10 – jan 28: kaikoura to geraldine – long drives and changing cars

after crossing over to the south island, the next plan was to head towards the southern alps. unfortunately the south alps happen to be a fair bit away, thus we decided to stop over in a middle of nothing, aka a town called geraldine.

as we were leaving kaikoura we were adviced to go to the beach and watch some seals, as the tide was low and we could actually hang out at the beach. this little experience turned out to be more than expected as the seals just kinda lay around the rocks and people walked around them. there was a sign saying that people should stay at least 10 meters away from the seals, but of course a few people didn’t really listen. generally speaking the seals didn’t care at all if you were at least 5 meters away from them (and we’re talking about wild seals just hanging out at the beach in low tide here, not some trained animals or anything), but one dude in particular poked a seal with a snorkel, and i juts wanted to choke him on the spot. not only those seals are HUGE and STRONG and have VERY SHARP TEETH, they also don’t have to come to this beach – there are plenty of other places to hang out. people like that just spoil all the fun.

regardless of that incident that happened as we were already leaving, it was a very fun experience. low tide left a lot of shallow pools of water, over which i proceeded to jump cartier-bresson style over them and forced oleg to take photos of me. we have photographs of both of us jumping over those pools. (here is oleg’s photo)

the drive from kaikoura to geraldine passes through christchurch – biggest city on the south island (as far as i know anyway), and definitely the most major one, with a fairly big international airport. an executive decision was made to stop there and try to exchange the lancer to another car (hopefully an astra, same as we had on the north island – its just a reallly nice car, even if i’m not driving) in the avis city location there. surprisingly enough the transfer went as smooth as hot knife through butter, as not only we got another car with no questions asked and with a very apologetic “could you hang out for 30 minutes in town – you can get some coffee or something?”, we got a cute silver holden astra (yay!). i like silver color on cars.

hanging out in christchurch was fun, as the city looks very cool – a lot of small, not chain stores, people hanging out at the sun, very loungy and relaxing. and cheap sushi! i’m highly intending on getting some when we come here on our last day. other notables in this town are weird advertising and great ice cream which i partook in.

after getting the car, we headed straight to geraldine – which still remained a fair drive away. this would be the longest day of driving on the south island – and we still arrived before sun down. this is the nicer thing about heading this far away from the equator – the sunset is around 9-10pm – thus it gives us plenty of time to do some food shopping, cooking, staring down the snobby llamas across from the road, and relaxing, which is all we did.