2025 New Zealand: January 4th: Hokitki to Christchurch

 The sun came out again as we left Hokitika in the morning after breakfast, which was bought by walking to the supermarket in the morning. The drive up to Arthur’s pass was dramatic after the initial flat section, with a 16% grade near the summit and even a gallery. We found the parking lot for the hike up to the Arthur’s Pass Lookout after crossing over Arthur’s pass.

The hike was nice, but a little bit undramatic after the previous hikes we’d had this trip. We did the Bealey Valley Track as well to the viewpoint, but it too didn’t feel as spectacular as all the hikes we’d done before. Both hikes took 2 hours altogether, without a lot of visitors. As we left the parking lot we saw that more cars had shown up, indicating that we were just early.

At Arthur’s Pass village, we stopped by the DOC visitor center to discover that the Bealey Valley Track was designated “The Hike of the Day.” There were two more water fall hikes, but each would take about 2 hours round trip, so we bagged it and drove to Christchurch instead.

The drive to Christchurch was spectacular, a microcosm of New Zealand all in the space of 2 hours. We saw what looked like Texas, California, England, all in the space of several minutes. I was quite impressed. We got into Christchurch and our motel around 2pm, checked in and saw a couple of cyclists prepping their bikes in the parking lot. They were from Canada and were planning a ride around the island while mostly camping. Their plan was to first take the train over to the West Coast and then start riding.

We went out to the Korean fried chicken place for lunch. It was as fried as anything you saw in the US, and we couldn’t quite finish. After that, we walked downtown through the botanical gardens. The gardens were quite pretty but not even as spectacular as what we saw in San Jose.

Downtown Christchurch looked dead on a Saturday. I was nowhere prepared for that. It looked like the family in Wanaka that told us about the depressed economy was true. The church for instance was still under repair. The shopping malls looked surprisingly empty. It was disappointing. We bought some ice cream and walked back to the hotel for a quick break.

We saw that there was a large Costco sized supermarket nearby and decided to walk there to buy chocolate and honey to bring home. The walk there took us past a huge diversity of restaurants, many of which looked really attractive. I realized that New Zealand is a lot like the USA. The downtown has been hollowed out because everyone just drives everywhere. When we got to the supermarket it was in a huge American-style mall, and it looked like Costco inside. We bought some honey, and what seemed like a large amount of chocolate (though in practice within 2 weeks of coming home we’d ate it all, so it clearly wasn’t enough!).

We ate at a Vietnamese noodle shop on the way back for dinner and then went back to pack everything up. The wind blew and it started raining. I successfully checked into the Fiji Flight from Auckland back to Nadi and then San Francisco but couldn’t check into the Christchurch to Auckland leg because that was ran by Air New Zealand.