Christchurch - Arrival from Auckland

Today we need to cover a longer distance by plane first. We fly from Auckland to Christchurch at noon. We want to explore the South Island now. We have planned two weeks for this.

We hope that the weather on the South Island will be a bit better and more stable than on the North Island. We shall see.

The flight lasts just over an hour. We have a window seat and Thorsten can take a few pictures from the air - we hope for views of Tongariro and Taranaki ...

Fortunately, the cloud cover is not continuous, and we at least get a few nice glimpses of the area around Taranaki. Particularly noticeable to us is the dense forest, which forms a circle, as if drawn with a compass, around the volcano. We can't see anything of Tongariro & friends again. We assume that we cannot recognize the snow-covered volcanoes because, despite the few clouds, they do not differentiate between snow and clouds.

Instead, we see some tall mountains on the South Island ...

After a drink and chips or a cookie, we land in Christchurch and head straight to the rental car pick-up (we are picking up our SUV this time, not a Kia Rio, which was sold to us as an upper mid-range car... A car that even has a cover for the trunk. This way, no one from the outside can see our travel luggage when we travel from place to place, which we believe is important to prevent very curious people from accessing our luggage. the local Countdown supermarket. Then: onward