You read the title right, we’re in New Zealand already. How can this be, you ask, only yesterday I published an article on Ballarat in Victoria, Australia?

Firstly, you should know that this blog trails reality by a couple of weeks (or more recently only a few of days). Secondly and somewhat surprisingly, New Zealand is only a couple of hour’s flight from Melbourne. Yesterday, we dropped off our car with Julia and Dave in Ballarat and caught the train back to Melbourne. After a final night with our friend Mark, we jumped on an aeroplane headed for the land of sheep, down under.

Christchurch, or ChCh as it’s sometimes abbreviated (I’ve chosen to pronounce it “Chi-Chi”, for kicks), is reportedly the most English of all the Kiwi cities. I say city, but really it’s more like a town — the population is only 345,000. We’ve only been here a day as I type this, but I can tell you this: it’s cold.

Yayhay! Whoopee! Yabbadabbadoo! It’s cold! And we love it! It’s overcast, grey and it’s the middle of summer! It’s just like home!

(Alright, it’s still over twenty degrees, which is obviously not cold by British standards, but compared to the forty-plus nonsense of Australia, believe me — this place is cold!)

After spending the morning pleasantly punting up and down the River Avon, we spent the rest of the day delighting in the fact that we could hold hands without getting sweaty palms and bought fleecy scarves and warm jackets! I am still wearing my minimal Australia sun clothes and am loving the twenty degree downward change of temperature and Squiffy is, well… cold. Poor lass has been wandering round wearing a under layer, two fleeces and a scarf and is still complaining of the chills. Seems like she’s got a really narrow comfortable temperature band (if she has one at all) and so I’ll have to set about designing a climate-controlled Squiffy-sized hamster ball in which to put her to continue our tour!

Seriously though, we were able to spend the whole day outside and didn’t need to replace our own body weights with water.

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