Being Henrik: Timaru, Peel Forest and Christchurch

We left Omauru and stopped pretty soon again in Timaru, a short
distance north. Timaru is a big port town, and you could notice that
the main focus was not tourism here. We cooked lunch in our van
(proven pasta recipe :-) and decided to head further north. Next stop
came up somewhat by chance. Selina was reading up in our DOC site book
for the south island and found a nice spot; Peel Forest. We got
excited because it looked like a good base for some hiking. The
weather was not playing ball this day for a change, we had a lot of
rain, which was more the exception on our trip luckily.

Getting to Peel Forest and setting up the van, we decided to not let
this stop us and went about finding some hiking tracks around the camp
site. We had some issues getting our bearings on the hiking map, but
once we found the walking path it turned out to be a really nice
forest walk with lots of native trees. We learned that there had been
a lot of woodcutting going on in the area, and we found some leftovers
from that, abandoned saw pits. We have now learned what a saw pit is,
amazing how hard people had to labor before the woodcutting got
mechanized.

The DOC site was situated on a big meadow, not too busy at all, and
still had great amenities. One of our best stopovers on the south
island, although the rain was tipping down for most of our time there.
We fell asleep to the sound of rain smattering on the roof of the
campervan, very relaxing and reminded Henrik of the camping holidays
of his youth.

The next day we defied the rain and decided to go for another hike in
the Peel Forest. We went to see the Acland Falls. Since it was both wet
and also fairly steep, the hike proved to be a little challenging.
Nothing too serious, but we were glad that we had brought our hiking
poles. The hike did not take very long. When we had finished we
decided to move on to Christchurch.

In Christchurch we decided to return to our proven concept, and found
a top 10 site that delivered as we had gotten used to expect by now.
We went in to have a look at Christchurch, and already more than a
year after the first big earhquake, it was a sombering view. The
central part was stil closed down, and we saw a lot of work being done
to demolish highrise buildings that had stood the earthquake but been
deemed dangerous and irreparable afterwards. In the evening, we
finished some leftovers in the van and decided to go out to catch a
movie. We watched the american version of The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo. It was a good movie, althoug Henrik is not sure that it tops
the Swedish version that was produced for TV. The challenging part in
producing the movie is that the story line is so rich, that all
details cannot be included in the movie version, which makes some
parts of the film feel like unneccessary appendixes.

Our next day in Christchurch marked the end of a great section of our
holiday. We returned our camper van at the Christchurch Britz station,
and it was time to get the rucksacks on and start traveling on foot
instead. We were really lucky to find an empty cottage at our top 10
site, as Christchurch accomodation was booked out flat, by visiting
tourists, builders, and local people who had their homes rebuilt.