Christchurch Day Two

While in Dunedin, a friend had mentioned that there was a gorgeous mountain pass to the west of Christchurch with some impressive feats of engineering. On a whim, I decided to venture out to find them, partly because I was missing the mountains and partly because I'm looking forward to exploring Christchurch more early next year when a friend of mine from the States moves there. I ended up driving almost to the other side of the country, and it was completely worth it! I don't have pictures of all of the amazing country I covered, because the road was often very twisty turny and narrow, with no place to safely pull off to take pictures.

The first of many one-lane bridges I have encountered. There isn't enough traffic to justify the expense of expanding the road. Right-of-way is indicated by signs as you approach the bridge, there are arrows representing both lanes, and the large of the two has right-of-way. Roughly half the time it didn't matter, since no one was coming the other way...

There's a LOT of gorse here, brought over accidentally from Scotland. It's very pretty, but it has the unfortunate habit of choking out the native plants, and it's pretty much impossible to get rid of it.

Changing landscape as I got farther into the mountains:

The Southern Alps!

Then I dropped over onto the western slope, and found the viaduct I had set out to see:

All around the overlook there were signs warning people not to feed the Kea. Kea are endangered parrots native to New Zealand. They're about a foot tall, have bright green and red plumage, and are too curious and clever for their own good. When I took the bus over to Milford Sound in January, the bus driver told us that Kea will rip rubber pieces and windshield wipers off of cars as a game. They have no fear of people. But there weren't any Kea when I was snapping pictures of the viaduct with three other groups of travelers. Everyone else cleared out, and I opened the car door to leave with one last wistful look and was about the get in when I heard a distinctive chitter from the railing about ten feet away. Sure enough, there was a Kea! I stepped out of the car to take a picture, delighted.

Then I heard a bit of scrabbling, and looked down to find a Kea about eighteen inches away from my foot, looking very interested in the open door. I quickly shut the door to avoid having an unintended travel buddy. The Kea, not particularly bothered by the noise, decided that it was time to investigate the car a bit more, and now, in addition to the Kea on the railing, there are two more who've decided that the most interesting place for them to be is under my rental car.

And now I've got a bit of a dilemma, as I can't safely leave with both of them down there, but neither of them are particularly bothered by my presence. I did discover that I could momentarily distract them from trying to pull bits of the car off if I clapped at them, but they weren't at all inclined to move. I was then left with the slight issue of how to politely and respectfully scare two highly intelligent and utterly unafraid members of an endangered species away.

I must be honest, this is not a problem I ever expected to have. The problem may have also been compounded by my inability to stop giggling.

I didn't want to throw anything directly at them, and didn't, but there were some rubber discs that previous Kea had apparently pulled off another vehicle, and after tossing those a couple of times in their line of sight and outside of the car, the Kea found those more interesting than the bottom of the car and came out to a point where I could herd them off to the side, enough to run back to the car, double check that I hadn't acquired any more interested parties underneath and the original three were still in sight, and then get out of there.

Then it was on to the next cool little bit of engineering:

I had tremendous fun driving these mountain roads, and I learned to drive in the Colorado Rockies. This was, admittedly, the first time I've ever seen warning of a 16% grade on a road.

On my return to Christchurch, I took a quick look through the Canterbury Museum (for some reason I did not take a picture of it, though it was another grand old building, similar in style to this one, which is across the street and part of the arts complex that is still being restored):

I swung through the shipping container mall and bought William Gibson's new book, The Peripheral, before heading off to dinner and then back to the motel to rest up to drive to Kaikoura the next day.