Tag Archives: Christchurch

On our last leg(s) – the journey to Christchurch

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Sunday 22 March 2026 – Dunedin was our last stop on the tour of the South Island. All we had to do was to get ourselves to Christchurch and hold ourselves in readiness for our return flights to the UK. Because of the unpleasantness in the Middle East, our original journey back via Dubai had been changed so that our route was now (a) via Singapore and (b) a day later. Thus we would have two nights and one day in Christchurch, and a layover in Singapore’s Changi airport of some six hours: total journey time therefore 30 hours, including 24 hours in the air.

But first we had to get ourselves to Christchurch, a distance of some 360km. Despite Jane’s best research efforts, there wasn’t a whole host of things to do and see en route, but she did find a couple of interesting diversions on our journey.

The first of these was still just about within the Dunedin city limits – Baldwin Street, dubbed the World’s Steepest (driveable) Street.

It’s notoriously difficult to convey steepness, either up or down, in photographs, so I made the sacrifice of walking up the steepest bit so that I could bring you a dispassionate measurement of the gradient.

It’s not that steep the whole way; a section near the top is the steepest.

I walked up the road, but Jane took advantage of steps, which run up one side of the steep bit.

For fun, we did another way of conveying the gradient.

At the top is a seat, much needed by some of the folk that had got that far

and some info about the street

Of course, some people have to make getting up the street a real challenge, and there are a couple of plaques there which are nods to the “because it’s there” lunatic tendency of some people.

and there’s one rather charming record, by the water fountain there, of a successful attempt to climb the street by a young lad aged only 3 years and 4 months.

After that little workout, we moved on, leaving logging country for more pastoral landscapes.

There were some exceptions to the low-rise nature of the landscape; Jane took this photo as we refuelled near a town called Bushey.

The Glastonbury Tor lookalike at the top is the Sir John McKenzie memorial, by the way (he was a politician in the last half of the 19th century). The last two thirds of the journey is through pancake-flat landscapes, which are conducive to high-density cattle farming, something we had noted in a few other parts of the country.

As we followed the coast northwards, we reached a town called Moeraki. It shares a name with Lake Moeraki, but the connection is merely linguistic, if ChatGPT is to be believed; Both names come from the word “moeraki” in the Māori language, often interpreted as something like “sleepy sky” or “day of rest”. Anyway, this Moeraki is a beachside town and on the beach are some geologically very interesting objects: the Moeraki Boulders.

Although their formation is a matter of abstruse geology, it’s clear that they are a popular tourist attraction. They are “septarian concretions”. A concretion is a hard and compact mass formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles, found in sedimentary rock or soil. Septarian concretions are carbonate-rich concretions containing angular cavities or cracks (from the Latin septum, “partition”, referring to the cracks or cavities separating polygonal blocks of hardened material). Some of the boulders show this partitioning very clearly, indeed looking as if someone has taken a broken one and glued it back together.

There are some broken boulders on the beach, which also give an idea of the crystalline nature of the material between the compacted mudstone.

There are many intact boulders, most of them part-buried within the sand

and very popular for kids to play on and (sigh) selfies. There’s one which looks to have rolled off the cliff where it was formed relatively recently (in geological terms, anyway).

Human provided for scale

The boulders are spherical through the way they were created, over a period of some 65 million years and starting with a seed, which might have been a shell fragment. Mineral-rich water percolating through the mud deposited crystalline material and mudstone evenly so that it expanded spherically within the cliff it was building up in.  When the cliff is eroded away by the sea, the formed boulders then roll down to the beach. There are apparently other similar phenomena on the North Island as well as these here.

We might have then completed the journey to Christchurch with no further stops other than for coffee, for example at this accurately-named establishment

which had a very enticing array of cakes.

But Jane noticed that a place called Geraldine had a vintage motors and machinery museum.  I was taken enough with the name of the town, as well as with Herbert and Alma along the route; but the prospect of a vintage museum proved irresistible, so we stopped off to take a look.

The desk was manned by a volunteer called Bruce, who was very pleased to see us, and accompanied us as we went into the first of the halls, which was real veteran cars.

It turned out that he owned one of them

but was also anxious to tell us about many of the other ones, too.  He was a lovely chap, but we were quite glad when other customers came along and diverted his attention away from explaining all the cars there. There were some interesting exhibits, such as this Model T Ford

and this creation, which I’d never come across before, the Reselco Solocar.

We wandered around the other sheds: tractors,

with a very charming array of tractor seats along one wall

and some very elderly-looking examples;

Stationary engines;

Crawler tractors;

and models.

There were other sheds with various other sorts of machinery, such as lawnmowers, much incidental period stuff such as old cameras and household goods, and a model horse in the yard.

The last shed contained cars of a vintage that was much more my period

Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre R
Wolseley 6/99
Armstrong Siddeley
Vauxhall Veloxes

and a Jag I’d never come across before, an XJ40 (mislabelled as a JX40, I might add).

The place had the same amateur air as Brooklands Museum used to have before it got really popular; amateur in the good sense of love being lavished on the exhibits.

There were a couple of quirky roadside objects to be spotted en route – creative use of hay bale “marshmallows”

and, having passed Bushey (the name of a town near where I was born), we also passed Chertsey

a town near where we now live. But there wasn’t another roadside attraction to divert us and so we found ourselves at the Sudima Hotel in Christchurch, not far from the George where we’d stayed before (and would have again, had they had room for us). It wasn’t the Small Luxury Hotel that the George is, but it was a well-organised and comfortable room and the service was friendly and efficient.

During our free day in Christchurch, apart from writing this blog, my main task was to return the hire car. This had the potential to be complicated, as I had agreed, on taking on the car at Greymouth all those weeks ago, to return it to the airport rather than the city depot of the car hire firm. Our travel agent hadn’t managed to change the arrangement, and I couldn’t persuade the agent on the phone to Budget that I even had one of their cars, far less could make any change to its return location. So I drove it, via a refuelling stop, to the Budget city offices to discuss whether it was OK to just drop it off there. To start with, that was a very frustrating process because there was only one chap on the desk actually helping customers, but, for some reason, a couple of others drifting about Doing Mysterious Things that didn’t help at all reduce the queue of three people in front of me. The chap at the desk was being frightfully helpful to an elderly American couple who seemed to be having many troubles picking up a car; he even spent time explaining phone charging cables to the lady and helped her buy one from the machine on the premises. All this took about 20 minutes with the three guys in the queue and me exchanging ever more meaningful looks and raised eyebrows. I had just resigned myself to a long wait when a guy wandered in to the office with a key for a car he was returning and said “fuelled up, no damage; can I just leave the key here?” and the desk chap just nodded. So I followed this wonderful example, and got the nod from the desk chap that the airport/city dichotomy was not a problem, dropped the key off and hightailed it back to the hotel before they could change their mind. I haven’t received any credit card charge, so I am currently assuming that all is OK.

We treated ourselves to one more Decent Cocktail And Nice Meal at the George in the late afternoon, after which, to shake the food down, we went for a walk. Obviously. So we got a few more photos of Christchurch’s street art,

cafés,

handsome buildings;

Antarctic Heritage Trust HQ

scenes of riparian beauty,

and even a farewell wave from Robert Falcon Scott

before turning in for the night to get some sleep before the long journey home.

So, that was it for New Zealand. We’ve had a wonderful time, full of new experiences, sights and sounds; we’ve covered over 3,700km on largely uncrowded roads; and we’ve walked over 200km, including a couple of toughish hikes. The country is a delight for British tourists – well-organised for a wide variety of activities at a wide variety of accommodation types and it’s been a pleasure to be able to enjoy much of that variety. Slightly sadly, we head home; there will be no more entries on these pages for New Zealand. But fear not: we will be on the road again in about six weeks’ time and I hope to be able to bring you the exciting sights of our next trip here. Where are we going? Ah – you’ll have to keep in touch with these pages to find that out.

 

 

 

Christchurch II – The other bits

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Friday 6 March 2026 – In the manner of matters serendipitous, things worked out well for our stay in Christchurch. The weather was fantastic, the walking around in the city centre was interesting and we went on an afternoon tour which accidentally supplemented our wanderings rather well. The tour was part of our scheduled itinerary and billed as “Discover Christchurch” and so I rather wondered what else I would discover about Christchurch on this tour. The answer was, frankly, not a lot, but it was an enjoyable half day and we did get to see other parts of the environs that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. We had been walking around the city (obviously) in the morning, and knew that driver Brent would be picking us up at the hotel at 13.25, so we had to scurry back to be in time. We didn’t want to make Brent cross*, after all.

Brent carted a minivan load of us around for the afternoon; a motley crew consisting of four Indians, four Yanks and us two Brits. He started off by driving us around the city centre, giving a desultory commentary about what we could see out of the windows. Since we’d already walked around the city centre – twice! – there was very little in this that was new to us, although we did get a good idea of the huge expanse of Hagley Park, which an enlightened government decreed in 1855 should be “reserved forever as a public park, and shall be open for the recreation and enjoyment of the public.” It was from Brent that we learned something about the new sports stadium (such as its cost, its lack of parking and the fact that he thought the money would have been better used for a mass transit rail system. The traffic we saw at times during the afternoon strongly supports this view.)

Having shown us the city centre, Brent then took us out of the city proper, to Mona Vale, an area around a public park in the suburbs to the west of the city. It has some very attractive (and very expensive) housing

and a Homestead building

which functions now as a very decent-looking cafe, offering, inter alia, a posh High Tea. The Homestead has what I would call a conservatory

but which is officially called a Bath House. Walking further through the park, we spotted something which we were never promised:

a Rose Garden. There was a vast number of different rose varieties planted there and even I could appreciate the scent – it was lovely.

The next thing on the itinerary was a visit to “The Sign Of The Takahē”. I was expecting some kind of ecological message, or at least a bird statue, but actually it was

a restaurant and coffee shop, on a hill to the south of Christchurch. It was originally built in 1918 at the behest, mainly, of one George Henry Ell, a New Zealand MP, who envisaged the building as the gateway into the Port Hills area. It was to be one of four planned rest houses in the area for those walking in the Port Hills that overlook Christchurch and Lyttelton harbour. The other rest houses were to be Sign of the Kiwi, Sign of the Bellbird, and Sign of the Packhorse, but only the Sign of the Kiwi has survived. We stopped for coffee and a scone there (scones are a bit of a thing in New Zealand) and then took the short walk to the viewpoint over Christchurch.

It kind of makes you grateful for the new stadium; at least one knows where to look, because it would otherwise be difficult to know exactly where the centre of the city was. Even the vast area of Hagley Park can’t easily be made out, which was a surprise to me. (I think it’s the green area to mid-left of the picture, but I’m not sure.)

After this, Brent took us south towards Lyttleton, which is a major port; the journey there allowed us to see that by going to the Sign of the Takahe and then further south we were going over the lip of an extinct (it is hoped) volcano.

We passed the village of Rapaki

and stopped at a sort of viewpoint. We couldn’t see much of the town of Lyttleton, but we could see its container port.

We amused ourselves for a while watching the container transport vehicles – I had never seen these in action before, believing that all the container action was done by crane. But these vehicles are rather neat.

That was it for the tour. Brent’s route back into the city demonstrated the sense of his assertion that a mass transit system would alleviate the traffic problem. A couple of the junctions we had to turn right at were just ridiculously gridlocked, but, there you go. They’ve got the stadium. We did pass some more murals

and an intriguing but incomprehensible installation.

The day, though, wasn’t done, because we then took the opportunity to go for an evening walk. Obviously. Our target was the Botanic Garden, which occupies a part of Hagley Park, and our visit there chimed nicely with our meeting with friends of mine the previous evening. Janet used to lead the ‘cello section in the same orchestra as me in Surrey, back in the UK; and the reason she was in New Zealand was because her husband, Wolfgang, had been invited to come over from the UK to run the Botanic Garden. The four of us had had a delightful meal together in the excellent restaurant at the George, 50 Bistro.  As with the other encounters we’ve had as we’ve travelled across New Zealand, it was a lovely opportunity to catch up with friends I haven’t seen for years, and particularly interesting to hear Wolfgang’s perspective on the Botanic Gardens and some of the heritage buildings that also fall under his remit. Janet, ever supremely thoughtful, had brought along a supply of Twinings finest Earl Grey, as she was worried that we might go short.

So: we walked along the side of Hagley Park from the George. It was clear that Something Had Been Going On in the park, from the sheer number of portable toilets that were set up.

We think it might have been a festival of some kind.

Our main target was indeed the Botanic Gardens, but en route we passed a couple of notable constructions. The first was an arresting sight of the reconstruction/modernisation of the Canterbury Museum.

The building is undergoing significant structural work, with parts of the facade supported by extensive temporary steel bracing. In the meantime, its content have been housed elsewhere in the city.

On the other side of the road is another handsome building, the Christchurch Arts Centre (formerly the University of New Zealand Canterbury College).

It appeared to be open, so we peeked in. It has a couple of magnificent quadrangles

one of which hosts a wine bar.

It would have been lovely just to sit and while away some time there, but we wanted to take a look in the Botanic Gardens, which are directly opposite, so we hauled ourselves away and crossed the road.

The Botanic Gardens area is huge – 21 hectares – and based around the river Avon, which makes it very pleasant to walk around. We hadn’t that much time before it closed, but we managed to see a few corners of it, such as the World Peace Bell

and the Dahlia display

before we had to start heading back to the hotel.  On one lawn was a handsome pair of Paradise Shelducks

(with a decidedly frisky male and a less interested female) and on a path we came across some terminally cute Californian Quail chicks,

being minded by their parents.

It was utterly charming to see them in action.

We also passed a striking 2013 artwork by David McCracken called “Diminish and Ascend”, intending to create the illusion of a staircase to the sky.

So, that was it for Christchurch – lots of walking about, many artworks and a splendid reacquaintance with friends, all in delightful weather. One can’t ask for much better when travelling, I reckon.

Tomorrow, we have to leave Christchurch; we’re getting in training. Stay tuned to hear more.

 

 

 

*  Brent Cross

Christchurch: I – the city centre

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Thursday 5 March 2026 – Guess what? The drive down to Christchurch from Kaikoura is quite scenic.

It’s reassuring to note that they take some precautions against falling boulders in places,

but then we were heading into a place with quite a record of geological instability.

We arrived in Christchurch in good time check in to our hotel, the very well-organised George. Whilst Jane settled in to our room, I went to hand back our hire car; the nice manager at Budget was good enough to waive the charge for the extra day we incurred through the mix-up back in Auckland. On the way back I got some milk in for the inevitable cups of Twinings finest Earl Grey and also discovered a significant characteristic of Christchurch – the street art,

which is sprinkled liberally throughout the city, quite often on walls surrounding car parks. There are a lot of car parks on the open spaces throughout Christchurch that arise courtesy, one suspects, of the massive earthquakes that devastated the city in September 2010 and, more tragically, in February 2011, more of which later. I also passed the Victoria Jubilee Clock

built in celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1897 (and rebuilt in 1930, presumably after an earthquake in 1929). I also noted that they have problems with the English language here similar to the ones we have in England.

The hotel room carried a reminder of the earthquake, too.

Anyway, we had some time to ourselves, both during this afternoon and tomorrow morning. So we went for walks. Obviously. These are photographs from our peregrinations, not necessarily in the order in which we saw things.

Street Art

We took a lot of photos of the street art, because there’s a lot of street art. There are some huge installations across the city centre

Trompe l’oeuil frontage for something

and many, many smaller examples.

It seems that any space is game for being covered.

A standby generator in Mona Vale

Other Art

As well as the murals, there are plenty of other installations around the city,  both old and new.

James Cook
Queen Victoria
Not sure if this is an art installation or a working phone box

Architecture

Obviously, since much of the city was destroyed in 2010 and 2011, there are many, many new buildings. Accommodation has sprung up all over the city with an agenda to attract people back to living there.

One famous post-earthquake construction, a container mall (similar in concept to the Tin Town that sprang up after the Napier earthquake), has since been demolished, and replaced with a very modern shopping centre

and the city’s restored tramline runs a tourist hop-on, hop-off service through it and round the other sights of the central area.

The city itself feels a little….odd. I suppose the lack of skyscrapers (there’s unsurprisingly a moratorium on tall buildings except under exceptional circumstances) and the ubiquity of modern constructions have a bearing on this. It’s a very pleasant city to walk around in. Parts of it have been restored to their previous glory, like New Regent Street,

along which the tram runs.

There’s been plenty of construction of new buildings, of course. The river Avon runs through the city, giving it a pleasant, green, focus

(the statue in the river there is, yes, an Anthony Gormley).

This greenness is not normal, by the way. Apparently, by this time of the year, all of the green spaces have usually been burnt brown; but it’s been such a wet summer that the grass is still green. As we walked around, the weather was delightful – 25°C and sunshine – so Christchurch folk’s bad luck was our good fortune.

Some modern buildings are just Deloitteful

but all the time the spectre of such a recent upheaval (literal and figurative) hangs over the city.

There are also several handsome old buildings which were damaged in the earthquake and which haven’t been restored (yet, one hopes),

including this teacher training college, which is a very striking building.

There is a museum, Quake City, dedicated to the earthquake, which is a very intense education about the impact it had. One thing I hadn’t appreciated was the constant barrage of quakes that has hit the city since its inception. Since 1844 there have been over 20 earthquakes in the area – they’re almost routine. What marks the 2010/2011 earthquakes out is the timing: September 2010 was a larger upheaval (7.1), but it happened in the middle of the night when the city was quiet. The one that followed, in February 2011, was “only” 6.1 but it was in the middle of the day, many of the buildings were weakened from September and so foundered, and many lives were lost in the collapsing buildings. The devastation was huge and widespread, as shown in photographs in Quake City.

Some buildings survived,

Was a Church, is now a microbrewery!

and, particularly, wooden ones tended to be able to withstand the shaking.

But, of course, many didn’t, notably the cathedral and the basilica.

Political wrangling has put a stop to restoration work of this cathedral, which seems an outrage until one considers that there’s not enough taxpayer money to go around and there are many more important calls on what money there is than, frankly, restoring churches. In that context, it’s a bit strange to note that there was money to build a brand new sports stadium

(seating capacity 30,000 but without its own car parking) but not to construct a mass transit rail system which would go a long way to relieve the city’s chronic rush hour traffic gridlock. There’s clearly been a lot of building, many examples of which could possibly have been funded entirely from the private sector.

An example, though, of what can be done is shown by the Cardboard Cathedral, formally called the Transitional Cathedral of the city, which is a truly remarkable (a) building and (b) piece of thinking.

There really is a huge amount of cardboard in its construction.

In a move that should surprise no-one, the building regs were changed somewhat after the earthquake, and ever since, all buildings have to have a minimum 50 years of expected life; the cardboard cathedral is expected to last well over a century. We learned this from a conversation with a lovely chap called Richard Parker, a volunteer at the cathedral and also a man involved with the city’s building programmes.

The Cardboard Cathedral is quite an inspiring construction, both for what it represents – rebuilding after a major setback – and how it’s done – with vision and imagination. Our visit to it and to Quake City were probably the most significant segments of our wanderings around in this very pleasant city; and we weren’t quite done. We had our fourth and final meeting with old friends, and were able to explore a few other aspects of the place. I’ll detail them in the next entry.