Dec. 22

Picton to Christchurch, via Kaikoura

I'm so far from home I may as well be back again.
The landscape here is different from the nearly uniformly lush, green, rolling hills of the North Island.
Here shades of browns and yellows cling to the hills, dry grasses actually showing patches of dirt. Trees are few, and the air has a smell I remember from summers growing up in Montana - the smell of heat, carrying dust and the essence of dried plants.
Unlike home, the hills lead to the bright-blue ocean and long, sweeping beaches. In Kaikoura, famous for whale-watching, we don't see whales. I do, however, eat a whale-sized portion of seafood - what the Kiwis call crayfish (rock lobster), mussels, chowder. This is one of the beauties of living on an island.

Little time is actually spent in Christchurch, which has a very European-feeling city center, around the cathedral for which I assume the town is named, but has a very generic, almost American midwest, feel more than a few blocks away from the church: Big-box retail stores lining a multi-lane road.

We stay up too late after meeting and drinking with fellow tourists in a pub. On the road we tend to meet people, usually other travelers, in the bars. In Wellington, which has just as many tourists, we don't. Part of it, of course, is that we have our own companions when out in Wellington. But not always. Perhaps when we're not traveling ourselves, we're blinded to the other tourists. Or something.