Walking on the Wall

Mutianyau Great Wall, China (May 28, 2016)

The advantage of the Mutianyau section of the Great Wall, with respect to the more popular Badaling, is that Mutianyau is less frequented, and is possible to find views of the Wall unobstructed by crowds.

Walking on the Wall

The restored section of the Mutianyau Wall is 2.5 km long, and includes 23 towers spaced about 100 meters from one of the other. The Wall itself is designed as a raised road, allowing watchmen to easily run from one post to the other in what would otherwise be an impervious mountainous terrain. This allowed to keep under control a vast border with a minimum amount of troops. Some of the watchtowers have a flat top, with a space designed to hold a fire that could be easily lit to alert the main garrison stationed in the valley in case of a mongol incursion. It is said that this fire was made using wolf scats, for their property of producing dark dense smoke easily seen from a large distance. Even as we were visiting, the Wall undergoes continued maintenance. In fact most of the mason work is not original, but reconstructed according to the original design of the wall: only in a few places large panel of glass allowed to see the remnants of the original wall embedded in the modern reconstruction. Towards the end of the restored section of the Wall there is a 200 meters long writing on the mountain: 忠于毛主席, which means "loyalty to Chairman Mao". As I mentioned in a previous post, visiting the Wall is considered a civic duty in China. 

We spent several hours walking on the broad stone roads built on top of the Wall, without covering the whole length of the restored section. The sight of the Wall, and the views of the landscape around it, are very impressive, and certainly justify the visit, even though a different time in the year, maybe in spring or autumn, is advised to avoid the hot sun that relentlessly accompanied our tour.

Mutianyau Great Wall, China (May 28, 2016)

Visiting the Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall, China (May 28, 2016)

Flying to China from the US is expensive, especially if one is forced to use american carriers to get travel reimbursement from work. One way to reduce the cost is to relax the constraints on the traveling dates, in order to get the cheapest available flights. It turned out that paying the hotel for one day more after the end of the conference was cheaper than returning the same day. So, I ended up having an extra day to kill in Beijing: perfect occasion to visit a nearby section of the Great Wall.

On the bus to Mutianyau

The Great Wall was built starting from the 7th Century BC, even though little remains of the most ancient parts of its construction. The majority of what survives today is from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The wall was built to control the northern access of China, and to contain the raids from the nomadic hordes living in the northern Mongolia steppes. Overall the actual wall is long more than 6,000 km (almost 4,000 miles), but extends much more if one includes trenches and natural defensive barriers. Most of the Ming Great Wall has now disappeared, a victim of the ravages of time and history. A few sections however have been restored and are now visited by million of tourists every years, many of them Chinese. Visiting the Great Wall is in fact considered a patriotic duty by the Chinese. This may be due to a quote attributed to Chairman Mao: "If you have never been to the Great Wall you are not a real man". Truth is however a little more complicated, as the quote is only the third verse of a poem Mao wrote in 1935 to inspire men and women to complete the Long March:

The heavens are high, the clouds are pale,

We watch as the wild geese disappears southwards,

If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not true men,

We who have marched more than 20,000 li.

Mutianyau

The isolated sentence may have lost its original meaning, but is nevertheless very effective to promote Chinese tourism to the wall (street vendors offer you a "certificate" if you walk along the wall), especially the Badaling section, the first to be restored in 1975. That section of the wall is the easiest to reach from Beijing, 80 km north of the city and well served by public transportation. It is also the most crowded, so we decided to visit another section, near the fruit producing area of Mutianyau (about the same distance from Beijing than Badaling, but no easy public transportation). Arranging that is not difficult (plenty of travel agencies with english-speaking personnel), as long as you are careful to avoid the "cheap" trip offered by the hotels, which inevitably end with a long stop at a local mall. After some searching we chose to hire a trip with tour-beijing.com, offering "Mutianyau no-shopping tours" for $64 each person (we were 10, so we ended up hiring an entire minivan and private tour guide for that price). The bus picked us up at 8AM, right in front of the hotel, for the 1.5 hours ride to reach the wall (if there is not much traffic, which is instead expected in the morning).

Huge apartment blocks

You can see our guide in the small photo above on the left: she was actually living in the area near Mutianyu and had to leave very early in the morning to pick us up at the hotel. The bus ride was comfortable, but we indeed ended up stuck in highway traffic for half an hour or so. The difficult part was to getting out of the city, an endless expanse of high rise apartment blocks, many of them built surrounding what looked like a factory or assembly plant of sort. One can only appreciate the huge size of Beijing by driving through its never-ending outer suburbs. Once we managed to escape the traffic of the city the flow in the highway became easier, and we drove through a pleasant countryside full of orchards (the area North of Beijing is famous for its fruits production). Until we finally reached the mountains. 

Chairlift to the wall

The wall is a big touristic attraction and its access is well organized. The bus left us at the base of the mountains, where we got a chairlift to the wall, a few hundred meters above (some of us elected to walk on a steep path in the forest). The chairlift (small photo on the right) is actually quite nice, and it affords an unobstructed view of the wall which you cannot have from the wall itself (see large photo above). Once on top, you walk. I will write more extensively of the wall hike on a separate post, but for now I would just remark that even this short restored segment of the wall is actually very long, more than enough to satisfy any wall-walk urging I had, especially considering that any step forward must then be retraced back to the chairlift station, to get back to the bus at the end of the day. Notice however that in the photo on the right the chairs coming down were all empty. That is because the fun way to get back to the base is not with the chairlift, but rather with a very long toboggan.You sit on a small wheeled cart, pull up the brakes and slid all the way down as fast as you trust the centrifugal force to keep you within the banked tracks in the curves (or as fast as the person in front of you). It was indeed quite fun.

Beijing highway (May 28, 2016)

Disaster!

Milford Sound, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

How many memory cards do you have for your camera while traveling?

...

We went on the boat tour with some friends that were also traveling in New Zealand and happened to be directed to Milford Sound the same day as us (ok, it was not by chance, we exchanged a couple of text messages to make that happen). Despite being very cold, we decided to do the tour on the open deck of the boat, because the sun was so bright that it would have been a shame to stay inside. Besides, I came all the way to New Zealand to take pictures, right?

So we were, the four of us, on the bow of the vessel navigating the placid waters of the sound. The sound (which is quite deep) is protected by the strong currents of the Tasman sea by a shallower entrance, corresponding to the terminal moraine left by the glacier that 10,000 years ago created the fiord. The entrance to the sound is in fact so narrow that captain Cook missed it, when in 1769 he circumnavigated New Zealand during its first voyage. The scenery is so beautiful that I kept shooting non stop from the deck of the boat, and by the time we arrived at the entrance of the sound I had filled my memory card and was time to change it with a new one.

Tasmanian Sea

As I was kneeling to my backpack to get the new card, I half heard the captain saying to hold tight because we were about to enter the Tasman sea, famous for its currents. I guess at that point he advised everybody to get back inside because the sea was going to get rough. Well, as soon as he finished talking, while I was still with the old card in my mouth, the new one in one hand and the camera in the other, a gigantic wave hit the boat. I was launched towards the sky (fortunately I fell back in the boat) while the wave washed the deck through the hole of the anchor, drenching everybody still on the deck. As you can imagine I was a little startled, but seeing some photo opportunities (see photo on the left) I just put the card in the camera, deleted whatever old images were on it, and prepared to shoot again. Well... here is the problem. In the confusion I put back the card I had just filled with all the photos of Route 94 and Milford sound, and then deleted all of them. All 100 photos of the day: gone.

That’s why I asked how many cards do you bring along with you. I usually prefer more smaller cards, so that if anything happens to one of them, I still have the others. Still that can lead to accidents like this one if you are not very careful (or if you are distracted by almost getting thrown overboard). So, there I was, wet, without photos, kind of upset... tempted to launch the damn card overboard once for all... and I would have probably done that if Mayli hadn’t forced me to calm down and hand her over the card for safe-keeping.

When we went back to the Motel, we managed to get internet to see if anything could be done. After a quick search with Google, find out that Lexar (the manufacturer of my cards) sells a program, Image Rescue, capable to recover photos that have been accidentally deleted, as long as they are not overwritten by new ones. Apparently I am not the only bozo deleting photos by mistake. The program really worked well, and I was able to recover 95 of the 100 photos I thought were irrecoverably lost. Definitely $30 well spent. Now I keep a copy of the software on each of my memory cards (in the directory that is not cleared when the photos are deleted)... just in case...

Milford Sound, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

Milford Sound

Milford Sound, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

We arrived at Milford Sound in time for one of the boat tours. Given the enormous number of tourists that in the high season visit the sound, there are several companies with equally enormous multiple-deck boats offering 1-2 hours tours. This has been criticized by environmental associations, for the impact that the motorized cruise traffic may have on the fragile ecosystem of the sound.

Waterfall in Milford Sound

In the February of 2004 a spill of 13,000 liters of diesel fuel was found in the water. The spill  was apparently intentional, caused by inserting a high pressure hose in the tank of a boat, and forcing the fuel to come out. While there was no appreciable damage to the wildlife, the spill interrupted the touristic activities for two days, while the waters were cleaned. The authorities claimed that this was an act of eco-terrorism to protest the excessive number of tourists in the sound. Given that, we chose for our own tour one of the smallest boats available (still large, but not huge). In the end it wasn’t a particular good choice because the captain of the boat was more interested in showing the “postcard like” views of the sound, than the wildlife (the sound has a resident population of seals, penguins and dolphins, and we saw none). Still better than some of the humongous boats. The sound (which is actually a fiord), is in any case really gorgeous, with the spectacular mountains emerging directly from the sea (among which the iconic Mitre Peak). These mountains fall very steep straight to the water, with a lot of exposed rock and little vegetation, so all rain ad snow water flow directly into the sea in a multitude of spectacular waterfalls, like the “rainbow fall” in the image on the left.

Milford Sound, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

The Road to Milford Sound

Eglinton Valley, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

We woke up in the coldest morning since our arrival in New Zealand. As we moved South, and more into the winter, the temperature had been falling, but this was the first time we found the car completely covered by a thick layer of frost. We set up to leave as early as possible because the destination of the day was Milford Sound. Piopiotahi in Maori (after the now extinct piopio bird), it is probably the most famous touristic destination of New Zealand. So famous that, during Summer, its single access road is completely congested with the traffic of 500,000 tourists each year.

Along the Road to Milford Sound

Being Winter, it wasn’t that bad, and in fact we were often the only car on the road. Route 94, the “Te Anau - Milford Highway”, is actually a nice single lane road, that covers the 121 km between Te Anau and the Sound along the Eglinton and Hollyford Rivers to the East and the Cleddau to the West. The road was opened only in 1953, when the 1270 m long Homer Tunnel was completed. The tunnel crosses the highest point in the route, at almost 1000 m of elevation. Not too much in absolute terms, but the mountains on the side of the road are still quite impressive (see photo below). In winter the road is often closed due to avalanches. Before Route 94 was completed, Milford Sound was only accessible from the sea, or by a 4 day hike along the Milford Track. The track has been defined as “The Finest Walk in the World” by New Zealand poet Blanche Baughan, and the name stuck. Due to our lack of training and time, we could not walk along the track, which must be quite a spectacular experience.

Even the road, however, was spectacular, and more so in this cold winter morning, with few cars and a crystal clear sky. The large photo above, one of my favorite of the entire trip, shows the Eglinton Valley: fiery mountains covered with snow, mist slowly dissipating with the first rays of the sun, and the glossy frost covering the dry grass and the naked bushes.

View near the entrance to Homer Tunnel, New Zealand (Jun 3, 2008)

Lake Wanaka

Lake Wanaka, New Zealand (June 2, 2008)

Driving South from Makaroa, we entered the Otago region. As we were driving deeper in the rugged mountains that where the theatre of a late gold rush in 1860, the road entered in wide U shaped glacial valleys filled with large lakes. Lake Wanaka appeared below us as a long strip of water, that clearly filled the void left by a retiring glacier, more similar to a fiord than a lake.

Lake Wanaka

I took several panoramic of the lake (see one below), from view points easily accessible on the side of the road, and them from a great camping ground on its shore. Again, I think being in Winter was a plus, as the snow on the mountains reflecting on the lake made the view even more spectacular.  At the end of the lake there is the town of, unsurprisingly, Wanaka. Wanaka is a popular touristic destination and we stopped there to get a sandwich for lunch at a cafe on the lake shorefront. The view from that same shorefront has provided an unlikely backdrop for one of the most spectacular scenes of that movie I often cite here. Do you remember the mad ride of Gandalf when he was going to Minas Tirith on his white horse? Well, the mountains rising at the horizon are the same mountains visible from the shore of the lake in downtown Wanaka, with the lake water digitally replaced with the tall green grass!

Lake Wanaka, New Zealand (June 2, 2008)

From Jackson Bay to Makarora

Jackson Bay, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

The view at Jackson Bay, and on the road to get there, was certainly worth the drive (and the skipped lunch). The original reason we went there, however, was for the chance of getting to see the local colony of penguins. The timing was wrong, though, as penguins spend the day out at sea, fishing. We still saw other interesting birds, like the cormorant in the photo (maybe a Little Pied Cormorant?), quite upset that I bothered him with my camera, during its afternoon rest on the Jackson Bay pier.

The Milky Way

As it was getting late, once we got back to the main road at Haast, we went to the visitor office (an impressive concrete “cathedral” a little out of place in the very small village) to see if we could reserve a place for the night further along the road. Apparently they couldn’t do it, and they didn’t know where we could get food either, so we just decided to take our chances and keep driving. At sunset we finally reached Makarora, a tiny village surrounded by the Mount Aspiring National Park. We stopped at the Makarora Wilderness Resort. The resort was a nice surprise. Being out of season it was almost empty, and we got one of their cozy chalet for the night, for a cheaper price than expected. And then, best of all, we got our fish and chips, prepared by the custodian of the place, even though the restaurant was closed (due to the Queen's Birthday the next day). Fish was good, crankiness gone, a lively fire was burning in the fireplace... what more could we desire for the day? Well, as we were walking back to the chalet we looked up, to discover, for the first time since we were in New Zealand, a totally cloudless dark sky, with an impossibly bright Milky Way cutting through it (the Milky Way is much brighter seen from the Southern Hemisphere, from where the Bulge of our Galaxy is visible), and the Magellanic Clouds in all their glory. A perfect way of ending the day!

Mount Aspiring National Park, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

Horokoau

Horokoau from Lake Matheson, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

Mt. Tasman (Horokoau in Māori), with the height of 3497 meters is the second tallest mountain in New Zealand. I photographed it next to its neighbour Mt. Cook (Aoraki) from the shore of  Lake Matheson.

Fox glacier

The Māori name of the mountain means "the cormorant that swallows), comparing its profile to the swelling in the neck of a shag, as it is swallowing a fish. Mt. Tasman is not the tallest mountain in New Zealand (Aoraki is taller), but it is nevertheless impressive. Its climb seems to be very technical, requiring advanced skills in ice climbing. Il you do a quick search on the web, it is pretty obvious that climbing Mt. Tasman is not a simple hike. There are several companies that offers guided trip to the summit, assuming that you are fit and experienced enough, that you have the required 7 days to spend on the enterprise, and that you can pay the NZ$5,000 fee... We didn’t have any of the above, so we contented ourselves to watch the rock and ice beauty from below.

The finger of ice on the left of the photo is the Fox Glacier, that descends in the valley between the two mountains in the foreground, and that was responsible, once upon a time, for the formation of lake Matheson. From the the village where we had spent the night, one can go with a short hike to the base of the glacier, or rent (hire) a helicopter trip to actually “walk” on the ice. This is also something we didn’t do, but we still got a pretty good view of the glacier from a vantage point along the road, as we left the lake and the mountains, directed towards the west coast.

Horokoau and Aoraki from Lake Matheson, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

Lake Matheson

Lake Matheson, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

Probably the most photographed lake in New Zealand, lake Matheson offers a splendid view of Aoraki/Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman in its mirror waters. We went to the lake “early” in the morning (well, early for us), leaving Fox Glacier village as soon as we were ready. When we arrived, the lake was still covered in mist, and completely still like a glass surface (as in the panorama below).

The path to the lake

By the time we reached the place were the two mountains are mirrored (it is a 20 min walk in a dense forest) the mist had lifted, but an almost imperceptible breeze had also started to create ripples in the water, ruining the mirror effect. I actually liked it anyway, as the added texture in the water was creating interesting games of scattered light. The water of the lake is very dark (and that helps the mirror effect) due to the organic matter depositing from the surrounding forest. It is home of many waterfowls (we saw a lot of ducks and geese) and the mysterious (for us, as we didn’t see any) long finned eels. The lake was created by Fox Glacier itself, that before retiring at the end of the last ice age left the depression that is now occupied by the water.

The path going around the lake was full of tourists. Among them there was a nice asian family that asked if we could take a picture of them in front of the lake. At first I thought they were Japanese, but as soon as they started talking among themselves we realized they were Chinese. The difference being that we couldn’t understand a single word (while if they were Japanese the language should not have been so alien, given that Mayli and I at the time of the New Zealand trip were -supposedly- studying it). Well, we did find two Japanese girls later on on the path, cute in their very fashionable striped long socks with individual fingers, and had a chance of listening to them. Well... even in Japanese we still couldn’t understand a single word!

Lake Matheson, New Zealand (June 1, 2008)

Arthur's Pass

Arthur's Pass, New Zealand (May 31, 2008)

When Mayli finally finished her Neutrino 2008 conference, we left Christchurch for Arthur's pass. We drove for a few hours up Route 73, until we reached the pass, crossing the Southern Alps from the east to the west side of the island. As you can see in the photo above, the weather was very cloudy. Still, as we were approaching the pass, we could see spectacular mountains flanking the road. 

Hiking trailheads

Arthur's pass is named after the surveyor Arthur Dudley Dobson, who found his way across in 1864. While a scenic road now allows to leisurely cross the pass, at Dobson's time the many gorges on the western side of the passage made the crossing not so easy: to cross the Otira Gorge he actually had to leave his horse at the top, and lower his dog with a rope. The passage was of course well known to Maori's hunting parties, that used it regularly to cross from one side to the other of the island. The pass is at the center of a natural park, that include many peaks over 2,000 meters, the highest of which is Mount Murchison at 2,400 meters. The area is hiking (tramping!) paradise, with many trails crossing the U-shaped valley, directed towards the snow-capped mountains. in a beautiful landscape.

The mighty peaks

We stopped briefly at the pass to take some pictures. While I was taking my photos I was called by the occupants of a car stopped along the road, just in front of us. It turned out that the people calling me were a nice couple of retired New Zealanders from Christchurch, driving through Arthur’s pass on a photographic expedition (they were particularly attracted by the mighty peaks on the side of the road (in the photo on the left). They had Nikons (a D100, a D300 and a D1) and were very happy to see that I also had a Nikon. They were really nice guys and we had a very pleasant conversation. Among the various tips they gave us, they insisted that we should add to our destination a cove not far along the route, where we could have a chance to see penguins... but this is a story for another post. Mayli after some time got bored of waiting, and took a picture of me talking with them (I had it on a previous iteration of this blog, but it was lost when the computer hosting it suddenly died).

Despite the bad weather, there were a lot of people leaving the cars and going for a hike. A lot of people were walking in the direction of the weird rock formation you can see on the left side of the panorama below, made of a line of boulders standing like sentinels watching the pass.

Arthur's Pass, New Zealand (May 31, 2008)

Making Friends

Rakaia River Valley, New Zealand (May 30, 2008)

As much as I liked Route 72, at some point during my drive I started to long for something less “domesticated” that the gentle countryside of New Zealand Pacific coast. My intention was to turn into the Coleridge road just before Rakaia Gorge, to get to Lake Coleridge. Obviously that’s not what I did, as I never arrived to any lake. I instead ended up on a road getting soon unpaved (“unsealed” as a New Zealander would say), which was going through a beautiful glacial valley. Now that I look at the map, it is clear that I got the Blackford Road, that then became the Double Hill Run Road, which climbs the shoulder of the Rakaia river on the opposite side of Lake Coleridge.

My new friends

The road goes on forever, on the shoulder of the valley, where ribbons of glacial water are braided in front of the usual majestic mountains. My Ford Focus was still going great, so I just kept climbing the dirt road. Now and then I stopped, because the valley was really beautiful. You can see it in the top photo, and in the panoramic at the end of this article. And I was basically alone the whole time, with the exception of a pickup truck of some farmer that passed me midway, a hiker (sorry “tramper” because in New Zealand you don’t hike, you go “tramping”), and some other friends I met along the way (pictured at the left). These cows were at the far end of their pasture, While I was taking photos of the gorgeous scenery during one of my stops. They noticed, and moved closer and closer, until I had trouble fitting all of them in the frame. I guess they were feeling alone and wanted some company. I stayed there for a little while, then we said goodbye and I went driving up the valley again.

New Zealand is certainly a country with a lot of farm animals. Until not too many years ago there were over 70 million sheep; now the sheep are less than 40 million, still about 12 sheep every human inhabitant. The decrease in number of sheep is due to competition with other types of farm animals, including my cow friends, but also deers, ostriches, llamas and other exotic species. I can assure you that finding a llama or an ostrich in the hill country of New Zealand can be a quite unexpected encounter, but it did happen to us. There are about 10 million cattle in NZ (equally divided between beef and dairy cattle), which still makes for a respectable 3 cattle each human. One can only hope that all these animals will not go the Orwellian way (how many pigs are there in NZ?).

Rakaia River Valley, New Zealand (May 30, 2008)

Renting a Car in New Zealand

Route 70, New Zealand (May 29, 2008)

The day after Akaroa I rented the car that we would keep for the next week. Before leaving Boston we found a local Christchurch rental car company, that turned out to be quite good. Sometimes choosing blindly from the internet has its own risk: you never know what is really on the other side of your internet connection. This time instead we got the real thing.

Route 70

First of all, in New Zealand you don’t rent a car. You hire it. So, if you search on google for new zealand car hire, one of the first links you get is the Apex car rental company. It is local (they say... the kiwi way), but big enough to have different locations in both islands. The first thing we liked was that one can chose the car to rent (sorry, I mean hire). Not just the model, but the car itself, with the mileage on it. We chose a Ford Focus automatic. I am usually for manual shifts, but given the added complication of driving on the left, I thought an automatic shift was not a bad idea. Fortunately the Focus had one of those semi-automatic shifts where you can directly select the gear, which turned out to be a quite useful feature (decent compromise for the lack of control of automatic shifts) when later on in the trip I had to drive through mountains and unpaved roads. The people at the rental agency were very nice (as most New Zealanders, I should add), and helpful. Somehow our request for a GPS unit (remember this trip was in 2008, before GPS was ubiquitous on smartphones) and snow chains was forgotten in our internet registration, but the guy at the agency went out of his way to find a unit for me. I even got a travel guide for free (you can actually download it from the web site). And for the environment conscious among us, the company plants a number of acres of new trees every year, to try to offset the CO2 emissions generated by their cars (at least they did that at the time, I can't find a mention of it on their current web site)!

The trip to Akaroa was just a pause in Mayli conference, which had two more days to go. So I went alone to rent the car, and spent the next couple of days driving around Christchurch, in the beautiful hills and plains at the feet of the Southern Alps. Farmland (and a lot of sheep), with one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. But that’s a new story for next time...

Route 70, New Zealand (May 29, 2008)

The Bridle Path

The Christchurch gondola, New Zealand (May 27, 2008)

My first full day in Christchurch I was all by myself, as Mayli was busy with her meeting. I still didn’t have a car, so I decided to go somewhere in the vicinity of the city, reachable by public transportation. After conferring with a few of Mayli’s friends and a lady at the office of tourism, I decided to do the bridle path (called "bridal path" in this cute schoolchildren page).

Hiking and Biking

The path links Christchurch to the port of Lyttleton, where the boats from England were arriving in the late 19th century. The path was made in 1849 to shorten the route of the new settlers coming to the city. The name derives by the fact that the path was so steep that pack horses carrying the settlers luggage needed to be led by the bridle. The bridle path starts at the base of the gondola station, which can be reached by bus (no. 28 to Lyttleton) from the city Bus Exchange. Then it is an hour or so to walk (or you can take the gondola) to reach the Summit Road at the top of the Heathcote valley. From there there is a beautiful view of Christchurch on one side (see photo), and of the Lyttleton harbor on the other side (that is for the next post). It was quite a warm and sunny day, so I spent some time at the top visiting the gondola arrival station (you can get food and drinks there), and then hiking a little on the Summit Road (and enjoying the view). Then I followed the path all the way to Lyttleton, and I got the bus 28 to Christchurch.

At the start of the bridle path, Christchurch, New Zealand (May 27, 2008)