Who's a pretty boy?

 
November 22nd & 23rd

Our final stop in Kaikoura brings another exotic creature. Tonight’s cosy B&B is called the Admiral Creighton – and Creighton the cockatoo seemed to take a shine to me. We tried to add to his repertoire of phrases, so he may well greet the next guests in a mix of London, Brooklyn and Queensland accents. On our final morning, we briefly check out the seal colonies off the beach – the gash on my leg means I can’t squeeze into a 7mm wetsuit and get in the freezing water – shame(!) - but you can see plenty from the beach. Once again there are lots of new borns on show; it’s spring here, after all. Sadly there is not time to hop in a boat and go whale watching – but at least the boats only go to view them now. When I visited the maritime museum in Auckland, I was horrified to see relatively recent footage of whalers in action, including a gruesome kill using a rocket propelled harpoon.

Then it’s back to Christchurch, where I say goodbye to my companions for the last two weeks, and spend my final 24 hours in New Zealand. Known as the Garden City, Christchurch has a very English feel – with many parks and green spaces, and punting on the River Avon which runs through the town centre. The B&B I stay in, a pretty clapboard house built in the early 1900s, has a garden full of large, gorgeously scented roses, probably brought over from England originally, just as the huge weeping willow trees that line the river were. I’m told that everything grows more quickly in NZ as it is so near the ozone hole over Antarctica. I don’t know if that’s true, but plants here definitely seem bigger.

The B&B is next to Christchurch Art Gallery, a striking modern building that houses an ever-changing series of exhibitions of work by NZ artists. Two of those I chanced upon were little gems. The first was a series of large scale photographs of the storage facilities at galleries and museums throughout NZ. I particularly liked the natural history stores, with their bizarre groupings of stuffed birds and beasts – some standing, others knocked over, still others lying corpse like in drawers. And the photograph of a moving image library, that inexplicably had a car bonnet and radiator grill nestled amongst the cans of film.

In another gallery, I sat on the floor and watched a film loop of the rippling blue water of one of NZ’s many lakes, listening to Gregorian chanting. It was strangely hypnotic and after a few minutes you start to see the black and white surface ripples as figures dancing over the lake. After seeing so many lakes, rivers, lagoons, fjords, sounds and seas in this country, I really enjoyed this simple, contemplative piece, which captures the essence of New Zealand.