We left Christchurch on a sunny Monday morning, driving out in the rental car we had picked up that morning. We were off on our "holiday within a holiday" - 10 days of driving down the coast of the South Island, visiting all the places a bus couldn't get us to.
Driving an automatic took a lot of getting used to. Tom really liked it (he hasn't driven since he was 17 so the lack of gear changing was good for him!) but I could not get used it. I felt like I had less control over the car than normal and it just made driving feel so much lazier. I think I'll stick with manual!
We took a slight detour out of the city so that Tom could take me down some of the roads he'd gone along on one of his bike rides. We were blessed with fantastic weather; everything was bathed in sunlight and looked like it had jumped straight from a photograph.
We had booked up the 10 days earlier in the month. We're not huge fans of plan-as-you-go (Tom especially doesn't) and we wanted to free up as much brain space as possible so that we could focus on trying to find ourselves some work. This ended up being a really good idea. Looking for jobs was stressful and it was nice not having to worry about anything else!
So back to our journey! We were headed to a place called Oamaru, a small seaside town that is well known for penguins (unfortunately we didn't see any while we were there). We had 4 nights booked in the YHA there - a perfect base for our trip to Mount Cook and Lake Tekapo, which happened to be the main reason we had rented a car in the first place!
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Would you look at that view?! I took this as we were driving out of Christchurch and oh man, looking at it right now I can't believe it was me stood behind that camera.
CAN YOU SEE HOW BLUE THAT WATER IS?!
After driving over it, we had to pull over to the side of the road and find a lookout because we really thought our eyes had lied to us. Would you believe me if I told you the water looked even better in real life? Don't worry, we couldn't believe it either. It was incredible.
A picture of Tom petting the hostel cat.
Need I say more?
It didn't matter how often we visited small towns in New Zealand, we never stopped finding it weird that the hostel owners would ask us why we were staying there for so long. Not in a "oh why are you visiting?" kind of way, but a "why would want to visit here?" way. It was so strange to us that people in the business of tourism would question you tourist-ing to their town.
Saying that though, I can see why you might ask that in Oamaru. We weren't exactly struggling to find time for everything.
Want to know a secret? I think my favourite part about our stay was cwtching up in here on a rainy afternoon and watching Lord of the Rings with Tom.
It's funny that a lot of what we remember, and enjoy remembering, about New Zealand has ended up being little things like that.
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