Day 1:
Our South Island journey began after landing in Christchurch and picking up our bright green and purple campervans (that's Jucy for ya). For those of you who don't know, Christchurch experienced a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in February 2011 and because of the severity of the quake the city is still rebuilding.
So while Christchurch looks a bit shady, we had a lot of fun walking around and seeing all of the rebuilding projects and temporary play spaces!
We spent the whole day wandering the city making the most of it, only to come back and find that one of our vans had been broken into....
Unfortunately all of Kate's clothes, laptop, etc were stolen and Izzy's passport. We were all devastated that such a horrible thing would happen to us on our first day.
That night we tried to have a positive outlook for Michiel's birthday and we did have a good time eating homemade chili and drinking wine in a backpacker's apartment :) The next morning Michiel made us all caramelized rum banana porridge. Oh. My. Goodness. Seriously best oatmeal of my life. Thank goodness for Michiel because I swear we would have been just eating PB&J the entire trip if he hadn't come!
So the next day we collected a new van and set off for Arthur's Pass. The views during the drive were amazing! We just had to pull over for a photo op:
We hiked up to see a waterfall and had some fun climbing around, then on our way out of the mountains we had a bit of trouble...
We had driven up hill the whole time and when we started to go back down our brakes began to overheat! We pulled over and they were smoking quite a bit and we knew we couldn't continue to the bottom until they cooled down. So since our vans had stoves etc we decided to make tacos in the dark on the side of the road haha. It was an interesting experience as we all huddled in one van around the small table.
Let's just say the first 2 days sure were memorable, but there was still a lot more to come!
