Christchurch, New Zealand

I’ll start this post with a bit of an add for this awesome gentleman. Scotty of ScottyB Tours was our tour guide for our 5 days in and around Christchurch. He was a fantastic guide too! He was knowledgeable and very interesting to listen to. He knows the area extremely well and had lots of interesting stories along our journey. We highly recommend him if you are ever in New Zealand, he is available for tours anywhere on the South Island!
If your interested, his website is: http://www.scottybtours.com
Our first day was a tour of Christchurch itself. Our first stop was this place. The site was a building that housed Canterbury Television Station, King’s Education Language School, Hair Consultants, Relationship Services and The Clinic Medical Center. On February 22, 2011, an earthquake of 6.3 Magnitude struck the city and the building collapsed, killing 115 people and injuring many more inside. The site is now a memorial honoring the lives lost that tragic day.
This was part of the foundation of the building.
A memorial to those lives lost.
This is a church that they lovingly call the “Cardboard Cathedral”. It was designed and erected next to the memorial and it got its name because what you are looking at is the roof of the chapel
and those are 100 heavy duty cardboard tubes coated with waterproof polyurethane and flame retardant.! They sit on 8 shipping containers which form the base and walls. It was designed by a famous Japanese architect Shigeru Ban in association with a local firm Warren and Mahoney.This is their temporary place of worship while the original church is under construction to repair the damage caused by the earthquake.
Even the chairs that are the “Pews” are in keeping with the Japanese theme.
This is the Christ Church Cathedral which as you can see is fenced off while they work on it. Completion of the project is not until the end of 2027!
Local artists took advantage of the fencing and are displaying some beautiful artwork!
Next on our tour was the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. As you’ll see.
As you’ll see in the next several pictures it was very colorful, especially since this was the beginning of their fall season!
That is a huge tree! Especially compared to Joni and Lane!
Not all the flowers are real or life size!
Lane on the left, Jan in the middle, Scotty and Joni to the right.
Quite a variety of different color roses too!
We loved this fountain!
Some of the beautiful old buildings around the Gardens
There is also some interesting art pieces scattered throughout the city too!
Down along this river they have installed another memorial to those lives lost in the earthquake of 2011.
I’m not sure what this is about, kind of odd!
Christchurch is where a lot of the expeditions to Antartica leave from! They’re only about 3500 miles from there. It seemed weird that the farther south you go down here the colder it gets; opposite of where we live!
More beautiful flowers!
We had lunch at Delilah, a very cool restaurant with great food!
After lunch Scotty took us to this trail that lead to a great view of the bay.

That’s it for Day 1 of our Adventures with Scotty. Stay tuned for Day 2……..

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Author: bzspony1949

We've been full time RVers since 2015 and have been fortunate enough to have seen all 50 states (we flew to Hawaii and alaska) and stayed in each at least one week! It's been an awesome adventure but we've decided to park our fifth wheel in Yuma Arizona, mostly because its warm year round! By staying put in one place we can now do other travel both in the USA and abroad.

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