Sunday 23^rd. Feb.

Having gained the impression that the weather was permanently balmy round here I left my socks and boots on the veranda to air, but awoke to heavy rain and the boots a quarter full of water, but I suppose it is one way to wash your socks.

The rain was also a good excuse for an easy day after the previous exertions, so I went just over the ridge from Akaroa to the Okains Bay Museum where they have a very comprehensive and well recommended exhibition of Maori and Colonial artefacts including a good number of simple canoes, and a couple of the more modest type of the bigger ceremonial canoes.

 

A little blue sky was beginning to appear so I enjoyed the drive through, as I keep saying, the Scottish scenery albeit with powder blue volcanic crater bay and skies, and headed into the flatlands of the Canterbury Plain. I wanted to see the farming and the big braided River Rakaia with the longest bridge in NZ. To get there I went through Lincoln NZ. Very different from Lincoln UK; there are only about 10 shops and a filling station and it is only a stone’s throw from Christchurch. Its raison d’être is that it is home to the very large agricultural university.

The surrounding area has some very large dairy herds on very lush irrigated pasture: one of these long boom irrigators on wheels looked to be over half a mile long. Any fields without irrigation were parched.

Over the Rakaia Bridge, a very long, low and unexciting concrete trestle over the braided river, that is a multi-channel river between shingle banks thrown up and moving about when in spate; impossible to photograph from ground level but from the plane these rivers look like long grey plaits: very impressive: wish I had my camera handy on the plane.

Further into the plains there were modest simple farmsteads with crops of barley, wheat, kale, clover and some podded crop of which I have no idea at all. Must investigate and photograph at some stage.

Drove back to the Banks Peninsular to stay at The Governor’s Bay Hotel; a little idiosyncratic but very comfortable and living up to its reputation for good food; I had Scallops followed by Groper? I also shared my table with a couple from Blyton near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire would you believe.

The reason for staying close to the Banks Peninsular was that the French girl Lila was going to Aoraki Mount Cook Village the same day as me, and a lift from me was much preferable to the more limiting public transport. Martin and Mathius will be there as well, having hired a campervan.