Stove of Armour!

My dashboard-sheep! (From Dunedin)
...Who usually ends up sitting in the centre console with
my phone because I haven't  found a good way to affix
sheepy to the dashboard, yet. Nor have I named it.

No Aliens

The day before yesterday, I drove into Christchurch. Aaagh, cities! Traffic, traffic and people everywhere! To be fair, Christchurch isn't actually that big - maybe 3 and a half hundred thousand people? Between September 2010 and June 2011, the Christchurch area was hit repeatedly by several damaging earthquakes. The most damaging (February's), took out a huge amount of the infrastructure around the city.

continued cleanup of what
used to be the downtown core.

The majority of the

stores, cafes, banks - all in brightly
coloured shipping containers arranged
outside of the "red zone"

buildings in the downtown business district were damaged to the point that they had to be taken down, and most of the the streets were also broken up quite badly. A large number of the streets are still being replaced - a new one opens up about every two weeks or so. Lucky for me, Daniel (the gps :p ) was all up-to-date on which streets I could drive on and which I could not (the Kiwis are pro open-source maps - the map I've got is put together by drivers down here and free for everyone to stick on their gps, which is awesome, because garmin wanted over $100 to but the New Zealand maps from them).

some pretty funny cartoons resulted from the
earthquake - as in, several hundred.

Yesterday I explored the city centre. The whole of Cathedral Square all nd a several-block radius around it is all blocked off as buildings are demolished and rumble moved away.

The remains of the cathedral in
Cathedral Square, Christchurch

There are/were several beautiful historic buildings in Christchurch, like the
Canterbury provincial offices, which sadly all suffered a lot of damage. However, a bunch of the businesses which were displaced have built a pretty cool temporary location entirely out of shipping containers! Mostly stacked double-decker, with storage and top and stores on the bottom, and all painted bright colours.

Still with their funny signs...

I also took a gander about the Canterbury museum. This place was pretty neat - a mix of natural history, Maori history, and European settlement history (I suppose I could have just put "history" at the end instead of after each topic...). Lots dating from the Victorian period, which naturally piqued my interest. Perhaps the coolest thing - a stove from the 1850s. Built as a 15th century German suit of armour. Life-sized. It was really quite awesome.

Full-sized suit of armour... STOVE!

Castle Hill Boulders

Today I fled the city and headed back for the mountains, to Arthur's Pass National Park. On the way I saw some cool rocks (so many cool rocks!) - giant limestone boulders scattered about on a hilltop. Popular with rock climbers / boulderers (that can't be right... boulder-ers... ung... bouldering people...), the rocks ranged from shorter than me to over 20 metres high.

The bottom of the
Devil's Punchbowl
Falls. I have pictures
of the whole thing but
obviously neglected to
export them to here, and
I am too lazy to do it
right now :p

In Arthur's Pass itself, there is a lovely (and very, very tall) waterfall plunging into the "Devil's Punchbowl."

Aaaw, a nice bunch of people I had dinner with just came back to the hostel all peeved because the bar closed at 8 pm. :p (Did I mention, this town is tiny?)

Have I mentioned that I really like the beech
forests? I really like the beach forests.

Tomorrow - Avalanche Peak. Or thats the plan. We'll see if my alarm goes off (I slept through it this morning :p ).

Tuck heading into Arthur's Pass