Our last two days in New Zealand were bittersweet. We have come to love this country and all it has to offer.
Our last full day was taken up with a fairly long and not especially exciting drive from Dunedin to Christchurch, which we had to reach in the late afternoon in order to return our rental car on time.
One of the few stops we made was to see the Moeraki Boulders- unique ‘mud balls’ that formed in the beach cliffs millions of years ago from calcite crystals, making them almost like cement.
They emerge from the eroding cliffs, much like a Michelangelo statue emerging from its marble tomb, and eventually tumble onto the beach where they are gradually eroded away by the pounding surf.
They were actually quite haunting and evocative in the lowering clouds of a gloomy summer’s day.
Back in Christchurch, we treated ourselves to a final meal out, sitting outside in a nice restaurant across the street from the Auckland Art Gallery, which we made a point to visit the next morning.
It was Waitangi Day, a national holiday, and Christchurch had a festive mood, even though we all had to pay a holiday surcharge for our gelato!
In addition, the city was dressed up for the Lunar New Year, which would be celebrated a couple of days after we departed.
Since our plane did not leave until the late afternoon, we were able to have one final morning in Christchurch, which dawned bright and sunny with some spectacular cloud formations.
We spent the entire morning in the city’s excellent art gallery where the architecture, the curatorial notes and the challenging way they presented their collections really impressed us.
We were so engaged by the exciting artworks of New Zealanders- many of them women and indigenous artists—that when we ventured into the smaller gallery of European art, which I normally would have gravitated to, it all just seemed stuffy, dated and frankly wrong! That was really a gallery first for me.
We reluctantly pulled ourselves away, for we had a plane to catch. As we rose into the skies over the Canterbury Plain, we took our last looks at the famous braided rivers, the rich farmland and fabled mountains.
As we flew on to Australia, we said farewell to a place we had appreciated and delighted in from the first days in Paihia to our last days in Christchurch, and looked forward to the next stage of our round the world adventure.
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