Day 7 - Christchurch, the place tourist should skip

On 22nd February, 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch and 185 people was killed in the disaster. The downtown area was severly destroyed. Local people and business started to move to other area of New Zealand.

Why we stopped at Christchurch at New Year Eve? Just because of the poor public transportation in New Zealand. Our actual next destination was Oamaru. However, there was no direct transportation from Mt Cook to there (or I can't find it?), so we had to en route Christchurch to Oamaru.

So on the sixth day afternoon, after seeing Hooker Lake glacier, we stayed at The Old Mountaineer's Cafe to have some coffee before going back Tekapo in the evening through Cook Connection. We would pick up by another bus company, Atomic Shuttle, to Christchurch at Tekapo. The journey was long and boring, and the van was quite small too. So at the time we arrived Christchurch was 10pm. We stayed at YMCA hotel and this was very close to Hayley Park and there was a New Year Countdown event there, so another hard night for us. YMCA hotel was a budget hotel, the room we booked has no washroom, though it was quite spacious.

The next day, we got up early and tried to follow the guidebook to see what we could discovery. Actually, most of the guildbooks are useless after the earthquake. It is because the downtown area, including historical buildings, shopping area were destroyed after the earthquake. We visited the Hayley Park and the museum there, not bad, but we just could not spend a whole morning there. We have a lunch and the price was quite a surprise to us. Don't forget there was a surcharge as that day was the new year day...

Luckily, we would leave there at 2pm and we took Atomic shuttle again. This time the charted bus was much bigger.