"A Little Bit of Everything" a Canterbury Travel Page by Kakapo2

I have met many tourists who have not seen a lot more of Christchurch than the airport, not knowing that there is a lot to explore in the city itself, and that you can make fantastic day trips or multi-day round trips. Christchurch is a great base for sightseeing and adventures in Canterbury.

Once friends of mine visited for ten days. We were busy exploring the region, and when they left we still had not shown them all the great places around Christchurch.

The Canterbury page includes fabulous day trips from Christchurch, as to top destinations like Arthur's Pass which is probably my favourite road trip in the whole of New Zealand, and Hanmer Springs where I love to soak in the hot outdoor pools, especially when surrounded by snow in winter. But also have a look at my Christchurch travel pages. In the meantime I have made a page for Lyttelton and Lyttelton Harbour which includes a lot of tips for things to do on Banks Peninsula.

An Off the Beaten Path tip on the Christchurch page describes a fabulous tour on Banks Peninsula. Most travel guides suggest only a trip to Akaroa because this is NZ's only French settlement and ignore the rest. However, the peninsula is breathtakingly beautiful, with tussock grass landscape like in the high-country around Lakes Tekapo and Pukaki, and the two magic turquoise blue harbours of Lyttelton and Akaroa. It features idyllic bays, mountains up to 920 metres for great walks, narrow gravel roads leading up and down the hills, offering plenty of million dollar views, and wonderful wildlife, with penguins and Hector's Dolphins, the world's smallest and rarest dolphins.

Two of my tips are about the Giant's House in Akaroa. If you love the mosaic art of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona you will definitely enjoy a visit to this house and garden filled with fantasy mosaic sculptures which are different to Gaudí's creations but still remind a lot of him. Click here and here

For more tips about Akaroa click here and here

Sorry for listing some Banks Peninsula tips on my Christchurch page and others on my Lyttelton page. The problem is that VT has not listed Banks Peninsula as a destination.

I have extra pages of Canterbury's most extraordinary landscapes of Mt. Cook National Park, Lake Tekapo and one about a close-by but still somehow hidden treasure, Lake Ohau. I have just added the sensational nearby Clay Cliffs near the gliding paradise of Omarama to my must-see list of NZ.

You will be surprised to learn that a big area of Canterbury features more than half a million free roaming wallabies that were once introduced from Australia. Of course, here they are regarded as pests, just not as bad as the possums. But in the township of Waimate you can cuddle and feed wallabies. And you would be surprised what a nice place this little township is. There are always little gems to discover. Even in the not so exciting plains.

In the high-country you will most probably get in touch with keas, our cheeky mountain parrots. I have dedicated some travelogues to them on my South Island page.

Before I lived permanently in New Zealand I had always dreamt of living on Paku Hill in Tairua on Coromandel Peninsula. The magic views from there had captured my imagination, it was love at first sight.

I have been there many times in the meantime, and it is still a fascinating place for me. But being married to a New Zealander with job commitments, we had to find a less remote place, and after having lived in Lyttelton for several years now, I think we have found a great alternative to my dream spot which can be rather rough when it rains heavily. All amenities you can imagine are close-by in Christchurch, you have concerts, cinemas, theatres, shopping malls, an endless number of restaurants, retail shops and wildlife centres - and if you want you are far away from it all.

Banks Peninsula which I see from our house in Lyttelton is an incredibly beautiful area - like many other places I love... ;-) And the view from Mt. Herbert, although different, matches the magic of Paku Hill.

The turquoise blue of the Lyttelton and Akaroa harbours in Summer is as magic as the colour of Lake Tekapo (my other top destinations in Canterbury and one of my top spots in the whole of New Zealand) and Lake Pukaki, and the ever changing views over hills and bays, the up and down, the sounds of silence, the wind and the birds' songs fascinate me every day. Or do not let me exaggerate: every beautiful day. I do not like rainy days - but I do not mind cold days as long as the sun is shining.

I love the remote areas of Canterbury, and my first love - beside Banks Peninsula - is the Mackenzie Country. Banks Peninsula has a lot of similarities, especially some very dry tussock grass landscapes. Already the Port Hills which separate Christchurch from Lyttelton Harbour look similar. But I also like the difference: There are pockets of native forests nestled in wetter spots, just mini pieces of rainforest - which I also love, although it is the pure opposite...

Have a look at some of my road trips. Some are like trips into another world.

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The people of the border region

The closer you get to the southern border of Canterbury the more you can get aware that the people do not feel like Cantabrians at all. They are attached to Otago, their ancestors came from Scotland and not England, they read the Otago Daily Times from Dunedin and not The Press from Christchurch, and they hate the Cantabrian bureaucrats who rule their region from Christchurch without ever having set foot near their places and have no idea what is happening or how things work down there.

The historic reason for this is a change in administration. At some point the border between Canterbury and Otago was moved south to Lindis Pass. I am rather sure you will not find many locals - apart from the fact that there are not many locals in this sparcely populated region - who are happy to be Cantabrians.

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It is not all about the splendour of nature. It is also about the exploitation of nature. Canterbury's fascinating high-country has not looked as it looks now before the arrival of the humans but the dry tussock grass landscapes and the rounded hills which look like covered in ochre velvet are the face of Canterbury that we now know, and which attracts locals and tourists because it is so different.

It would be a shame if more areas looked like the boring and highly irrigated Canterbury Plains with all those farting dairy cows that are not only a problem for the climate (really!) in times of global warming but their effluents also kill lakes and rivers. Those plains along SH1 which reach to the foothills of the Southern Alps display a tone of green that looks far too European for my taste. So we should try to at least conserve the high-country, and replant some native bush in the valleys. By doing this we can help to save rare wildlife.

It is so funny that we think New Zealand is so unique because it has always looked like it looks now. No, New Zealand is still unique although humans have destroyed so much of its unique nature. It would not look unique anymore if we had more irrigated green pastures. It is the story of New Zealand in general, and it is the story of Canterbury in particular.

I am happy that we also border the highest peaks as they are not good for any kind of cultivation or exploitation. So they are left in their splendid beauty, and appreciated by adventurers who even risk their lives to get to the summits, and by people like you and me who admire them from lower regions, on a perfect day, a blue lake in the foreground.

Sometimes you might have strange encounters with human history in perfectly remote areas which seem untouched at first sight. Just the other day we went tramping in the Mt. Somers area, and the higher you get the more obvious it becomes that in the early 1930s they did coal mining with heavy machinery there. Sometimes such places like the Blackburn Coal Mine look like a dump, the people having been too lazy to clean away their rubbish, so they quickly called it a historic place. Just joking - although I have seen places where the remains of a gone-by era have become rubbish as nobody cares about access or overgrowing bush.

There are also many museums which are ridiculously new compared to those in European countries, but they are great places which are testimony and honour the huge efforts of people who once settled in a land far away from home and had to start everything from scratch.

I would also call old cemeteries historic places. Walk around there and read all the headstones, and you will understand how hard life was in the early days. Perhaps this makes it easier to understand why fantastic landscapes have been destroyed in those times. Those people had to survive, they did not have the knowledge we have today, and they were everything but tourists or environmentalists.