A lot of travelling folks we've crossed paths with seem to have done, are in the process of or are planning a road trip of some kind. We've heard tales of Australian desert crossing, trans American expeditions and even spoke to a guy motorbiking solo around the world with his snowboard. To be honest, although we have done longer drives back home, the road trip idea never really appealed. So much so, that we were quite content with catching the buses, until, all the factors fell in place for us to be driving a cheap rental from Queenstown to Christchurch.
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| The dollar a day rental |
The 400ish kilometre drive, comes down to around 6 hours driving, but we had the car for two days, so why drive straight there? A quick google search and a bookme.com browse, gave us a rough plan of stopping off at the Lake Tekapo hot pools, sleeping in the car and swimming with some dolphins in Akaroa Harbour. This made the trip a bit longer and technically we drove past Christchurch to get to Akaroa, but that's what makes up a road trip.... isn't it?
When we got to our first stop in Frankton, 10k from Queenstown and somewhere we had walked to and from before, we had taken a liking to driving again. Even with our left foot dancing away, looking for a clutch in the automatic 4x4, we had hardly noticed the month and a half without driving and settled in quickly. Passing Cromwell's gaint fruit and turning on to state highway 8, we were into new territories and ready to crunch some miles.
Road tripping in the UK, has always felt like a motorway fly by or stuck behind a slow lorry, awaiting your inevitable time to over take. But not over here, it's different, its quieter, the roads are straighter, wider and all along that highway there seemed to be an open space on each side of the road. There were no drystone walls barricading the traffic in, no trees hiding the views, just open country and mountain back drops.
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| Lake and mountain back drop |
Roughly half way between Queenstown and Christchurch, is Lake Tekapo hot pools and a perfect stop off. Three open air pools shaped to the different lakes near by, at 36, 38 and 40 degrees, makes it easy to relax, and after an hour and some tasty fries we were ready for part two.
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| 40°C pool |
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| Chilling |
Crunching down the miles, the landscape changed from upland rolling hills with snow capped mountains, to rolling green hills, to the Canterbury plains and finally in the dark the sea. As we turned up and joined two campervans in the picnic area, the moon broke out and turned our already speical area into an amazing lake side stop over spot. Once the engine was off, all we could think of, was getting our heads down, so we were quick to sort our stuff out and turn out the lights, however once the lights were out the full force of the moon seemed to make its way through all the windows, giving us a 360° night light for most of the night.
Unfortunately we were awoken early by the hard pitter, patter of rain and the car rocking from the wind, and we both knew there was little chance of swimming with dolphins that day. After driving in to Akaroa and chatting with the lovely people at black cat cruises, our thoughts were confirmed, as it was super rough and the dolphins were off doing there own dolphin things, the swim was cancelled. After debating how wet we wanted to get in the rain, we settled on the tourist summit drive and a pop down to one of the bank peninsula bays. After some snow, some cold looking sheep and some sea, we were driving back towards Christchurch and into sunshine.
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| On the summit road |
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| In a bay |
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| Fairly cold |
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| Akaroa Harbour |
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| Sea side! |
Getting into and settled in Christchurch was easy with the big grid road systems and the plentiful accommodation options. We hadn't heard much about Christchurch, apart from the earthquake, and the first thing we noticed was the emptiness of the city centre. There seemed to be loads of empty building lots which had been clearing of rubble and covered with hardcore. After a couple of hours wandering, we were left with the feeling that we had already, came, seen and done Christchurch, but this was only a tired, early evening first impression, which changed half way through the first morning.
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| Christchurch people must be huge! |
So a classic short, road trip from Queenstown to Christchurch via Akaroa, and one leaving us with a lasting urge to buy a car of our own.
