Christchurch

We’re embarrassingly behind on our posts – bear with us as we try to recall everything from early December until now!

You may not remember (we barely do), but we left off in Queenstown having just gone skydiving and visiting Milford Sound. Feeling like we had hit most of the things we wanted to do around Queenstown, we made our way up to Christchurch.

Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island, and due to two massive, devastating earthquakes in 2011 and 2012, the city is a cool combination of old English architecture and new modern eateries, office buildings, and cocktail bars. While it’s obvious that the city is still recovering, the juxtaposition between old and new makes for a very unique city that we really enjoyed exploring. Embarrassingly, despite all these cool new restaurants and bars, we spent most of our time at Christchurch’s public library! Pro-tip for any backpackers – the local library will likely have free Wifi, an abundance of outlets to charge, plenty of water fountains, and no judgy looks for spending five hours at a place after only buying one coffee (sorry not sorry). We also found New Zealand’s best indoor rock climbing gym (dare we say only good one?), so we killed plenty of time there as well.

We spent a few nights in Akaroa, a cute, little town on the Banks Peninsula, just southeast of Christchurch. The result of volcanic activity, this peninsula is mountainous and offers great trails and plenty of isolated bays.