Christchurch...meeting up with the Boys!

The gang outside our hostel
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After leaving Fiji and once again having a pretty empty flight we landed in Christchurch. Empty flights are the best as we always spread out, making sure we get get a whole row each to sleep on. Anyway, we had booked ourselves into another BASE Backpackers so we headed straight there. It turned out to be right in the centre of the main Cathedral Square and being a BASE, it had everything we needed.

A big aim in Christchurch was to meet the lads from back home. They were coming out to meet us for a three weeks holiday and to experience all the good stuff New Zealand has to offer. We were therefore keen to save as much money as we could as we knew the next three weeks would drain our accounts, which is why we spent most of our time there mooching in the hostel, watching a few films and 'Scrubs' episodes on Natalie's Ipod. We walked about in town a few times, its quite a nice place, very much like a City in England, especially with the Cathedral in the centre.

Posted by Adam

The Cathedral
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We broke up the time there with a trip to Kaikoura, a small town a couple of hours North of Christchurch. The blog for that can be found here...

Upon return we carried on chilling out in the hostel but had to get a bit of shopping done, mainly for walking boots ahead of the South America leg. We dropped our hire car off which we had used to get to Kaikoura and headed to "The Antarctic Centre", an educational centre all about...Antarctica, together with Storm Simulation room! We of course had a challenge who could stand in the -21 degree wind chill machine the longest. The fear of catching frost bite on the face overcame us after a while so we bailed out while we could. We met up with our mates Ben and Billy during the day so had a few beers with them that night.

Dell and Ben's birthday celebrations
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The following day was spent preparing for the lads from home to come out, especially beacause it was Dell's birthday. Vodka jelly was left to set in the fridge and 100 balloons succesfully blown up and covering the hostel dorm floor. We also wrapped up his birthday present...the biggest remote control we have ever seen. Seriously, it must have been bigger than a sheet of A4 paper and we had carried it all the way from Australia. It was great.

On the Monday we met the guys at the Airport. It was really good to see them after such a long time away and we couldn't wait to get back and all go out for a few drinks. Conversation turned immediately to the outrageous length of Reidy's beard.

Maintaining the tradition of 'Flash-packing' we eat at a really nice restaurant called Sticky Fingers just next to the River, then had a party back at the hostel. It was Ben's birthday too so we had two reasons to get drunk. We took over the kitchen area at BASE and partied on through the night. It turned out to be a really good night, everyone was sufficiently lubricated and for some reason we all ended up wearing pink lipstick. It was good to catch up with the guys and it was the start of the part of the trip we were all really looking forward to. The next day we left Christchurch feeling tired (read: drunk) from the preceeding night but we had a deadline now...we had three weeks to cram in as much fun stuff as possible. Queenstown was the port of call, the place where all the action happens...