There was little to see on the way up from the Otago region to Christchurch and the Banks Peninsula, but one interesting stop we made was at the Morekai Boulders. These are a group of a couple hundred stone spheres each measuring just over a metre in diameter, and as far as I can tell their existence is a mystery. Pretty neat.

The Banks Peninsula is a quaint place that has been developed to serve as a weekend getaway town for Christchurchers, but plenty of tourists also make the trip. Really the only thing to do here is to take a driving tour, as most of the land is privately owned. The peninsula is quite hilly though, and the drive was a bit on the stressful side. Actually, once we got up above the snow line and it started snowing pretty hard, it became quite the stressful drive as we wound around the sharp and guardrail-free curves taking the odd glance down the steep as slope on our left. I didn’t really take in too much of the scenery then, but hopefully Ashley enjoyed it. We got down below the snow just as darkness hit, and ended up finding a pretty good beach campsite. The winds that night were crazy, and the van literally rocked us to sleep.

We drove into Christchurch early the next day, circled our hostel over and over trying to figure out the crazy network of one way streets, and then began the dreaded task of emptying and cleaning the van. The drive to drop off our home of the last month was admittedly kind of sad, but at the same time I was really ready to move on from NZ at this point. I was actually really of mixed minds – on one hand I felt as if I had seen all there was to be seen, especially after the low-key final couple of days, and needed to switch things up and go somewhere new, but on the other hand there was so much of NZ left to be seen. If the trip had been scheduled to take two months and we moved more slowly, there’s no way I’d be ready to leave after one month, but unless we did some serious backtracking we were done. I think NZ can be toured in a month, but I would strongly recommend taking 2-3 if you could afford it. It would have been nice to do some of the longer walks, see some of the more offbeat places, and have the ability to stop in a place like Wanaka for a week if we wanted Oh well… so it goes.

We got back from the rental place in the early afternoon and spent some time running errands, picking up the odd souvenir, and seeing Christchurch. It felt very intimate for a city of its size, and probably would be entered at third on my list of places I would live in New Zealand. That night we decided to live large, and we feasted and drank merrily at a fantastic Thai restaurant. An appetizer of more of those delicious Havelock green mussels was probably the best part of the meal - it’s the only course I can remember two weeks later anyway. Afterwards we stopped by a fancy lounge where we drank beers by the fire. It seemed like an appropriately relaxing way to conclude such a whirlwind of a trip.

The next day Ashley began a marathon series of flights to get her to London the long way around the world, and I smiled thinking about my two hour hop over the Tasman Sea to Oz.