Crusade to Christchurch

December 18th 2016

11:30 — In the Salon

(Sounds classier if you call a room a salon, doesn't it? Fits the style of the room, anyway.) We are about one and a half hours late for the free breakfast but luckily we stocked up on toast and croissants earlier.
The Spaniard, who is waiting for a replacement part for his motorcycle by the way, apparently plays the piano 24/7.
As neither of us really wants to drive anywhere today, we decide to explore Greymouth by bike. The mining town that pointedly summarizes its history as "come for the gold, stay for the coal" has the appropriate atmosphere of a rural east German town. (Especially the people here look like that)
Despite the coal mining operations, Greymouth — the largest city around here and home to about 30% of the west coast's population — is far from big by any standard with its 9750 inhabitants. Especially in comparison to the Asian mega cities with their populations in the tens of millions, the area around here is rather rural...

That's putting it very mildly; there is literally nothing around here. We both wonder what the life of people here looks like, about four hours by car from any major city.

We ride along a river for a while until we get to the sea, which looks quite impressive in the light rain with its strong waves. The horizon is a barely recognizable line between the white sea and the grey sky, and with the faded driftwood and dark stone beach, the entire scene looks very monochrome.
The weather, which is apparently typical for the region, sure doesn't feel much like summer.
After some long, mostly fruitless brainstorming in the supermarket we end up settling on chicken with frozen French fries for dinner — one of the three ovens in the kitchen surprisingly worked.

Finally something other than noodles and pesto...

State Highway 73, near Greymouth

"Follow State Highway for seventy-three thousand one hundred seventy-one kilometres"

Ok. Our arrival in Christchurch may get a bit later than we thought...
The route to Christchurch, that ends up not being quite as long as the GPS claimed, leads along the beautiful Arthur's Pass and past lakes, mountains, waterfalls and alien-looking rock formations. Every bridge we cross offers new, breathtaking views — unfortunately we can't stop every ten meters to take in the scenery.
According to to GPS we are about five kilometres away from the city centre — in Seoul we would long have entered the core downtown, here we are only sporadically seeing houses on the side of the road and a sign in the bushes welcoming us to Christchurch. We follow the signs to the 'historic jail' and find our hostel eventually — housed in an old prison building with solitary confinement cell, iron bars on the windows and everything. We are told that we can take mugshots with a 'guilty' sign, but we'll leave that for another time.
Following our check-in, we wander around like starved zombies for a good hour in search for a city centre with some food. Where exactly that city centre is supposed to be remains a mystery for now, but at least we do find a Japanese restaurant minutes before starving to death.