Christchurch

Amazingly, all 3 of us managed to sleep all night, after going to bed at 11pm. We're hoping that will help to minimise the jet lag but the time difference from Bangkok is 6 hours, so not counting our chickens yet... We got up to a beautiful sunny day, temp 20C - perfect. We spent a lovely day exploring the city of Christchurch, getting plenty of sunlight and fresh air (again will hopefully help our body clocks to readjust). Firstly we wandered around the city centre, where the devastation from the earthquakes in 2010-11 is still very evident. Only 20% of the buildings were left standing after the earthquakes, so the restoration operation is taking a long time and we saw a lot of regeneration and building work going on. The city has a lovely feel about it. As part of the regeneration, some shops have been set up in shipping containers - see first photo, pretty funky and colourful! We also stopped to see the "cardboard cathedral" - set up following the damage to the original cathedral in the earthquakes, it is constructed largely from massive cardboard tubes - an impressive architectural achievement.

After exploring the city centre, we found an amazing kids play park - easily the best we have seen on our travels so far, so we spent a couple of hours here and stayed for a picnic lunch. Solana absolutely loved it, especially the water park section (until she fell and cut her lip and knee...). When we finally managed to drag Solana away, we visited the botanical gardens - they are massive and we only explored a fraction of them in the couple of hours we had. We also saw quite a few birds - at least 6 different species already (some of them very familiar from home, as many were imported from the UK in the 19th Century). Afterwards we went into the Canterbury Museum, which had some interesting displays on the history of human life in NZ, NZ birds (we learnt the bird importation fact there!) and Antarctic exploration - we could have happily stayed longer exploring the other exhibits but they kicked us out at closing time... On the way back to our hotel we stopped for dinner. The food prices here are even higher than we were expecting (might need to revaluate our budget!) but we managed to find a pub where it was "steak night", so we had a tasty meal there without breaking the bank.

Apologies in advance to our friends James & Lou, and any of you who are also following their blog - we are now more-or-less following their footsteps through New Zealand but in reverse, so prepare yourselves for some similar blog photos!Read more