Our time spent in The Catlins, the most southerly point of the South Island, reminded me, more than anywhere else we have seen on our travels, of home. Beautiful coast gave way to luscious green farmland, whose occupying sheep far outnumbered any other form of resident. It both looked and felt like rural Scotland, for it rained and poured, unrelenting, throughout the duration of our stay (which, thanks to the raining and pouring, ended up being rather brief). Not keen to hang around in the miserable grey countryside, we continued our journey round the coast to the charming city of Dunedin. Gaelic for Edinburgh, it was easy to imagine that one was actually in Scotland (the city was designed there), though at this point we are as far away as we ever possibly could be. We have, now, literally travelled to the other side of the world and so the only way that remains is for us to start heading for home again (albeit over the course of five months, but every step now is one step closer).
So head north we did, and after an incredibly scenic stop on the shores of ice-blue Lake Tekapo, we began our return to Christchurch, where our epic campervan adventure was to come to an end. On that final journey through the Canterbury plains, with the ocean on our right and the snow-covered Southern Alps on our left, I felt quite emotional that our time travelling around this fascinating country was reaching its conclusion. Over the time we have spent driving its circumference, it has never ceased to amaze me how incredibly blessed this country is with such magnificent and diverse landscapes, and we would have been quite content to spend many more months exploring its nooks and crannies. Though I imagine that no amount of time spent here would ever be enough, for one wouldn’t easily tire of being astounded by the breathtaking beauty that lies, it seems, around every corner.
In truth, we had hoped to keep our time spent in Christchurch to a bare minimum. Struggling to recover from the events of the past few months, the city fights to rebuild itself whilst always fearing the next disaster. Though we were dropping our van off there, we planned to head straight to the airport and back to Auckland. However, as is so often the case in life, God had other plans. We arrived at Christchurch airport having said an emotional goodbye to the van that, we have since realised with some amusement, was our first marital home. That emotion (in me at least) quickly turned to tearful distress when we discovered that, because of the Chilean ash cloud, our flight had been cancelled. With flights not resuming for at least two days, we had to decide whether we wanted to spent that time waiting around Christchurch in the hope that the cloud would pass, or take the two day bus/ferry/bus journey back north. Though Phil was fairly cool, calm and collected, I knew that my next 48 hours would be spent panicking, and so we chose the latter. A rather dramatic conclusion to our New Zealand travels, though on the positive side, the journey was, inevitably, picturesque and helped to reduce our colossal carbon footprint. Though probably only by a little, we know that in the words of Tesco, “every little helps”, and the more I see of this incredible world, the more I desperately want to help in the fight to save it.
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