Monday, March 21, 2005 (Christchurch – New Zealand SI)
Happy birthday to me - 38 and an old fart
already. Already not looking forward to the impending end of this trip. Finally,
a cheaper rental car for Wellington. Exploring Cathedral Square and finally
coming face to face with a pair of kiwi birds. With a car and a place to stay in
Wellington now booked, we can finally relax a bit.
Day 378 (188). More relaxation was definitely
on the menu today with no travelling around planned. Fitting, I thought, since
today is my thirty-eighth birthday. Yes, that’s right, I’m slowly
becoming an old fart. Since I’m half way around the world and still
racking up some pretty impressive lifetime experiences, however, none of that
seems to really matter at the moment. We’ll see how I feel about it when
we’re back in Europe and have to re-enter the rat race again. With a child
on the way, no job, no home and little money, I’m sure there will be
plenty of time to worry about the rest of my life but for now, I’m too
busy enjoying myself. Since we are essentially stopping in Florida more to
re-visit our old lives there than to actually travel, the effective completion
of this trip is now less than a month away. It’s hard to believe that
we’ve been on the road now on this final leg of the trip for six and a
half months already. Where does the time go? On the flight home from Dubai at
the end of the first leg, I tried to summarise the whole experience and
attempted to pick out some of the highlights. When the time comes to do this
again in a few weeks time, it will be a much more difficult task. It will feel
like a sad ending to a deeply moving tale and it’s a task I’m not
particularly looking forward to, for it will be like stamping the terminating
seal on this overall epic journey that we’ve made together. I suspect it
will be a difficult transition back into a normal life again. My how we’ve
enjoyed ourselves on this trip so far. The ending is not yet neigh, however, and
there are still plenty of good times to be had ahead of us, and so we soldier
on.
The rental car problem was still
eating away at me this morning. I wanted so desperately for that offer of a
cheap car out of Wellington that I read about yesterday in my e-mail to be still
valid this morning so the first thing I did, after Sandy ‘wished me a
happy birthday’, was to call to find out if that was the case. As luck
would have it, it was and the guy on the other end of the phone confirmed that
the NZ$35 (€20,30) per day rental rate was still available. I wasted no
time in securing the booking with him via a fifteen percent deposit on my credit
card and was so very glad to get that problem finally off my chest. The only
problem now is that we will be arriving too late in the afternoon to collect the
car and will have to first find our way to a hostel for the night before picking
the vehicle up the next day. The upside to this is that we will save on a
day’s rental cost.
For the past
few days here in New Zealand, we’ve had the definite feeling that the
summer here in the Southern hemisphere has finally given way to autumn. The
cloud cover is now nearly constantly overcast and the temperature has dropped
markedly. There has also been the barely perceptible hint of drizzle in the air
on and off. It’s perhaps fitting that we’ve just about completed our
tour of the South Island but Christchurch itself may yet have one or two
surprises for us and so we completed breakfast and wandered into the centre of
town. Cathedral Square marks the epicentre of the city of Christchurch and I
thought it might be a good idea for us to wander over there just to see it for
ourselves. Parking in the inner city was sure to be problematic so we decided to
exercise our legs for the
day.
Indeed, Cathedral Square is a
hub of activity with locals and tourists criss-crossing each other throughout
the open space of the square. The cathedral from which the square derives its
name stands majestically on one side of the square and we wandered inside to
look around for a while. The apparent commencement of a burial service seemed
like a decent enough cue for us to make a respectful withdrawal. Just across
from the cathedral is an information office and this seemed like a good place to
investigate what else the city centre had to offer. Annexed to the information
office is an indoor aquarium and nocturnal kiwi enclosure. We missed up on the
opportunity to see the rare and endangered kiwi when we were in Queenstown and
for the sake of just NZ$10 (€5,80) each, after student discount, we were
able to rectify this today. We spent nearly an hour exploring the aquarium and
watching the continuously running video presentations in the purpose built
little cinema that they had there before stumbling onto a gold panning exhibit,
apparently with real gold flakes buried in the gravel and silt. Since we are now
both old hands at this, we simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to give
it a go. And indeed we did find several flakes of gold to add to our growing
collection – yet more mementoes from our time here. We finished up with a
visit to the kiwi enclosure, where they had a male and female bird wandering
around in the nearly completely dark enclosure. The kiwi is quite a strange bird
indeed. In fact, with no wings and no tail, it’s difficult to even think
of it as a bird at all. They are a very odd and unlikely looking animal at just
about thirty centimetres tall and we sat there on our knees the whole time in
the dark enclosure just captivated by the pair of them waddling around and using
their long beaks to forage beneath the dirt. By all accounts, you have to be
exceedingly lucky to stumble into one in the wild and we were both extremely
thrilled to be able to see a pair of them up close, even if only in a
semi-natural environment.
We
didn’t really have much of a plan for today and after emerging from the
kiwi house, we spent the next hour or so wandering around the inner city
streets. Sandy led us to a large shop where she shopped for a few new clothing
additions to her backpack. After this, we started to make our way back towards
our house. This turned out to be quite the trek, as we had by now made our way
clear across to the opposite side of the city (Sandy insisted I add that last
bit). Had we had any idea of which bus to get onto, we’d have probably
jumped onto one but at least we got our exercise for the
day.
Back at the house, finally,
Sandy prepared a meal from the last remaining fresh foodstuffs that we have in
the house whilst I called around for a hostel in Wellington. I was a little
nervous at first since several people had previously told us that we would have
to book at least several days in advance, due to the fact that Wellington has
fewer budget accommodation options for the number of budget travellers that pass
through it. As luck would have it, however, I did manage to find a place with a
double that was able to take our booking for the next couple of days at just
NZ$50 (€29) per night.
With our
accommodation and transportation for the North Island now sorted and out of the
way with, we were finally able to sit and just relax for the remainder of the
evening. There wasn’t much on TV so I whipped out the laptop and we sat
through another Harry Potter DVD.
Posted: Mon - March 21, 2005 at 10:18 PM