Summer Vibes in the Garden City
January 2020 marked 8 years since I’d moved to New Zealand. The start of the year came with no great fanfare but I had so many plans for the coming year including getting home to see my family and visiting a couple of new countries. I was excited, and the early news reports of a new virus trickling out from China did little to dampen my spirits. When I wasn’t working, I was intent on making the most of my days off whilst the summer weather was at its best, dotting around Christchurch from the city to the suburbs as my mood took me.
On the day that marked my 8-year anniversary, I found myself down at New Brighton beach. The pier there is an iconic Christchurch landscape and despite the wind that was whipping up, there were plenty of people out and about. After the recent hiking I’d done a couple of weeks prior, I was in no great desire to walk the full length of the beach, but I did go for a bit of a toddle down the sand, listening to the surf and daydreaming. Coming here reminds me of the long walks I used to take in Aberdeenshire, walking north from Balmedie to Newburgh. Listening to the sound of crashing waves is one of my favourite things to do and is an instant mood lifter for me. I walked under the pier before heading round to the stairs to walk out on it, a long meander out over the sea where couples stroll hand-in-hand and locals stand with fishing lines cast off into the surf. For me, there’s something quintessentially Trans-Tasman about it, as it always evokes memories of time spent in both Australia and New Zealand.
The following weekend I made use of my annual pass for the Christchurch Gondola, heading round to Heathcote to take the cable car up Mt Cavendish. The views from the Port Hills over Lyttelton Harbour and Pegasus Bay are some of my favourite viewpoints in the city. It was another gorgeous day and both the sea and the sky were a brilliant blue. I enjoyed lunch at the cafe at the top before wandering around the platform and then down onto the hilltop to watch the clouds moving in from the sea, dotted across the sky.
I was spoiled once more the next weekend when the sun was out in force again. After all these years living in Christchurch, I’d watched the city be reborn and there is so much of the new city that I really love. I need little excuse to visit Riverside Market or walk alongside the River Avon, and I especially love to walk through the Botanic Gardens in either spring or summer. The meadow flowers in the Gardens were in full swing and they were alive with bumble bees going about their business. The colours of the flowers were gorgeous with vibrant reds and yellows popping out of the display.
The rose garden was also in its prime by this point in the year, and is always full of people admiring the bushes with their blooms. On this occasion, there weren’t too many people there which meant I could actually take some photos without feeling like I was intruding on people posing for the ‘Gram. As I continued through the Gardens towards Canterbury Museum I noticed some new metal sculptures of a couple of deer grazing under a tree.
But I was really there that day to visit the museum which had a temporary exhibit called ‘Squawkzilla and the Giants’ about the prehistoric giant birds that roamed New Zealand around 60 million years ago. Before I moved here, I’d never heard of the country’s endemic parrots, the kea and kaka, nor did I know that penguins lived here. It’s not hard to love these bird species once you’ve seen them in the wild, so I was as happy as the kids that visited to come face to face with 1m and 1.5m tall penguins that used to call New Zealand home. It’s strange to thing that there used to be a penguin as tall as a human that waddled along the beaches here.
Before visiting this exhibit, I hadn’t realised that New Zealand used to have crocodiles. I always think of our neighbour across the Tasman as being the crocodile country, but apparently 40 million years ago, so were we. Then finally, I came face to face with squawkzilla, a human-sized parrot which looked very much like a giant kaka. The rest of the museum houses mostly static exhibits which I’ve been through many times before, so I took a quick whizz through a couple of them before heading back out into the sunshine.
I took a different route back through the Botanic Gardens to reach my car. This led me past the long stretch of flowers that leads up the wall next to the College. There were more bees buzzing around and when I reached the rose garden again, I wandered round the flower bed at its perimeter before heading into the nearby conservatory to get a view from the balcony on the first floor. There was a few more people milling about the roses by now, and plenty of people up on the balcony also. The following weekend I was to have the first of many planned trips away from home, but these first few weeks of 2020 had reminded me how much I love living in the Garden City.
MistyNites 