The Road to Christchurch

We're spending the week in Nelson, which is on the northwest corner of the South Island. It's desperately dry here and right before we arrived a farmer plowing his field hit a stone and started a fire. It's been burning for days now and has become the largest forest fire in NZ history. We could see the helicopters taking water to fight the fire as we drove into the city.

Our motel is right in the heart of the city so we're in walking distance to most of what we'd like to see. This is the third city where we've found a convenient Countdown grocery store so we haul our shopping bags down every couple of days after we've meal planned. NZ is an expensive place to eat out 3 meals a day for more than month so we use our kitchens which have been well equipped at every stop. It's interesting to see the difference in grocery offerings. Boysenberry yogurt and ice cream is popular here and Tom has had to switch from cherry to pomegranate juice at breakfast. We've been feasting on ripe apricots and plums and lots of Kikorangi triple cream blue cheese – I've gained at least ten pounds on the trip. With so much driving Tom hasn't sampled much local beer but what he's had has been hoppy – not his favorite flavor.

On our second day here we awoke to the smell of smoke. Overnight an arsonist had set a fire in one of the outlying city neighborhoods. We walked down the street to Trafalgar Square Park on Cathedral Hill and watched the helicopters dropping bucket after bucket of water on the fire. They managed to put it out but it removed firefighters from the main fire which flared up in the windy weather. About 900 more people had to be evacuated from the area north of the city because of the arson fire. So far 3,000 homes have been evacuated but most of the fire damage has been to tree plantations and life-style blocks which we call hobby farms. People here have been wonderful, taking horse and stock trailers to the fire lines to help people move their animals. The city has opened a stadium to those who need places for their animals.

Our accommodation is on the edge of one of the shopping districts so we've looked at a stained glass studio and purchased some quilt fabrics. We have a couple of baby quilts to make this spring, one for the Australian branch of the family. We sit and read in Trafalgar Square Park at the end of most of our outings. There's a cinema just a couple of blocks from here, too, so we saw On the Basis of Sex which I missed when at the Oriental in Milwaukee and Storm Boy which got bad U.S. Reviews but which we enjoyed.

One of the attractions of Nelson, which is filled with backpackers and cyclists, is its proximity to Abel Tasman National Park. It's a huge forested area along the sea, filled with hiking paths (tramping tracks) and opportunities to swim, scuba, and sail. We went for a sail one day and not only visited several coves and spotted fur seal pups and other wildlife but got to watch as more adventurous visitors took lessons kayaking and learning to sail a waka, one of the native Maori double-hulled canoes. They are huge and the crew has to learn to work together to sail in one. We also tramped a couple of kilometers on one of the hiking tracks but I am not going far these days since arthritis has kicked up in my hip. So much for fearless walking after my knee surgery – and I can't even blame the slow down on my robo knee... Anyway, Abel Tasman Park is magnificent and well worth seeing. Next time, however, hiking boots would be worth the space in our suitcase.

We are off to our favorite place in New Zealand – Christchurch, the second largest city in the country. We aren't sure what to expect eight years after an earthquake devastated much of the inner city. Christchurch is very English and one of the only cities in N.Z. that's actually flat since it's built on a coastal plain. We're cutting across the country and then heading south on the Pacific coastal road. We'll pass through Kaikoura, a city north of Christchurch that was earthquake struck just three years ago. Fortunately the damage there was mostly slips (landslides) over the road and upheavals in the sea bed offshore so the loss of life was much smaller than in Christchurch where the headquarters of the television network collapsed and killed dozens of people in 2011.

Before we came this time I'd looked into going on a bike tour between vineyards in Canterbury which we're crossing on our trip. We're so glad we decided not to try it. Just as in the mountains, cyclists ride right on the road here and I'm too much of a coward to try it. Not only are you sucking gas fumes all the time but in many places leaving the required meter between you and the bikers is impossible. There's not a great safety record here for cyclists and without a dedicated track I'm happy to leave the roads to the cars. The groups we encountered were all steady but I wonder how well everybody's doing after the last stop. Weaving, tipsy pedallers would be in even more danger on the road.

The trip down the coast was slow going. There's still a lot of road and tunnel work to clear up the slips after the Kaikoura quake. Large portions of the cliffs are also being reinforced with concrete walls and mesh fencing to stop additional slips. The road and the railroad tracks are right on the Pacific shore in some spots – it was easy to see colonies of fur seals basking on boulders with the sea spray splashing over them from the breaking waves.

We arrived in Christchurch just in time for the annual Chinese lantern/fireworks display in Hagley Park. We've been to one previously. The lanterns are set up along with a noodle festival, loads of food trucks just across from the Christchurch Botanic Garden. We spent the day there looking at the displays and stopped to have lunch at the garden cafe. I opted to try the rhubarb soda they had (it was good and I had a second bottle later that day). One of the waiters stopped at our table to ask if I really liked it and took me up on having a sip himself. We started talking about rhubarb, which he wasn't all that familiar with, and we ended up taking his email so we could send him Kathy Westphal's recipes for rhubarb cheesecake pie and rhubarb slushy. The internet is a wonderful way to connect to people even if the conversation starts with rhubarb soda...