New Zealand 2019 Part 2

After 10 days of skiing our son Damian and his 3 boys headed home to Sydney on the 20th July. We in turn picked up a small hire car to do some exploring on our way to Auckland to catch a plane home on the 31st July. So eleven days of discovery. As we had never been to New Zealand before this trip we were treating the 11 days as a reconnoitre for planning future visits to the land of the long white cloud. 

We certainly discovered that there is a lot to see and only giving it 11 days I guess, was somewhat of an insult to NZ. On leaving Queenstown we headed up the centre of the South Island and then headed for the east coast at Christchurch. I guess curioslity about the damage casused be the Earthquake/s came into play. It certainly was a shame to see all the damage that is still obvious after 8 years. Of course not helped by the follow up earthquake in 2016.

Office buildings and shopping malls that are left idle until money fore repairs or demolition becomes available was a very sad site, but the locals are very positive about their city.

You can see from our map here our route to Auckland.

The things we observed about NZ are:

1. The people are very friendly.
2. It is very cold this time of the year.
3. Their coffee is sensational. I don’t think we had a bad cup for the whole 3 weeks.
4. The scenery is spectacular.

See the gallery below and let the descriptions speak for themselves. Click on the small icons for large image and/or slideshow.

Hopefully I will get time to put together a short video over the next couple of weeks.