Christchuch

We are now in Christchurch. This is a very English city, I can even hear bagpipes playing out on the street.

Eileen is shopping so I thought I would do an update. We took a tour of the city this morning.

Two days ago in Queenstown we took a jet boat ride up the dart river. This is where a lot of "Lord of the Rings" was filmed. The do a lot of filming here. On the way to our jetboat ride we passed this beautiful farm with hay bales out front a barn and a water tower. Our guide asked us hw old we thought it was, most of us guessed about one hundred years old. Actually it is three weeks old and is a movie set, which will be blown up in a few days as Hugh Jackman drives away on a motorcycle. We took a walk through an old growth Beech forest that looked right out of Lord of the Rings.

The jetboat was the most fun you can have on a river. Why canoe when you can get into a 400hp jetboat and fly on the river at over 70kph, barely missing boulders and rock walls by inches, in some places on only 3 inches of water. Add to that some of the most spectacular scenery in the world and you have quite a ride.

We we got back to town thery were having a parasailing contest. They were coming off the top of the mountain and had to land on the beach, not all of them made the beach, some made the water and some just disapeared somewhere on the other side of town.

Yestereday we drove here via Mt. Cook. Mt. Cook is the highest in NZ at about 13,000 feet. Edmund Hillaty used this mountain to train for his quest of Mt. Everest. The base elevation of Mt. Cook is at around 3000 ft, giving a vertical rise of the mountain of 10,000 feet, about the same vertical from Everest basc camp to it's summit.

Some observations on NZ. The people her are some of the kindest and gracrious we have ever met. There are no wild animals native to New Zealand. Therefore you can go anywhere without fear of being eaten by a wild animal. The English introduced possum and rabbits here, and with no predators to eat them, they have multiplied like, um, rabbits. So it is always open season on possum and on Easter they have a large rabbit hunt. There are over 40 million sheep here, they are everywhere. With very little snow in the lowlands the cattle graze all year long, you don't see any barns, just milking sheds. It is a wonderful country, the only one I have ever been to that I could actually live in.

Tommorow we fly to Melborne fot the start of our Australia leg of this trip.