if all the people of Christchurch are hanging out in tiny hidden alleys all over the city.

I left way too early in the morning for my flight back to Auckland.  I just wanted to stay in that comfortable bed for another few hours.  Joel picked me up from the airport.  We found a place to picnic for dinner, wandered around town, shopped for food and checked me into the new airbnb.  Another night with a double bed in a room of my own – Aaaahhhhhh.  For New Year’s Eve we had a picnic with a couple people from the tour, watched a comedy show and then watched fireworks at midnight.  It was a very pleasant New Years Eve.

Today was a chill day of working and doing laundry.  Went to dinner and wandered around Devonport and Silo Park in Auckland.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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Bowls?

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Glacier

On By rrainefioreIn New Zealand, Travel, Uncategorized1 Comment

Time to move on.  Two hours after leaving Christchurch, the tour company called our driver and told him he had to pick up people up from the airport.  So now we are behind schedule four hours which makes for a long day of driving.  He dropped us off in a small town and we just wandered around for a couple hours while he went back to Christchurch.  I don’t like this part of the tour.  Just when you get to know people and bond with them, they leave and new people come on.  Maybe my future husband will be one of the new people. It was a full day of driving to the tiny town of Franz Joseph.  The drive was so beautiful.  There were so many waterfalls that we started playing a game to see who could call out the new ones fastest.  All along the trip whenever we are near the ocean, people have been telling us we might see an orca and of course no one has seen an orca.  So, we decided if you see a waterfall, just call out Orca.  I can’t even count how many orcas we saw.   My future husband is not in the group of new people.  After dinner they had dance music and the younger Italian guy likes dancing.  He pulled out some dance moves I can’t begin to explain.  It was like gumby crossed with Saturday Night Fever, some chicken dance and a dash of the Rockettes.  It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.  The older Italian wanted to play cards so I tried to teach him Rummy.  It was very difficult to teach so I left out some of the harder rules and let a lot of wrong moves, like playing out of turn, slide – Rummy Lite.  All was going ok until he decided he didn’t like the game anymore and proceeded to try to teach me a game.  It looked kind of like Rummy, but with more cards.  No matter what I did, it was wrong and he’d get upset because I wasn’t playing right.  He’d then tell me what I was doing wrong.  Unfortunately, no matter how many times he’d tell me, I still don’t speak Italian.  So, he’d tell me again and I still hadn’t learned Italian.

The next day 8 of us went on a glacier hike on the Franz Joseph Glacier.  Because the glacier has receded so much in the past few years you can no longer hike to the glacier.  You now have to be taken by helicopter.  This made the hike very expensive, but also makes you feel like a bad-ass.  For those of you who don’t know, I am in love with snow.  Ice is equally as wonderful.  I would have been happy to spend a week up there.  It’s so beautiful.  In 3 hours, I took 320 photos.  I won’t post them all, but I will probably post more photos than you want to see.  Sorry.  Sort of.  No, not really.  After the glacier, spent some time in the hot springs, then all you can eat pizza.  Good day.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

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Rainbow

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Orca

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Dolphin

On By rrainefioreIn New Zealand, Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Our next accommodation was nice.  We had small houses in the mountains.  We went to the hot springs and dinner.  Then on to Akaroa.  We were supposed to go to Kaikoura which is famous for dolphin and whale watching.  But because of the recent earthquake we were not able to go there.  Three of us went on a dolphin watching cruise in Akaroa and the rest wandered around the town.  It was a warm sunny day and we saw lots of Hectors dolphin.  I had never seen them before.  They are tiny.  I didn’t get any pictures of them so the picture I’m putting in is from the internet.  We saw little penguins swimming and fur seals.  We saw lots of birds and one sheep (not swimming).  The boat was a family run business, small group of people and the boat staff was wonderful.  They also had a dolphin dog.  He ran around with his little life jacket on.  He can hear the dolphin so he would run to the side of the boat where they were long before we could see them.  After Akaroa, we went to Christchurch.  Christchurch was nothing too exciting.  A bunch of us went to the botanic gardens (free) and then wandered around downtown.  Christchurch is still rebuilding from the earthquake years ago.  It feels like a ghost town.  Most buildings are abandoned and there were hardly any people around.  There’s a bunch of Burner type art and murals around town.  My favorite mural was one of penguins.  On the left the penguins looked normal, but then toward the right, the penguins were melting.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

 

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Buster the Dolphin Dog

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Elephant Shaped Rock

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Can you find the fur seals?

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Salmon Farm

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