Hanging with Llamas

I’m still in Christchurch for the time being, I’m loving this city. It has a great bicycle culture (bike lanes everywhere and tons of people riding.) It shouldn’t be a great surprise as everything is so flat around here so it’s an accessible way to get around. I’ve found a wwoofing job about 10k outside of town working on a garden, weeding. It’s a pretty easy gigand the people are nice. I get into town just about every day to wander around and check out the town. I think a major reason I like this place is it still maintains a soul even though it’s a metropolitan type of area. There are still a lot of original buildings and lots and lots of parks and open spaces. I guess thats why it’s given the nickname of the garden city. It’s nice to see a city embrace open spaces instead of grubbing for money.

As for when I start cycling again (probably in about a week or so) I’ll swing out to Akaroa (the one and only French town in New Zealand) as it’s supposed to be a tourist attraction, I’ll go mid-week to try lessen the amount of traffic I’ll have to fight. After that I’ve made an executive decision to make the cycling harder, so in that respect I’ve decided to give up the coast route and start crisscrossing the south island a few times as I’ve always said that one of the reasons I do this trip is to challenge myself physically and recently the cycling is just a matter of getting on the cycle and going. Also to make things more difficult I’ve decided to start wild camping or world camping. I’m tired of staying in ‘holiday parks’ here. These parks basically amount to KOA Kampgrounds in the states and I was none too impressed with that experience. Any campground that has internet is not camping, yet most of the campgrounds i’ve been while here have had that luxury. I’m not sure if i’m just no good at finding DOC (Department of Conservation) campgrounds or they just aren’t signed well but I think wild camping will allow me to use my stove once again (instead of the kitchen that seems to be in every campground.) And the third way that I plan to make it more difficult is to get off the main roads, the south island has a few more options when it comes to roads (at times) and more often I’ll try and get off the main roads. Hopefully this will become more challenging.

I spent a lot of time at the Buskers Festival and I think I saw about 95% of the acts here. Hands down best performer I thought was Fraser Hooper He has the best expressions and mostly works amazingly well with kids in the audience, his timing is impeccable and his routine is hilarious. I think I saw his act 3 times and it never gets old, mostly because you can never tell what the kids are going to do when they come up to stage. All around it was a terrific festival and I think it’s a great venue for the show to go down and great way to showcase the city. I added a few more pictures from the festival and I promise that’s all I’ll show from there.

Oh yeah, the other thing on the farm is llamas! Still haven’t figured out if they spit but i’m not one to piss of a llama, they have vicious looking feet.