Because our flight to Christchurch arrived after midnight, as scheduled, we spent a quiet first day in New Zealand's "Garden City." Our good luck with the weather held. It had been cold and rainy the day before we arrived, and it was warm and sunny during our two days in Christchurch and environs. We elected to walk to the small city's permanent sights rather than visit the Ellerslie flower show, which was being held for the first time in Christchurch. In Hagley Park, purportedly the third largest city park in the world, we meandered among the magnificent trees. And within Hagley Park, we spent much of our time in the rose gardens. On our second and final day in Christchurch, we hired a driver to take us to a whaling village, Akaroa, founded by French settlers in 1840. After lunch at a French restaurant, we took a small tour boat through the towering canyons of the sound to its Pacific Ocean headlands, accompanied part of the way by rare Hector's dolphins, the smallest dolphins in the world.
The range of activities in Queenstown, where we are spending four nights, is a bit more spirited than in Christchurch and attracts a somewhat younger crowd: bungee jumping, kayaking, jet boating, jet skiing, whitewater rafting, extreme rafting, whitewater sledging, river boarding, river surfing, fixed-wing flying, helicopter flying, skiing, heli-skiing, heli-biking, sky swinging, canyon swinging, mountain biking, vertigo mountain biking, gliding, paragliding, tandem paragliding, hang gliding, tandem hang gliding, stunt flying, ballooning, skydiving and tandem skydiving, gondola riding, luge, indoor ice skating, lawn bowling, clay-target shooting, horse trekking, back-country saddle expeditions, fishing, tennis, golf, frisbee golf, minature golf, sheep shearing, visits to wineries, and pub crawling. The local Saint Patrick's Day celebrations here make New York's seem sedate. Bungee jumping started here; the original site is still in operation and observes each anniversary of the first jump by offering free jumps to nudes. Most of the free jumpers are said to be young females.
I talked Susan out of the tandem skydiving from 15,000 feet. We contented ourselves with such day trips as visiting wineries in Central Otago, noted for their pinot noirs; and taking a helicopter, on a perfect day without a cloud in the sky, over the mountains and glaciers of the Southern Alps to Milford Sound, where we took a boat trip through that fjord. Our run of good luck with the weather finally broke, and a trip by jet boat into deep forest rivers (including sites featured in Lord of the Rings movies) was cancelled. We used that day to hike instead, including stumbling on an exquisite rose garden at the top of Queenstown's public park on a small peninsula in Lake Wakatipu, the lovely, large lake on which this tourist town of some 13,000 residents is situated.
It is fall here in Australasia, with the same advantages that a traveler enjoys in the fall in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is benign, and the holiday crowds are gone. The vistas in Queenstown and its broadly defined region are wonderful. The sunlight is unfiltered by pollution: Pure light illuminates the terrain's glaciers, mountains, hills, valleys, forests, rain forests, and vineyards and makes the pristine rivers and lakes, and the salty sounds, fjords, and sea sparkle. When it is cloudy, the slopes change colors as the shadows play across their surfaces. If we had done nothing else, our helicopter flight to and from Milford Sound and our boat trip through the profoundity of its fjord would have made our stay in New Zealand more than worthwhile.
