Our Car and the Trip to Christchurch

Lots happened since I posted last. First off, we bought a car- it’s a 1985 gray Honda Accord. My flatmate Xander found it online and it was dropped off at our place on last Wednesday evening. By appearance, it’s kind of falling apart but the engine is solid and it runs well. We named it Pam after the cheap generic food brand that we constantly purchase at the grocery store. Some such items are shown in the picture above. Driving on the other side of the road is interesting and I’ve been trying to get used to it. It cost 850 $NZ- Xander, Rob, Heather, and I are sharing it so that splits up the cost pretty well. With registration and insurance the price went up for each person, but not too bad. We had it for not even a week before tragedy struck.
On Saturday morning as we were about to set out to Christchurch we got out to the car, which was parked around the corner from our flat, only to find that during the night the rear window had been smashed out in two places. Most likely this was the doing of drunken college students. No other cars around us were damaged- just ours. As we found footprints on the hood and roof, the current operating theory is that some bastards tried walking over it and the roof buckled a little towards the back end, shattering the glass in two places on the sides of the rear window. So instead of heading right off to Christchurch we filed a police report just for kicks and had the broken glass taken out and vacuumed up. They put a temporary plastic window in- pretty much just thick plastic wrap like substance. The quote to replace the window was $330 NZ so that adds quite a bit to the per person cost of the car. I guess that’s the risk you run when parking in a crazy college area. Our street is known as one to have couches burned on it quite frequently, a common Otago party tradition.
Despite the adversity, Pam brought us (Xander, Rob, Heather, Julie, and myself) safely to Christchurch well in time to make the rugby game. The drive took between 4 and 5 hours, about 225 miles. After eating at a hole-in-the-wall fish and chips place outside town, we got into the city center. We checked into our hostel, which is right by Cathedral Square in the center of town. The place is called Base Backpackers; it was pretty nice and a bunch of other American students we know were also staying at. We walked around the city for a bit and then had a few beers in the room of some of our friends. Then for the main event we headed to the All Blacks game. The All Blacks are the New Zealand national rugby team and Saturday they played the South Africa Springboks. By way of a city bus packed with South African fans drunkenly singing songs, we arrived at the stadium and got to our seats. The game was pretty sweet. Seeing the Haka performed live was awesome- the All Blacks do a traditional Maori dance/intimidation ritual at the start of every game. If you just search “the haka” on YouTube a bunch of videos of it come up. Good stuff. Anyway, New Zealand trounced South Africa 33 to 6. I had what they claim is a hot dog at the game, but it’s really a battered, deep fried sausage on a stick. Although not what I’d call a hot dog, it was definitely delicious.
This morning we walked around the city more and stopped a couple places on the way back to take pictures. Maybe 60km north of Dunedin we stopped at the Moeraki Boulders, which are these giant spherical rocks along the beach at this one spot. Once, back at our flat Xander, Rob, Shayla, and I had a delicious Sunday dinner consisting of roast chicken and vegetables (Potatoes, what they call pumpkin but we call squash, and carrots). It was a good weekend and the first of many trips I’ll be taking with the car. We hope to do one trip every weekend and explore all around Dunedin and the south island. The drive we took this weekend was filled with incredible scenery and really excited us all about all the glorious trips and hikes we can do in the future. The landscape changes from rolling hills and vast gorges to flat planes, and then into giant mountains so fast it’s a little hard to believe it’s all on one relatively small island. We could have stopped almost every five minutes to take pictures of some new amazing scene.
Back to another week of class starting tomorrow. Now that we have the car the flatmates and I are going to drive to an even cheaper supermarket to get groceries. Exciting times. That’s it for now… more to come soon. There are updated pictures on my flickr site from the trip. I hope all is well back on the home front. Peace.