This morning we bade farewell to Busby, our Mercedes Sprinter 313 CDI campervan/bus. Busby was easy to drive and has served us faithfully without missing a beat – he has taken every opportunity to beat my head. 😀 Busby took a bit of getting used to but we did it, learning how to live with a campervan rather than loving it. A campervan will never replace our beloved caravan, Guillaume. A campervan does, however, enable a different sort of trip – this sort of trip.

On our 4-week journey around New Zealand, one week on North Island and three weeks on South Island, Busby has covered 4930kms/3080mls. We’d estimated 3000mls in our costings when planning for our trip – pretty damn close.

We now face an 11½-hour flight from Christchurch to Hong Kong followed by a 13-hour flight back from Hong Kong to the UK, all on Cathay Pacific. The seats will be bigger than Busby’s but I doubt I’ll sleep. We’ll see.

It’s been one hell of an experience.

Our Christchurch campsite offers a few suggestions under the heading of, “what on earth shall we do today”. One of the suggestions is to visit “Museum – Quake City”. Well, for our last day in New Zealand, we skipped the museum but we did visit Quake City. We hopped on a Blue Line bus just outside the campsite. For NZ$8.00 each, it took us into Christchurch with no worries about parking Busby – we could leave him pressing the camp cat. We disembarked at the central bus interchange (i.e. bus station) which was well positioned for the sites that Francine had in mind.

Any disaster is moving. Loss of life in the face of the forces of mother nature show our vulnerabilities; just how fragile we are. The centre of Christchurch, still suffering from the effects of the 2011 quake, is certainly a moving sight. The pattern of damage looks difficult to explain. Some old buildings that might have been expected to be damaged remain apparently unaffected. Whereas St. Paul’s Cathedral in London miraculously survived Hitler’s onslaught in 1940, Christchurch’s cathedral did not survive the 2011 earthquake. The open-ended skeleton remains.

With an unusable original cathedral, the good people of Christchurch erected a “Transitional Cathedral” which has been tagged the Cardboard Cathedral. Visiting on a Sunday, a service was in progress so we couldn’t have a good squint but certainly some of the supporting structure of this modern piece of architecture was huge cardboard tubes. The external structure appears to be corrugated, translucent plastic with aluminium angle-sections at the edges. The shape is like an A-frame with different perspective triangles at either end. It’s simple, clean and elegant. I loved it, even as a confirmed atheist/anti-religionist, and admired the resolution of the inhabitants of Christchurch.

Opposite the sharp end of the cardboard cathedral is what I suppose would be classed as an artwork, an artwork of 185 all-white chairs, each one symbolising a life that was lost in the quake. I presume the actual chairs chosen have some significance since one is a baby’s car seat and another is a wheelchair. They face the cardboard cathedral, almost like an audience awaiting a divine performance.

115 of the 185 lives lost were in the CTV, Canterbury Television, building, which collapsed leaving only the lift shaft standing and caught fire.

Six years on, several of the city blocks still remain empty awaiting, I presume, redevelopment, a testament to the devastation caused. The CTV site will not be redeveloped but is to be left as a memorial.

After an overdose of emotional content, we did wander around the Christchurch Botanic Garden before ending our visit on a brighter note in a bar serving Francine with a so-called sangria, a sangria with included both brandy and Cointreau. I’m pretty sure the Spanish wouldn’t put Cointreau into a sangria, though we’ve never actually had one. We’d better fix that oversight on our next visit to Spain which will be over Christmas and New Year.

It seems that Busby may not have been quite as level as I had imagined, so the camp cat came into its own after all.

Here’s the camp cat positioned in preparation for levelling Busby.

And here’s the camp cat after levelling Busby.

Job done.

[No animals were harmed in the production of this post.]

Today would be a conservative 160kms from Hanmer Springs to Christchurch. Apart from a 10-minute drive to hand Busby back to Maui on Monday, that’d be it.

We’d spent a relatively sloping night in Busby which leads me to comment on another feature of New Zealand camping. In Europe, certainly Britain, it is usual to use levelling ramps when pitching ones unit on sloping ground. Caravans need just one, to level from side to side because the nose jockey wheel levels adjusts up and down to level them lengthwise. Campervans generally carry two levelling ramps to be able to level in two axes. Until two days ago, after 3½ weeks of camping in New Zealand, I had not seen a single levelling ramp in use. We did see a pair, being used by a private camper van at the DOC site at Marble Hill. I was really quite amazed; the ground was frequently not level. Why does one need to be level? Well, doors swing on hinges downhill, sleeping in a sloping bed can be a challenge (or enjoyable, depending on the company), and cooking when all the oil flows to one edge of the frying pan is real pain in the kitchen. Why don’t they bother here? It beats me.

We began with two relaxing cappuccini [just showing off] in Hanmer Springs. Francine’s brother had reported that Hanmer Springs was “tired looking”. Not so, I’ve rarely seen anywhere less tired looking. I do find the letter grouping difficult, though: Hamner Springs would roll off the tongue better than Hanmer – N followed by M does not seem natural.

Before beginning our journey proper, we indulged in a 2km/1hr walk through Hanmer Heritage Forest which we completed in 30-minutes. Well, how can you make 2kms take 60 minutes? Maybe if we’d found any orchids for Francine to point her camera at but regrettably we didn’t.

Finally underway, we were heading for Christchurch – scary spiders, a big city. After a supermarket stop in Amberley, we followed a brown sign declaring “Scenic Inland Route”, to avoid the busy main road. “The Scenic Inland Route” turned out to be mostly straight, dull and decidedly un-scenic. It was, however, inland. By going inland it led us first to a picnic spot for lunch followed by a spectacle neither of us had ever before witnessed, a game of polo at Rangiora. How the rich live. We watched the poor old polo ponies, tails bound so they couldn’t swish away flies, being put through their paces before hitting the road again.

For the second time on our travels, we ended up on a road unknown to Kiwi Satnav; it was a motorway skirting Christchurch. Kiwi’s plot line went dotted, never a good sign, as our new route went off piste. As we approached known roads passing beneath us, with no exit in sight, Kiwi Satnav excitedly instructed us to “turn lift” [left, you may remember, for those with no Kiwi accent]. “I can’t bloody turn lift”, I thought. “Nor can I turn left, right or around.” The short motorway which, I suspect, may be New Zealand’s only motorway, dumped us near the airport. It was also near a second wetland reserve that we wanted to visit so, as they say over here, it was “all good”.

The wetland was OK but, as expected, we saw nothing new, just the standard two damselflies and a dragonfly which refused too be caught on pixels but which I suspect was the local Aeshna. As an odonata enthusiast, I could never live in New Zealand with so few species to observe. That’s true for wildlife in general here, really; there’s a paucity of it and most of what one does see is European and imported. It’s a country for scenery and, as such, has few equals, I think.

This last stop was within spitting distance of our campsite. We’ve checked into the Top 10 site at Christchurch and, perhaps because we’re here for two nights, we have a relatively spacious pitch with spikey plants between us and the neighbouring units. Reviews complaining about being able to shake hands across the minimal gaps had made me dread it. Where we are is actually fine and I breathed a sigh of relief. Also the pitch is level, otherwise, in the absence of any levelling ramps, I’d have to drive one wheel onto the camp cat to get Busby horizontal; it’s a fat cat and should provide considerable flexibility. If minor adjustment is needed, there is a second, thinner cat that might come in handy under another wheel.

Our Greymouth morning dawned sunny and bright. I’d awoken once or twice during the night and lay there listening the soothing crashing of the Tasman Sea surf on the nearby shore. It soon lulled me back to sleep again.

We had an appointment in Christchurch on Saturday evening – Francine wants Sunday looking at Christchurch before the first leg of our flight home on Monday – so we had to make tracks back to the east. We’d take the third and final pass of the three in South Island, New Zealand, the Lewis Pass. I topped up Busby’s fuel tank for what will hopefully be the final time. [Sniff]

Our first stop in search of coffee was intended to be Reefton but we passed a beautiful looking spot of habitat just before getting there, a spot with the delightfully attractive name of Slab Hut Creek. Busby stopped to let us go odo-hunting. It was teeming, the star attraction being Aeshna brevistyla, New Zealand’s Hawker. It was only our second encounter and made a refreshing change from the usual three (Redcoats, Blue Dams and yellow-spotted Dragonfly).

Coffee at last in Reefton, which calls itself the Town of Light. It looked like something out of the old west again and we sat on the street in the shade enjoying coffee and a salmon bagel. Call it breakfast. Town of Light seemed like a puzzling tag line until we discovered that this was an old gold mining town and was the first in New Zealand to offer electric lighting to customers, inhabitants of the town, in 1888.

The road out of Reefton is the road into the Lewis Pass. We began climbing gently through a wooded valley. The woodland continued all the way up to the top, lower than Arthur’s Pass but higher than the Haast Pass. The whole trip seemed to be through woodland so we tagged this the Wooded Pass. Although Arthur’s Pass may be the highest and most iconic/touristic, for us it was the least interesting. We prefer both the Haast and Lewis passes.

We paused for lunch at Marble Hill, which is actually a DOC campsite, and very pleasant it looked, too. Why do you find these places at the wrong time of day? No matter, there was some wetland and, yes, some odos. As we were just pulling out of our parking place a dragonfly came sniffing around Busby, first at Francine’s side window, then at her side of the windscreen. It was huge; it just had to be one the so-called Giants, New Zealand endemics. There are two very similar species, the Mountain Giant and the Bush Giant. Given the habitat, meadowland on the way to the summit of the Lewis Pass, I’d wondered if this could’ve been either. However, I’ve made e-friends with the author of the book on NZ Dragonflies who seems to think that the Lewis Pass habitat is that of the Bush Giant (Uropetala carovei). Who am I to argue? We stopped and search but, alas, our celebrity had disappeared. I was, of course, partly disappointed that there was no chance of a photo but I hadn’t been expecting to see one (very early in their flight season) and I had. Sad camper that I am, it was quite a thrill.

Literally just over the un-dramatic summit of the Lewis Pass is the top section of the Saint James Walkway, a long distance footpath. This top area boasted an Alpine Nature Walk which naturally appealed to us nature lovers. Yes, there were some odos but perhaps most intriguing were what appeared to be some species of sundew plants. Actually, there were two but I was particularly intrigued by a vertical one. The scenery was pretty neat, too.

Our final descent into Hanmer Springs seemed bouncier and bumpier than the rest of the day. This is often the case, so perhaps it is actually that for a certain length of time one can cope with the shaking, rattling and rolling of Busby, but then a tipping point is reached and ones mind screams “enough”. it wasn’t a terribly long day at 220kms but it felt like it; we both felt drained and were ready to stop. A second factor was that the road seemed very busy (for New Zealand), particularly with heavies, most of which tow equally heavy trailers. The heavy traffic could well be because the Lewis Pass is the only remaining route north from Christchurch to places such as Nelson and the ferry at Picton.The normally more direct east coast road through Kaikura is unserviceable due to earthquake damage. In any event, feeling like a hot shower, we checked into the Top 10 site at Hanmer Springs.

It’s hot. Busby’s thermometer hit 28°C coming down out of the Lewis Pass today. Now we’re sitting in a shadeless, though pleasantly grassy and remote pitch, in Hanmer Springs with all Busby’s doors flung wide and the sunny-side curtains closed. We never expected New Zealand to be this hot at this time of year.

There are rumbles – maybe we’ll get cooled down yet.

Yes, it may look mad but we’ve done it. We’ve driven across from Akaroa on the east coast to Greymouth on the west coast and we did it through Arthur’s Pass. So, Arthur’s Pass – tick. ‘T was a distance of 325kms but see below. New Zealand isn’t that big, really.

Morning dawned with sunny intervals. Akaroa still looked pleasant enough and the campsite still didn’t. We decamped reasonably swiftly and drove down into town for two delicious cappuccini [just realised that the plural of cappuccino should be cappuccini – it was the cannolo/cannoli from Arrowtown that did that] before heading out. One of those big cruise ships was in the harbour tendering passengers ashore. I wonder if that was the one we’d seen at Milford Sound? Just an idle thought, that was probably too long ago.

Since we were most unlikely to be here again, even if we visit New Zealand again, we decided to drive the tourist route around the rim of the extinct volcano overlooking Akaroa. It’s a spectacular 35km drive offering expansive views of the harbour for much of the way. To be honest it could’ve done with being a bit shorter but I’m glad we did it. It eventually dumped us back on the main road heading towards, but skirting, Christchurch. Kiwi Satnav had Arthur’s Pass as a destination.

There are signs scattered about NZ saying, “NZ roads are different, allow extra time”. Very funny. Yes, they are indeed different; you can maintain a much higher average speed than is possible in the UK. The national speed limit here is 100kph and you can usually do it. Not so back home.

After just two hours, including passing and pausing at two odonata spots (to be added to my map), we entered an almost Tyrolean landscape and began climbing towards Arthur’s Pass itself. We climbed into the land of that nasty invasive Broom again.

A little further up we came to Castle Hill and paused for a wander and for Francine to see the rocky outcrops. At a small flush opposite a cattle pond I spotted some Redcoat Damselflies and, favouring those over rocks with no heartbeat, I left Francine to go snag the rocks while I snagged more little friends. I was intrigued because there is an Alpine Redcoat in very specific habitat so probably not here. I had to try, though.

The road continued to be fast and much straighter than I expected until, that is, we crested the summit and began descending. Here the road was still a main road but was steep (~12%) and sinuous. It keeps one on ones toes. Francine described the scenery as dramatic rather than picturesque, as the Haast Pass had been when we’d crossed the range from Franz Josef to Wanaka. We’d lucked out, though, the conditions over the pass were good, save for a spot or two of rain at the Arthur’s Pass settlement itself.

Decision time hit again. Near the bottom of our descent we paused outside an Alpine Resort with a campsite boasting excellent reviews. However, we were still almost 50kms from the coast and if we intended to cross back again over the third pass getting to the coast would be handy. Besides, poor Francine had thus far had precious few chances at west-facing sunset shots. There were a few clouds hanging about – sunsets need clouds – so the coast won.

We completed the coast to coast route, discounted the first crummy Kiwi [that’s a chain, not a description] campsite that we tried and finally lucked out at a much better Top 10 site 4kms further on, almost in Greymouth itself. Busby has something approaching a proper camping pitch, grass beneath his wheels and vegetation to his sides. He’s very happy. We are literally beside the beach and most of what we can hear is the crashing surf from the Tasman Sea; that and that good ol’ bass line from a chalet which I hope will eventually quieten down. We’ll concentrate on the surf.

Oh, we saw a Weka again on the latter part of the drive, which was lovely. It was trying to cross the road but happpily thought better of it as Busby approached. Wekas are now limited to the west coast. I didn’t know it ‘til then but I’d missed them.

Poor Francine’s clouds now seem to have evaporated but it was a much more successful day than yesterday.