Christchurch

We left our Sydney hostel and headed to the airport with only a rough idea of what time our flight was. Luckily it turns out we were pretty close on the time and a 10 minute delay for boarding the plane meant that we had just about enough time to spend our last few Australian dollars on some fudge, which we later saw was out of date... no wonder it was the only cheap thing we could find, bloody Aussies!
We had a lot of turbulence on the flight, so couldn't get a cup of tea, but the views over New Zealand as we were landing, more than made up for this. We could see the snow covered peaks and the lush green landscapes of the Canterbury plains.
Upon landing we suffered more stringent checks than when we arrived in Australia. This involved us having to identify our own food, including sugar and rice, plus having our shoes checked for soil and foliage and showing our chopsticks again. We told them that all food items were purchased in Australia, but this only seemed to egg them on. We eventually made it through, but only after going through 3 checking stations with each inspector asking us the same questions and having our chopsticks tapped to see if bugs came out of it. One of the inspectors didn't seem to know what chopsticks were and asked if they're some kind of ornament.
We arrived in Christchurch and spent the first day organising ourselves with food and a campervan for NZ. By the first evening we knew our warm clothes would need to come out, as we could feel a chill in the air despite the lovely sunny day we'd had.
On the second day we wanted to go for a wander, but had been told and seen for ourselves that most of central Christchurch was still closed after the earthquake in February. We still went out, but a lot of the roads were blocked off and we ended up walking all the way round the edge of the CBD to finally get to the park and botanical gardens. That night at around 2 or 3am I felt an aftershock / tremor, which was pretty scary as it shook the whole room.
The devastation in town is still very obvious and it was upsetting to see the damage to people's houses. From what we'd read before, Christchurch seemed like a really nice place and we'd love to go back one day.
The next day we picked up our campervan and started our NZ adventure.