New Zealand - part I

Are you looking for a piece of heaven in this earth?? Well, then go to New Zealand!
But lets start from the beginning...

After 3 hours of flying from Sydney we got to Christchurch, the biggest city in the Southern island of NZ. Let me to say it was a particular emotion to land and to put my feet on the ground of that country! I just remember when sometimes in the past, until the last year, i was glancing through an atlas and i saw this far country, New Zealand... the land of Maoris, the land where the Lord of the Rings was set, and mainly the country at the antipodes...and i thought “Will i ever be able to see this so far country one day?”. Instead, sooner than expected, on the 13rd of April 2008, i was there, i reached the antipodes!!

The first thing we noticed was that our mobile phones didn’t work...ehi, we are really in a remote part of the world, we thought! Later we discovered it was only a fault of our australian Vodafone cards, while my italian card worked regularly...

But, no more nonsense... the day after we took our rent car and we left for our tour of the southern island of NZ!
(Ops, just a digression: NZ is so cheap for many things!! Just to give you an example, we paid 13€ a day for the car and we slept in hostel for an average of 14 € a night! And most of the times, we got a private room only for us and many hostel were really clean and nice!).

Anyway, our first stop was on the east coast, in a place called Oamaru. There we saw a colony of penguins! A new experience: seeing live penguins for the 1st time! Even if that was the smallest species and we couldn’t take photos of them! It wasn’t allowed as the flash troubles them!
Anyway, going on our first night was in the town of Dunedin. We got there around 10 p.m. and we discovered it was too late to have dinner in any kind of place! You know, british times! Btw, we slept in a old manorhouse transformed in a hostel. Really cute!

The day after we had a look in the town centre and then we saw the Otago peninsula, when we started appreciating the wonderful landscapes of NZ! The road just run next to a bay and climbed on a promontory, with a great view. The “funny” thing was that the road was quite narrow and without any kind of guardrail! We also found some large and nice beaches...it was a pity it was a bit cold and not very sunny to have a bath!

Later, we drove towards the west coast. There are no motorways in NZ, but there is no traffic at all, so it was ok! Driving in this part, our more frequent view was about the sheep! No surprise, that’s New Zealand! Even if it’s called the land of the kiwis, sometimes i thought there were more sheep than people in that country!