New Zealand - Christchurch and the riders of the Mark

We got the flight OK and picked up our spaceship named "Spock"... cool eh? (double bed and gas cooker in the back) and we drove out of Christchurch and ended up sleeping behind a house when we go too tired to travel any more and just had to stop... We got a knock on the door at about 10.30pm (which gave us a bit of a fright), and thought "oh no! we are going to be moved on". It turned out that we had parked behind the local school and Anthony, who was knocking on the car door, was the husband of the school principal coming to check up that we were not evil robbers out to steal from the school!

In true Kiwi style he invited us to park on his lawn instead and come in for a coffee and shower at theirs in the morning, what a welcome to New Zealand hey!!! :-)

Our first camp site - thanks Anthony & Diana


We went into to see Anthony and Diana, the school principal, in the morning (K was a bit scared that we were going to get detention, but luckily she was lovely) and had a lovely hot shower and coffee, and some toast with vegemite. We actually made Anthony late for work as he kindly gave us a few hints and tips on what to do and scribbled on our map in a felt pen.

We set off to the local town to take a Lord of the Rings tour and went to see where Edoras in Rohan and Helms Deep was shot. We headed to "Erewhon" (nowhere splet backwards) and took a 6-wheel drive over some rough tracks and through a few rivers and halfway up the outcrop where the capital of Rohan was built: Mount Sunday. The scenery of the Southern Alps is amazing: snow on the peaks and the basin of the mountains where the glaciers had cut flat the mountains into a rugged landscape of thorn bushes and these lovely golden soft bushes, smaller but similar to the type that you get on sand dunes.

Geeks in the audience will recognise this mound

We walked up the outcrop and re-enacted some of the Rohan scenes ("Your words are poison!") and took some photos of us with a flag and a battle axe, finishing off with a yummy sandwich and glass of champagne.



We even did some reanacting of the film



This evening we had dinner at Toms parent's house. We met Tom in Singapore and he said to look his parents up, we did and they kindly cooked a lovely meal for us and even gave Eleanor a chance to do some yoga with Cheryl :-).

All in all we had a great time and I think a lovely start to Kiwi land. We can't believe how friendly everyone is and although our little car is pretty cosy to sleep in, at this rate we'll get a few beds after all!