Akaroa
Today is our last full day in Christchurch and we had heard about a small town that exists in an extinct volcano just south of the city of Christchurch. From the map of New Zealand, it appears that the volcano was originally off the coast, but as it rose from the sea, when it was active, it became part of the landmass. The original crater that was formed during the eruptions now forms a natural deep-water harbour for the town of Akaroa.
After a leisurely breakfast, we slowly made our way by car to the road that would take us to Banks Peninsula, (the extinct volcano), this road while in an excellent condition, was far from the major roads I had been accustomed to in my travels to major tourist attractions in Australia.
The road was what I would call a typical rural road, but with a lot more traffic on it.
Akaroa being a tourist destination and not an industrial area, the majority of the traffic was cars, with very few trucks, which was good as it was only two lanes, one lane in each direction. This along with the fact that there were places where there were many bends and hills, made overtaking slow moving trucks difficult, but I did not mind as I had already resolved to stop at the side of the road whenever I thought I could take an interesting photograph.
When we first left the urban area of Christchurch, the road travelled through a typical coastal plains landscape, which reminded me of some of the plains in Australia, except we noticed that here in New Zealand, the farmers used trees as wind breaks much more than in Australia (could that be because they are much closer to the South Pole and the winds are icy cold?)
The trees in the wind breaks were planted close together and then trimmed to look just like some giant had planted a hedge and kept it trimmed with nice straight square sides and even the top was trimmed flat.
As we approached Banks Peninsula, I became aware that we were also starting to climb. The rocky out crops were no longer sandstone but granite, evidence of the volcanic nature of the landscape we were entering.
This is where the road became winding, we were now driving in a valley with a mountain on one side and a lake on the other. Soon we were on top of the extinct volcano and could see our destination in the background, here at a hilltop café we decided to have a break for our morning coffee and to take in the beautiful scenery.
From here the journey into Akaroa was mostly downhill, there was still some way to go as we had to go around the harbour, often we were in sight of the clean waters of the harbour, at others because of the steep sides of the old crater near the edge we had to go further from the water’s edge.
Eventually after going over the last small rise, we entered Akaroa, here it became evident that this town was not originally an English settlement, but French, and although now there are no longer any French speaking people, there is much evidence that they had been here, the very names of the streets are still in French.
As this was already late Autumn and most of the activities in Akaroa are summer activities, (like swimming with the dolphins) we only walked around the town and found a place to have a leisurely lunch, then slowly made our way back into Christchurch, retracing our route from the morning!
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