x-church

we flew down to christchurch yesterday, as part of a madcap plan to see some spectacular new zealand scenery in our last remaining days.

“go to the south island,” everyone says. “it’s spectacular there!”

spectacular apparently being a code word for rainy.

our madcap plan, was this: fly down to christchurch yesterday, take the train across the southern alps and then a bus down to the franz josef glacier today, heli-tour of the glacier tomorrow (“not to be missed!” exclaims the travel brochure and guidebook), all day bus down to queenstown on thursday, and then fly back to auckland friday to catch our flight back to lost angels.

only we didn’t do that.

when faced with getting up at 6am in order to catch the 8:15 train, and then three more days of constant travel, we sleepily decided, “fuck you, franz joseph glacier! we don’t need you!

the down side of our icefloe impudence is that we’re stuck here in christchurch with not much to do. it’s not quite as incredibly compact as wellington, and does claim to be the art center (centre) of new zealand. and of course there’s the eponymous cathedral in the middle of the city, which is not so impressive that they felt that putting a large metal sculpture resembling a giant waffle cone on fire next to the church was a bad thing.

the plus side was that we did have our best new zealand meal in christchurch, at cook’n with gas, which is a fantastic little restaurant where they served the most delicious food and had a great wine selection. if you’re stuck in christchurch, you might as well salvage the time by eating here.

(traveller’s tip: if you’re flexible, qantas seems to have great e-ticket fares for flying from city to city. and the best thing is, they get even cheaper the day of the flight, instead of the other way around. instead of booking our tickets the day before for NZ$115/pp, we ended up getting tickets the same day for NZ$70/pp!)

Posted at December 7, 2004 6:39 PM