Eat Local

February 12
We woke up this morning to find free homemade bread waiting in the kitchen. Nice! It was already cool enough to suggest that our friendly fellow American girl had gotten up before 6:00 to make it. We checked out of the hostel and drove to a part of town where we believed we'd seen bakeries. We found a spot near the sidewalk where a young hoodlum was being reprimanded by two policemen for wearing an apparently gang-like bandanna over his mouth. As the youth walked away sans-bandanna, we walked in the opposite direction in search of doughnuts.

It didn't take us long to find a bakery. We wandered inside, looked around, and found... no doughnuts! Egad! Surely they have doughnuts in New Zealand! We acknowledged that none of us had actually seen any of them on our trip, and we resigned ourselves to less sugary pastries. If there are any doughnuts to be found in this country, they will wait for another day. After breakfast we drove to the Christchurch botanical gardens outside Hagley park. We didn't really understand the signs in front of the flowers -- most of them said "Rosa" (including ones that didn't seem to be roses), some of them had a date or two from the past few centuries, and a few had locations listed. The flowers themselves were pretty, and the landscaping was perfect. There were a wide variety of very large trees, plenty of green grass, and a river running through the garden on which people glided by on punting tours. It almost felt Italian.

A greenhouse in the garden

The darker side of Christchurch: A maximum-security playground.

The garden led us to a museum which occupied us for a large part of the three hours we had before our parking expired. The first exhibit we entered was on Maoris and Moas. The former is the name of the indigenous New Zealand people, whom I know very little about so far. The latter is the gigantic flightless, defenseless bird species that they drove to extinction. Both were intriguing and kept me lagging behind the rest of the group, as I ended up doing for the whole tour of the museum. The exhibit we spent the most time on after the Maori display was Antarctica. Christchurch Scott is the launch site of many Antarctic expeditions and the location of many memorials to them. In this room we got to see, among other cool but less recognizable things, a copy of Robert Scott's last journal entry. The handwriting was hard to read, but it was there nonetheless: a dying man's last words about his own death. It's a sad story and it's strange to see it retold so matter-of-fact-ly. I was so caught up in this area of the displays that I lost the group entirely and had to search through three separate floors to find them.

We didn't stay in the museum long after I caught up -- we instead found ourselves in the middle of a shopping area, unsure of how to get back to the gardens where we had intended to be the whole time. Fortunately, we managed to find our way back without much searching, leaving us with about 40 minutes to meander back to the car. We made our way to the central rose garden which was filled with pretty colors and smells. In the center of the roses was an oversized sundial with arrows pointing toward about six major world cities. Surprisingly, it listed their distances in miles rather than kilometers (the only English unit we've encountered so far is the Subway footlong). Almost as surprisingly, it showed London to the South. We realized that the North-up, equator-center view of the world is very strongly ingrained in us. I'm curious to see if there are similar conventions in world maps here.

The garden was our last stop in the city, so when we reached the car we got back on the road. Our first stop was Lyttleton. We picked up breakfast and lunch supplies here, along with some snacks. We kept driving around the coast until we reached a picnic area to have lunch -- which wasn't until 3:00. We ate tuna sandwiches and one peach each, just for Dustin, and drove on to Akaroa. The town had a beach that was lined with some kind of fern tree, giving it a tropical feel. Ian's guide book recommends walking along this beach to a nearby lighthouse. About 2/3s of the way there, we called it good enough. The lighthouse didn't appear to be very spectacular and we were ready to get to our final destination for the day: Okains Bay.

The road to the bay took an aesthetically pleasing but practically worrying turn when we drove into a cloud rolling out from the sea and over the hillside. For several minutes everything was shrouded in fog and we really hoped it wouldn't rain tonight. We started descending the hill, out of the fog, and reached the camp site with fairly clear skies.

The site was nice enough, aside from some strangely poor signs in the office (containing a single red quotation mark in black text, inconsistent fonts, erratic punctuation, and random spacing). We found a good spot to set up camp and scurried off to the beach while there was still light.

I don't even know where to start...

We quickly lost Zach. He had wandered over to the rocks at the end of the beach, hoping to find mussels. When we noticed he was not there, or anywhere in view, Ian said he had last seen him in front of the cave close to said rocks. We ventured bravely in and cowardly out, lacking, again, headlamps. The car was much closer this time than it had been at the sea caves, so we went back to obtain some light. As we walked back to the mussel-covered rocks, we doubted Zach had gone in any further than we had into the cave. We were proved correct when he came strolling down the beach behind us, bearing the news that we were allowed to gather and eat the mussels. We could do it safely, as well: he had talked to someone who regularly ate the mussels raw, to no apparent ill effect. We decided to do it, stopped back by the cave (which, it turns out, really doesn't go back any further than we did), then waded into the water. Zach instructed us only to get the really big ones, and advised us that they would probably be the furthest from shore. We did as he said and amassed a small bounty of shellfish.

Zach was excited about the endeavor. He had always wanted to do this, but had never been in an area where it was allowed. We talked about the fact that this would probably be the only totally free food we ever ate, and the freshest to boot (at least as far as animal food goes). We carried our treasure back to the kitchen, along with the ingredients for rice and beans. Zach boiled the mussels first, to serve as an appetizer. Still not a fan of mussels, I only had two to celebrate our unique gathering opportunity. I worked on the rice and beans while everyone else chowed down on the rest of the mussels. I enjoyed this part of the meal, and everyone ate their fill. After we cleaned the dishes we walked back out to the beach. The sand was nice and comfortable, but the clouds had returned and obscured our view of the stars. We went back to the car after a few minutes and set up the tent for the night. The area we found had a lot of straw spread over the already soft sand, so we looked forward to another particularly restful sleep.