With new teddies in hand, we set off from Christchurch (where we saw only the outskirts and only spent one night in a holiday park/campsite right in town) to the Banks Peninsula, where we would be camping for 3 days over Christmas.
We didn’t really know anything about the area, so imagine our delight when it turned out to look like this:
These two photos are of Akaroa Bay. In the next one, you can see the mouth of the bay, where it opens up to the Pacific Ocean.
This was one of those drives where you have to stop every few minutes to take a photo, because it is just so breathtakingly gorgeous!
To get to our campsite, we had to drive “over the hill” away from the Bay, on the twistiest, lovliest road, with crazy switchbacks and no shoulder or guard rails at all, and a few friendly locals…
We arrived at Okains Bay to find a really windy ocean front campsite, with pine trees and a great adventure playground for the kids, a dirt bike track that made us wish we had brought the bikes after all, but no clear indication of actual “sites” like we have in california and canada. you just sort of throw your tent up wherever you like, so we drove around the campsite looking for our perfect spot to spend Christmas. We ended up with a beautiful spot right on a river/estuary that led to the ocean just a quick walk up the beach. This is the view from our site:
It was “beachfront”, but protected from the wind. It had a great estuary to explore, a cool cave to look at, and best of all, entertaining sheep watching. In short, we couldn’t have been happier with where we landed.
The kids loved the flying fox…
the beach was beautiful!
and the sand was perfect for drawing “google monsters”, who have two mouths, because they can be happy and sad at the same time, by the way…
On Christmas Eve, we went on a dolphin finding boat (too cold for the dolphin swim for us) and saw the world’s smallest dolphins, the Hector’s Dolphin.
there were a bunch of them, swimming all around the boat, but very hard to photograph!
In addition to dolphins, we saw “cathedral cave” and the stunning scenery of Akaroa bay.
The boat then took us just outside the bay, to look for penguins (which did not cooperate) and more seals. The baby seals were very entertaining to watch, but hard to photograph (for my camera anyway) from a moving boat. They spent a lot of time scrambling up and falling down the steep rocks…
The boat ride itself was lots of fun, but our two kids had slightly different reactions…
After our boat trip, we made our way back over the twisty road, stopping again for more photos, of course…
…and worried that the rain in Akaroa would be much worse back at our campsite, but we were really lucky with the weather our whole trip, and it was lovely back at camp. We went to bed and waited for Santa to come in the night. We did hear something rustling around in our garbage, but we’re pretty sure it was a possum, though maybe Santa was looking for the “meat pie and beer” that kiwis leave out in lieu of cookies and milk, according to our kiwi christmas books…
oh, and here is the uniquely kiwi christmas wrapping paper I used…
… anyway, christmas morning in the tent…
We spent the day playing “Monopoly: World Edition”, doing laundry, making new friends, and just enjoying this kiwi camping christmas. We really missed our family and friends, but we also enjoyed this very special, once in a lifetime holiday season.
We left Okains Bay feeling pretty ready to go home, actually. Little did we know how much fun we’d have over the next week. We got a late start heading out from Okains Bay, after packing everything up and tracking down a family we had made friends with to say goodbye, it was about noon by the time we left our campsite. Our plan was to head over to Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island, via Arthur’s Pass. We didn’t know anything about them beforehand, but were compelled to stop and have a quick look at the Castle Hill Rock Formations:
The rest of the drive was beautiful forest, but it was rainy and gray, and we took no photos. When we got to the village of Arthur’s Pass, it was about 5 pm and raining buckets, so we really wanted to grab a hotel room and stay, especially since Arthur’s Pass is a good place to see Kea birds and hear Kiwi birds at night. Being Boxing Day, the entire village was booked up, so we stopped long enough to get a hot chocolate, see (and later regret that we hadn’t taken a picture of — sorry Kea!) the liquor store called “the wobbly Kea” and move along to a little hotel in Greymouth. It was nice to sit in a hot tub, take a nice long shower, and watch a movie. ah, roughing it!
I’ll save the rest for next time, as there seem to be small people here wanting lunch!
Ooh, that looks absolutely beautiful!!