30 March 2006:

The day started cool and cloudy as we arrived in the port of Lyttleton near Christchurch. It stayed cloudy all morning and into the early afternoon, with sun finally appearing in the middle of the afternoon. This was not a great port call for us. Don’t get me wrong, Christchurch is a pleasant university town and has many shops and restaurants and I’m sure a great number of opportunities for cultural improvement. However, the tour we had chosen was a short railway ride through the countryside, followed by lunch at a local winery and then a trip to the International Antarctic Center. In this case our choice was poorly made. The railway ride was OK, but after just doing the much better Taieri Gorge train, the Weka Pass Railway was a disappointment…..although to be fair, the trip was more comfortable due to the wider spacing between the seats. The scenery was marginal at best. With the tour guide pointing out such attractions as: “Oh, look, coming up is Frog Rock….looks just like a frog doesn’t it?...or maybe a toad.” Frog? What Frog? Or, another one: “Look here folks, this is Seal Rock. Everyone comments about how it looks so much like a real seal….or at least they did until a few years ago when we had an earthquake and the seal’s tail fell off.” And I am not making that comment up. Lunch at the Canterbury House winery was excellent. However, the Antarctic Center was another losing proposition. I’m sure it is a fine institution and helps educate children on the history of Antarctic exploration, but we expected more than a few interactive computer history lessons, a ‘cold room’ and some stuffed penguins. To be fair they had a nice 13 minute slideshow with photos and sounds from Antarctica, but we found we had gone through the exhibit twice in less than 30 minutes…..we went through once and thought we must have missed something major so we started through it again from the very beginning……we hadn’t missed anything. We then spent about 45 minutes in the heart of Christchurch. While we didn’t have time to see much there, we thought it was a very nice place and we wished we had passed on the whole tour and just caught a shuttle into Christchurch and spent the day.

Christchurch claims to be the most British city outside of England. I think they are being much too modest and understated……isn’t that just so very British of them….I think they may be MORE British than the British. There are imposing Cathedrals, fine museums, little red telephone booths, the river Avon meanders through the city and is crossed by quaint bridges. Boatmen in punts pole leisure travelers up and down the Avon to the sound of small bands playing here and there. School boys in proper uniform (distinctive jacket, tie and short pants) carry their books home at the end of a proper British school day as clock bells sound the hour. I suspect that New Zealand, being somewhat isolated on the far side of the world, has retained a certain Britishness that the British have lost in the modern world….this is the Britain of the early 1900’s…..and it is pleasing to behold.

Some general observations New Zealand:

Unlike Australia, where everything, even down to the gnats, can kill you; in New Zealand everything is pleasant and well behaved. There are no poisonous snakes, no scorpions…..in fact until the islands were visited by Europeans back in the late 1700’s there were no mammals except for 2 species of bats. This caused the animal kingdom to evolve in a benign manner……many of their birds even lost the ability to fly because there were no predators to have to escape from. It’s hard to figure why two land masses that are so close together and that were once (in the far pre-history) even joined together managed to evolve animal life that is so vastly different in temperament.  

…but I digress….back to current New Zealand….in addition to having a benign animal population, they have a benign human population too. Everything is oh, so civilized. Even their drivers are courteous….courteous to a fault. If you try to cross the street, the drivers will stop for you. In fact, sometimes if you are just thinking about crossing the street….maybe in a minute or two….a driver will read your mind and stop his car and wait, with what seems like infinite patience, until you realize that you really do want to cross the street. In one case I was just walking down the sidewalk and a driver screeched to a stop near me and waited until I figured out that he WANTED ME TO CROSS THE STREET IN FRONT OF HIM…..so I did.

Drivers are so courteous here that I suspect that in the early days of the automobile no one could get anywhere because they were all yielding the right-of-way and waiting on the other guy to go head….”You first….Oh, no I couldn’t, please go head…..No, no, that wouldn’t be right, you go……No, I insist, you go…….I couldn’t possibly, you should really go first…” or something like that. But the New Zealander’s have solved that little problem by installing “Round-Abouts” (traffic circles). This device ensures that you are a good, courteous driver because every driver must yield first, before getting on to the round-about……so everyone yields to everyone else. And once they figured this out they built round-abouts everywhere…..you can’t go more than a mile or two without encountering one, even in the country. Sometimes you will encounter a round-about where there isn’t even another highway intersecting your road…..but if you look closely there might be a sheep path crossing the road and they decided that “maybe that sheep path will someday become a road…let’s put a round-about there just in case”.  I think that someone, maybe the Prime Minister’s brother-in-law must have gotten the round-about concession and milked it for everything it was worth.

Speaking of the Prime Minister: While on the Weka Pass Railway we did learn one little piece of Kiwi history…..from the early days of the railway. It seems that the railway was building 3 railway stations along the route. The Prime Minister at that time had two daughters, Mina and Phoebe. So, he named two of the stations Mina and Phoebe. Not having anymore daughters, he lost interest in thinking of a name for the third station and told one of his friends to pick a name for the last station. To which request the friend responded: “Oh, No, not me…..I can’t think of any name”. As a result the third station immediately became: Ohnonotme.

That is more than enough for now. March 31 is a sea day for us; on April 1 we have a full day tour in Tauranga so I don’t know if I’ll be posting anything that day or not. We leave the ship early in the morning on 2 April for an all day tour out of Auckland. If internet access is available at the hotel I’ll certainly make an update there….if it isn’t available then it may be a couple more days before I can send the final posting.