First Day in New Zealand

After a 17 hour day of flying we arrived in Christchurch at 9 am and picked up our Toyota Hiace van.  She's got a name, Caroline II, and she has 400,000 km on her.

We drove 3 minutes to the Woolworths for groceries and then another 5 to the Riverside Holiday Park where we set up.  We thought we'd fall asleep right away but we didn't sleep at all.  For one thing it's 28 degrees today, the NZers are surprised too, it was 13 degrees yesterday.  

Fantails and silvereyes were abundant among this road lined with what Leo thinks are Monterrey pines.

We went for a walk around the neighborhood and saw quite a few common New Zealand birds including a lifer for us:  New Zealand fantail.  We also refamiliarised ourselves with several Australian species:  Australian magpie, masked lapwing, silverwing.  And there's lots of introduced European birds:  song thrush, house sparrow, starling.

 

Akaroa and the Banks Peninsula

We headed south from Christchurch to Akeroa on the banks Peninsula.  We stopped at a reststop on Franklin Lake

 Where we saw black swans (introduced from Australia), great crested grebes and mallards.

We turned off the main highway onto narrow windy roads that looked down onto sheep pasture.  It was really beautiful and really stressful for our first day of driving on New Zealand roads.  The van is rather underpowered so we had a train of vehicles behind us.

Eventually we reached our destination, Akaroa harbour, and pulled into one of the last free parking spots where we would spend the night.  We checked out the busy main street, walked the pier

And saw these birds:

White-faced heron

One of a number of Cormorant species

The very pretty silver gull with a very not-pretty hoarse seagull call

After supper we took the trail to Children's Bay (10 minutes, it said).

When we got there there was a loop trail up into the hills so we checked that out.  

We had great views back to the town from here

And the whole trail was very birdy.  We saw the New Zealand pigeon (lifer).

Bird of the Day!

We were commenting how noisy the cicadas were and Leo spotted one.

The fantails were very outgoing and flashed their tails at us.

We spotted this guy running around a field nowhere near a swamp.

Australasian swamphen

Eventually we got back down to Children's Bay only to find that the tide was in, cutting off our return. So we had to climb back up the hill and retrace our steps. Some 10 minute evening walk!