South Island Trip - Days 2 to 4 - Nelson to Christchurch

Rabbit Island Beach, Nelson

Day 2 Nelson to Collingwood and back
Iain and I have fallen in love with Nelson and have decided we’re going to try to move there within the next twelve months. It’s got everything going for it: a good climate with the highest sunshine hours in the whole of New Zealand at 2,500 (to give you some idea of how sunny that is, Birmingham averages 1,400), beautiful beaches, easy access to hills, mountains, lakes, rivers, and bush, including two of the most stunning National Parks anywhere in the world, and the town itself is a vibrant place with lots going on, particularly in the areas of sports and culture. There’s a thriving arts and crafts community and a lot of alternative lifestylers (AKA hippies), which suits us just fine.

Nelson main street

On our last day in the Nelson area we decided to take the coast road to Collingwood, a leisurely two-hour drive.

Our first great find was Rabbit Island, a recreation reserve with a stunning beach. Tahunanui beach in town seems to attract most visitors, leaving Rabbit Island beach, which is only a fifteen-minute drive out of town, nice and empty. Just the way we like it.

On the way to Collingwood we went through Motueka, which is a small village almost entirely given over to backpacker hostels and teashops. It’s the nearest settlement to both of the National Parks and as such attracts a huge number of visitors, especially during the high season between Christmas and mid January, a time when almost every New Zealander is taking their annual holiday. We didn’t stop in Motueka, instead pressing on to Collingwood, an old gold mining village.

To our relief Collingwood was almost deserted. Even the guy who runs the Farewell Spit Eco-Tours was taking a break. His tour vehicle was an ancient, patched-up truck that looked like it would never pass an emissions test (if New Zealand had such a thing, which it doesn’t) Did he think that by the simple expedient of attaching the word ‘eco’ to his business he was going to persuade tourists that he was interested in minimising the environmental impact of his little operation? I had to have a little cynical chuckle over that one.

We had a veggie burger at the village café and then crossed the road to visit the Collingwood Museum, which is a building the size of our sleepout crammed with an unorganised jumble of old artefacts that it’s impossible to untangle any coherent narrative from. For example, a whale’s eardrums were lying in between a wind-up gramophone and a leaflet explaining how to get measured for a suit. Multiply that little anomaly a thousandfold and you’ll get some measure of the museum. I loved it, and could have spent at least an hour there, spotting weird combinations of things, but Iain, who gets ‘museumed out’ more quickly than I do, didn’t have the constitution to deal with the muddle, and hotfooted it out of there after about thirty seconds.

One of the smaller Waikoropupu Springs

On the way back from Collingwood we visited Te Waikoropupu Springs – one of the largest freshwater springs in the world, with some of the clearest water anywhere on the planet. Apparently, the only clearer water known to exist is under the Ross iceshelf in Antarctica. The photographs really don’t do the place justice. It was stunning. The springs are sacred to the local Maori, who believe they possess healing powers. On average the springs discharge about 14,000 litres of water per second – that’s about forty bathtubs full!

This is several metres deep, and clearer than it looks in the picture!

Day 3 Nelson to Christchurch
On Day 3 we drove from Nelson to Christchurch. This involved first driving back to Blenheim, which we had come through on our way to Nelson, but we needn’t have worried about getting bored when doing the return journey. As the weather had been so bad on our outward journey we’d not got to see much of the landscape through the low cloud.

On the way back the sun shone and we got to see how gorgeous the surrounding countryside really was. About halfway between Nelson and Blenheim the landscape undergoes a shift, partly due to geography, and partly due to climate. The sheep and cattle-filled valleys and lush, green, bush-clad hills give way to a broad plain covered in orchards and vineyards, with a range of arid, yellow hills in the distance. Marlborough, the area around Blenheim, is much drier than Nelson, and you can see this immediately in the parched brown grass on the verges and the number of irrigation systems in the fields.

The road swings up and over the Marlborough Hills, whose unusual colour comes from the coarse yellow grass that covers almost every square metre of their surface. I wanted to get a picture of this landscape, but there were no stopping places and this stretch of the road was very busy.

Around midday we passed through a village called Ward, and a sign saying ‘Ward Beach, 6 km’, so we went off to investigate a possible picnic spot. And what a picnic spot it was. We sat on the shingle beach and admired the beauty of the Pacific ocean while we felt our blood pressure, which hadn’t been high to start with, gently falling with every swish of the waves against the shore.

Ward Beach

On the other side of the Marlborough hills the road veers east and for a long stretch – maybe 50 kilometres or more - hugs the Pacific coast. The landscape is still arid, but this is tempered by the seascape, which presents an amazing palette of at least three distinct shades of blue, ranging from light turquoise to deep azure. The water is almost glass-still and laps an endless stretch of golden sand half-hidden behind impressive sand dunes. Gradually the coastline gets rockier, and soon you start spotting seals on the rocks. The rocks are a long way below the road, but with the aid of the telephoto lens I managed to get a shot of some seals who were having a bit of a sunbathe.

Sunbathing Seals

We stopped for a tea break at Kaikoura – a small coastal town known for its whale-watching cruises. We passed up the opportunity to go whale watching because of time constraints, but made a mental note that it’s something we’d like to come back and do when we’re living ‘down south’.

After Kaikoura the traveller who’s going to Christchurch has two routes to choose from – the shorter and faster Route 1, which stays close to, but not on the coast, or the slower and longer inland route, which wends its way up the mountains. We opted for the latter, and were rewarded with brilliant views not dissimilar to the area around Crianlarich in the highlands of Scotland.



Day 4 in Christchurch
The weather today was cold, wet and miserable. The thermometer struggled to reach 12 degrees, which, after Nelson’s balmy 24 degrees, and with a brisk wind coming from the south (straight off Antarctica) felt considerably colder. If the weather hadn’t been so bad we were planning on taking a scenic drive down to the Banks’s Peninsula, about an hour’s drive south, a picturesque area of hills and bays dotted with little fishing villages. With visibility at about 100 metres there was little point in bothering, so we decided to go into town and have a wander round instead.

Christchurch Cathedral

Christchurch is definitely the most English-feeling of the places we've visited so far. There are many more brick and stone buildings than elsewhere in New Zealand, and the city is laid out on a regular grid pattern, with wide, tree-lined streets. The leaden skies, blustery winds and near-horizontal rain all added to the authentic English feel.

The people who founded the first European settlement here were obviously all English and must have been suffering from severe homesickness to boot, because they were desperate to remind themselves of the old country at every opportunity. They named the river that flows through the city the Avon, called the region Canterbury, and named most of the streets after midlands towns – Hereford, Manchester, Worcester, Gloucester, Peterborough, Oxford, Cambridge and Lichfield all have streets named after them.
As if New Zealand hadn’t got enough trees to satisfy even the most ardent Victorian tree-hugger, the colonists chopped down all the native trees and replaced them with English varieties, samples of which they must have brought with them for that express purpose. The riverbank is lined with willows, oaks and horse chestnuts. They also imported English birds, for some reason, including blackbirds, sparrows, pigeons, and mallard ducks. Taking birds to New Zealand is like taking ice to Alaska. It’s a wonder the colonists had any room on the ships for themselves and their belongings. It also makes you wonder why they bothered emigrating, especially when the life of a migrant in those days was so tough. I suspect most of them would have been better off staying at home.

Punting on the Avon

Many New Zealanders we’ve met speak about Christchurch in glowing terms, as if it’s some sort of rare jewel. ‘Oh yes,’ they’ll say. ‘Christchurch is lovely – very English.’ For them, that means it’s exotic, but for us, it’s not so appealing, partly because it feels too familiar, and partly because it feels a bit false – like you’d imagine the Disney Corporation’s idea of an Olde English Towne would look like.

Once again it's late at night and my brain has gone into go-slow mode, so it's time to call it quits. We definitely won't be posting tomorrow night because there's no broadband at the place we've booked in Greymouth. We'll catch up with you next time we manage to log on. Bye for now,

Helen