New Zealand, Christchurch: Taking Advantage of Excellent Arts Centre

The Arts Centre in Christchurch was a really nice part of the city that had many small cafes, restaurants, theatres and small independent cinemas
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The first thing we want to let you know about is the dodgy holiday park we stayed in during our time in Christchurch, a city on the eastern coast of New Zealand's South Island. Addington Accommodation Park was not very nice, but it was conveniently located a few minutes' walk from the railway station, where we were due, the next morning, to board a TranzAlpine train for a return trip across the island through the Southern Alps, towards the west coast town of Greymouth.

We arrived in Christchurch in the evening after a long day of driving south from Picton, where we had entered the South Island on a large ferry from Wellington, the country's capital city in the North Island. Since an early start the next day was inevitable, we decided to cook dinner and hang out in the campervan without going into the city centre.

The fancy sandwiches were large hamburgers with egg, cheese, sliced beetroot and other trimmings, all from New Zealand

In Christchurch, visitors could go punting on the narrow Avon River
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Christchurch was the South Island's biggest city and has often been described as "the most English" of New Zealand's cities. The description was no doubt bolstered by the activities taking place on the Avon River (read further down below to find out more about that), a grand Anglican cathedral arising above the city's central square, and streets all over the city centre with very British names (Chancery Lane, Gloucester Street, Cambridge Terrace, Oxford Terrace, etc - the list goes on and on).

At night, Christchurch Cathedral and the 18-metre high Metal Chalice sculpture were quite a sight
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Despite the English similarities, Christchurch did have its own character and charm, being a city with puritan roots but with an energetic enthusiasm for the trappings of modern life, as exemplified by a multitude of great cafes, restaurants and bars, and Kiwi art that had a pride of place in the city's art gallery. Lonely Planet kindly pointed all of that out to us.

On our second evening in Christchurch, after a day out on the TranzAlpine train, we decided to stay close to the holiday park and see a film. We finally broke down and saw "Superbad", a film we had boycotted during the summer because it looked really dumb. What surprised us was that we really enjoyed the film and thought its dirty humour was hilarious. People close to us may think (yes, this means you, Kelli and Clay!) that our taste in films isn't very good, but we like to give everything a chance with an open mind and lack of judgement until we actually watch a film, which makes the experience more enjoyable for us and also means that we enjoy more films as a result than most of the normal public would do.

The stained glass windows inside Christchurch Cathedral were beautiful
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On the way back to the holiday park from the Hoyts Cinema in Christchurch where we had seen the film, we stopped and bought some pizza from Domino's in order to avoid having to cook dinner in trusty old Bessie, our campervan; when we headed back to the vehicle, we had planned to back up and label some of our travel photos, and cooking beforehand would have taken up too much time.

One of the pizzas we ordered was a barbecue beef pizza with ground beef, onions, green capsicums (that's the same as normal green peppers), barbecue sauce and a swirl of mayonnaise around the pie. We wanted to mention that one because neither of us had ever eaten a pizza with mayonnaise and it ended up tasting unusually delicious. The combination of barbecue sauce with beef went well with the mayo.

This unusual statue was right outside Christchurch Cathedral
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The next morning, we checked out of the holiday park and decided to drive into the city centre to park Bessie somewhere that would enable us to easily explore the city on foot. A large supermarket car park was our lucky host for the day, and we found out, by walking around for a couple of hours, that Christchurch's city centre had many shops, restaurants, bars and other things to see and do. The day we strolled around town, the weather was very sunny and warm, so we were able to wear t-shirts during the afternoon. We continued to have very good luck with the elements during our month in New Zealand!

Christchurch's city centre had many quaint streets such as Worcester Boulevard, where the Arts Centre was located
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The first thing we tried to do in Christchurch was to find a hairdresser so we could get haircuts, since we hadn't had haircuts since visiting Phoenix, Arizona, during our road trip across the southwest United States a couple of months earlier. There was a problem, though; the place we checked out offered us haircuts for over $50 NZD each, which would have eaten up our travel budget for the day and was a much too high price for us to pay; we decided to wait it out longer even though we were in desperate need of haircuts.

We stopped to admire a large mural that painted on the side of a building along Worcester Boulevard
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What we did next was probably not surprising - we tried a McDonald's "Kiwiburger", which were only sold in New Zealand. The fancy sandwiches were large hamburgers with egg, cheese, sliced beetroot and other trimmings, all from New Zealand. It was a good burger, but Dan thought he could have done without the beetroot.

McDonald's was a good place for us to park ourselves for an hour or so and catch up on writing these journal entries; the establishment where we ate lunch that day had a nice and quiet upstairs seating area with ample sockets for us to plug the laptop into, and we decided to take advantage of our time there. After writing for a couple of hours, we left the restaurant and headed towards Christchurch Cathedral, situated in the main town square.

We had to take a photo of Christchurch Cathedral's tall Gothic spire, since the 1881 church was one of the oldest man-made structures we saw in New Zealand
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In front of the cathedral was an enormous 18-metre high statue of a chalice, a large tree with benches underneath, and a spacious pedestrian area with several people milling about in the sun; the area was named Cathedral Square, rather fittingly. Inside the cathedral, we saw many gorgeous stained glass windows and ornate wall decorations, thinking that the place was beautiful, but very much like many English churches back home.

After leaving Cathedral Square, we walked down Worcester Street to Avon River, where we saw tourists punting down the river in a small boat called a "punt", just like people do in Cambridge and Oxford, and other places in the UK. We continued walking after watching a man guide the punt slowly along the small river for a few minutes, finally reaching our last intended destination of the day - the Arts Centre. The Arts Centre was formerly Canterbury University, which had formerly been Canterbury College. There was an enclave of wonderful Gothic Revival buildings, where arts and crafts outlets shared the premises with theatre, cafes, restaurants and a couple of independent cinemas.

This was a mosaic wall inside Christchurch Cathedral
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Walking around the inside of the Arts Centre was like walking around some of the courtyards within building complexes in England. There were fountains and garden areas, as well as small grassy lawns, all surrounded by the beautiful buildings. We had discovered the Arts Centre after looking up the cinema times for a couple of films showing at one of the independent cinemas there, and we ended up seeing "Away from Her" and "My Best Friend".

The first film was a drama about Alzheimer's disease and starred Julie Christie; it was very sad and moving. The second film was a French comedy with Daniel Auteuil and was very funny; he played an art dealer without any friends, and he made a bet with his colleagues that he could introduce them with his best friend by the end of the month. The films were shown in the same cinema room, which was actually just a small room with 11 seats and a small projector screen on the wall in front of us. The films were nearly sold out and the room became quite warm throughout the films, but the overall experience was very cosy, like watching a movie at home!

The small bridges crossing Avon River were very English in appearance
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After the films were over, we walked back to Cathedral Square and had iced coffees at Starbucks. It was dark when we left the cafe and we walked back to the car park where Bessie was eagerly waiting to take us to our next destination. We had planned to visit Mount Cook National Park the next day and we drove as far as we could that evening before getting too tired, about 3-1/2 hours. Leaving Christchurch at night after 9:00pm meant that we didn't arrive in the area until almost 1:00am, which seemed to be Kyle's limit before becoming too tired to drive.

The buildings in Christchurch's city centre were a mix of old colonial buildings and more modern ones
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At Lake Pukaki, Dan pointed out an I-Site (information centre) car park that was large and empty, and we parked ourselves there for the evening, getting a good night's rest and waking up to a beautiful scene with a large, brilliant blue lake in front of us, and several snow-capped mountains framing the far side of the water.