Road Trip Canterbury

We have come round to our December establishment, faithful readers, and I am pleased to announce that it is a wonderful establishment indeed! After finishing up at the Swedish Cow-Shed, we took a couple of days to do a relaxed drive around some of the highways of the lower Nelson and upper Canterbury regions. Our first evening was spent attempting to find a good place to park the car and sleep in the back. The first attempt to bed down was thwarted by a huge swarm of sandflies that occupied the car as soon as we had pulled over and opened up the doors. We got them out by piling back into Sparkleypoo and driving as fast as we dared down the highway with the windows open. It did work, most of the flies got sucked out, but it was unfortunate that we had to abandon that sleeping spot. It was tucked away in the trees by a river and a swing bridge and was quite pretty, especially compared with the gravel-pile occupied "picnic area" we slept at afterwards.

The following morning was wonderfully sandfly-free. We stopped for breakfast at the Maruia Springs hot pool resort at Lewis Pass, and were so delighted by the prospect of enjoying the stunning and quiet mountain scenery in the peace of a traditional Japanese hot spring that we purchased two guest passes to the pools and stayed there for most of the morning. I would highly recommend stopping there if you are ever passing through the area, and the room prices seemed quite reasonable too.

From Maruia Springs we drove to Hanmer Springs, and wandered around the tourist down before having a late lunch/early supper at the springs restaurant. The food was decent, but aspired to too much and delivered too little, flavour-wise. The bold-as-brass sparrows, on the other hand, were a riot. They would fly right into the restaurant and perform elaborate begging routines at the feet of the diners.

After finishing up at Hanmer Springs, we drove along one of the less-travelled and more-windy section of the Alpine Pacific highway, and found ourselves at Kaikoura. Kaikoura is quite the recreational area, complete with the best whale watching in New Zealand, a sizable fur seal colony, plenty of random shopping, and the Kaikoura Winery. We went for a tour of the winery and their underground cellars, which of course came complete with a rather extensive wine tasting. For the record, I was the one who spat out the samples this time around, while Glen got pleasantly buzzed. We came away from the winery with a bottle of their Kaikoura Cream, a crème liquor similar to Bailey’s Irish Cream, but made from wine instead of whisky. It goes down like slightly boozy liquid milk chocolate. Irresistible.

From Kaikoura we elected to follow south highway 1 straight through (or around, as the case may be) Christchurch and spent the night at a scenic picnic site not too far away from our destination of the Banks Peninsula and our next WWOOF destination.

The Banks Peninsula area is breathtaking. It is a coastal caldera formation and is composed of steep green pastured hills dropping sharply into very, very blue ocean waters. The roads themselves are somewhat hair-raising for someone who did not learn how to drive on them, and while I’m certain that we infuriated many drivers by going much slower than the posted speed limit, we don’t regret going that slowly. The roads were steep and narrow, and the scenery was just too go to want to hurry through.

The road trip ended at Akaroa, the closest town of any size to our WWOOF location. Akaroa is, like so many of New Zealand towns, picturesque and touristy, and that is just fine by Glen and myself. It is an easy place to spend several days in, despite it’s tiny size, and is only about an hour away from Christchurch. There are plenty of harbour-side cafes at which one may soak up the sun, and plenty of scenic hikes and drives in the immediate vicinity. It practically forces one’s spine to unwind. The abundance of fresh fish is a bonus. Despite us having been in the area for a couple of weeks already, there are a few attractions in Akaroa that we’ve yet to investigate. But we will investigate them, and I shall forward you a report when we do.

This map more-or-less plots out our exact driving route. Find Lewis Pass on highway 7, go to highway 7A to Hanmer springs, take highway 70 up to Kaikoura, then highway 1 to Christchurch. It’s a great loop to make, and well worth the time taken: