The Birds and the Bees - Christchurch

The Birds and the Bees - Christchurch


Christchurch came a day early for us as we seemingly raced down the coast of the south island. We arrived on Saturday but our first Warm Showers host wasn't expecting us until Sunday. We checked out a few hostels close to the city center looking for camping, then settled on a nice place called Frienz for a little extra $$ but walking distance to everything. We reveled in the luxury of our private bathroom and complimentary shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, toothbrushes, lotion, and an unidentifiable packet with directions only in an Asian dialect. In true backpacker hostel style we jockeyed for position at one of the range tops in the small but well stocked kitchen and made dinner. We fell asleep in a room lit like day from the hostel sign right outside our window; lulled by the sounds of Saturday night in a big city.

Backpacker kitchen organization at its best:

The next day promised us: our first warm showers host, a national criterium race, and a Santa Parade. What more could we ask for?! We packed up and headed out setting off to meet Jeff Chandler our host. When we arrived at Jeff's house we were greeted warmly and welcomed into a lush and densely shrub lined piece of heaven. Jeff is a bee keeper hobbyist (although you can easily tell he's passionate about it beyond mere hobby) and his bees were busily working around the hives outside the front door. We were offered either a camping spot on the lawn or the extra bedroom - we took the bedroom and the opportunity to wash up our tent so that we might stand a chance at passing through the Aussie biosecurity with all our gear. We chatted briefly with our
host and headed back into the city for an exciting afternoon. In the early heats of the criterium we ran into Katrina, one of the folks we assembled bikes with at the Auckland airport. We were all planning on seeing the Santa parade so we set a place to meet and she headed off to see about some repairs they were having done at a local bike shop. The criterium races were great! The two hairpin turns in the course made for some major wipe outs as the riders clipped their pedals trying to accelerate through the turns. We checked out the Santa parade from Cathedral square and found Mike and Katrina there chatting with a German cycle tourist they'd just met and hawking candy being tossed to the crowd from passing floats. We were shortly joined by a Swiss couple with a very unusual half recumbent tandem touring bike. The couple had been making quite a name for themselves around NZ with such an unusual bike and Mike and Katrina were excited to meet with them. Rides were given, stories swapped, housing arranged, and touring friendships forged amongst complete strangers as the interconnectedness of cycle touring worked it's magic on all of us that afternoon.

We witnessed a very strange array of floats and bands throughout the Santa parade, seemingly no one theme tied any of the floats together, certainly this was not a Christmas themed event! We saw exactly one Santa on the last float, he and his reindeer closed down a very odd but fun show and we parted ways with our friends exchanging email addresses and hoping to cross paths with all of them again.

Back at the bee ranch Jeff offered us a tour of one of his hives. Z. reluctantly accepted and E. excitedly donned the white canvas bee keepers suit. Jeff showed and explained away about the hive, the bees, the social structure in there, and answered our inevitable killer bee questions all with great humor and lots of knowledge and interest!

The next day and evening were spent sharing cycling stories and chatting about bees and honey. Jeff graciously offered us his garage (an early 1900's milking shed) for our bike cleaning and packing project. We scrubbed, wiped, degreased, and meticulously dug the NZ crud out of tires in hopes, again, that we would make it though biosecurity unscathed. Two nights with Jeff were supremely relaxing and we were delighted to wake up to honey harvesting happening in the kitchen!

Soon we were saying our goodbyes and saying to ourselves how fortunate we'd been to have been taken in by Jeff and all the other unlikely hosts we'd had throughout New Zealand.