Luckily I have got the time to finally visit the very-south-land : New Zealand. Well, its pretty south for me anyways. A total of 5 people, me and my friends happily joined a 5 days tour starting from Christchurch, ending at Christchurch. The whole itinerary was Christchurch –> Lake Tekapo –> Mt.Cook national park –> Omarama –> Queenstown –> Milford Sound –> Te Anau –> Dunedin –> Oamaru –> Christchurch
The tour we joined was run by Chinese…so…typically, we see a bit of everything and nothing. The highlight of the tour is food, comparison to all previous Chinese tours I have joined in my life, this tour has the best food provided. Regardless of the shallow visit of NZ, I still enjoy the tour very much. NZ is the cleanest country I have ever seen, it has rivers which are able to be seen through until the bottom, and lakes too, they are so blue and clean. It is probably the most unpolluted land on earth. People seem to be very nice, of course I need more time to discover that.
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The first day we arrived Christchurch in the afternoon around 3pm. Right next to the airport there are a sheep farm and I found it so funny what if all the sheeps are deaf due to the noises from airport landing area? haha Surprisingly, NZ customs are actually quite severe, I chose the youngest custom to queue for thinking he should be more easy-going than the older ones. Ends up they are all the same, he had to ask me where I am going during my trip. I told him I am going to visit some kind of Glacier and he even questioned me the name of the Glacier…well, thats a bit harsh.
After going through all that, we crawled up to the one and only shuttle bus and headed to our hostel. It was pretty spacious to fit 5 of us. After settling in, we started to explore the town and hope to find a bite in the town… The city center seems to be 20 mins away from our hostel, as soon as we started to walk, the weather turns very chilly. I had to put on my thickest coat and my scarf, felt like winter. When we walked past the old city center, we found ruins. Ruins everywhere. It was very sad to see scenes like this of a town. Most of the buildings are severely destroyed, showing all the steels and concretes. The whole area was fenced to be the “red zone”, waiting to recover. Somehow it seems it will take at least 10 years to recover to what it was. The town seems dead quiet, we hardly saw people walking on the street, neither did cars.
We found a small Japanese diner “Samurai ” right next to the one and only biggest supermarket. The diner has everything from sushi to ramen. The weather was so cold I decided to order a ramen, it was pretty nice but can hardly be considered as very good.
Nothing to do much after dinner, we walked back to the hostel and get a good night sleep. Zzzzzzz….
* They called Woolworths here as “Countdown”, that sounds a bit funny. The name gives me the imagination that they always have discount and is always counting down for the end of sales.
Be Here Today 