New Zealand Has Plenty of Wool, But No Internet

WE LEFT KAIKOURA BY 10AM, taking the coastal road South. We curved and weaved, coast…inland farms…coast…inland…coast, until we reached a small town called Chiviot.

“Look a flea market!” I yelled.

I was driving, testing out my skills on the wrong side of the road, and pulled over fast. I love flea markets and was excited to see what was being sold.

“Hm…Wool sweaters, wool crafts, wool dolls, wool slippers, pieces of wool, and wool.”

Not really what I had thought, but one lady was selling some pretty Paua shell necklaces and she couldn’t get enough of Quinn.

“Aren’t you cute?”

“Thanks,” Quinn said completely full of himself.

We chatted a bit with her, actually Quinn did most of the chatting; he loves to tell everyone all about our trip and where he’s been.

“Here, you go,” she handed Quinn a beautiful spiral shell.

“Thank You,” Quinn politely said.

“These shells are beautiful,” I pointed to the huge paua shells she had.

“You can find them on the beach and these as well. You can drive down there now, just turn left down that street and you’ll end up at the bay.”

We went down to the beach area, parked the camper and walked out onto the beach. There was no sand on the beach, just big smooth gray rocks, with some jade and red lava rocks mixed in. We split up and went on a shell hunt (Photo Above). I found all sorts of pretty spiral shells, some flakes of paua shells, and some nice pieces of jade. When we were shelled-out. We returned to our camper and compared our spoils from the sea.

WE WOKE UP BRIGHT AND EARLY IN CHRISTCHURCH, to get downtown so I could use some Internet and update the Blog. I walked into the Internet café, hooked up my computer, the Internet came on worked for a second and POOF, gone. I thought it was my computer but everyone in the Internet café was looking around in confusion.

“Telecom says the Internet is out, hopefully they’ll have it back on soon,” announced a café worker.

I hung out for a bit waiting and them decided to come back later.

Most of Christchurch is situated around the main cathedral Square, where the actual Cathedral that gives this city its name is located. Jon and Quinn aren’t interested in Cathedrals or historic buildings, so they left me to wander around the church, while they went off to feed the parking meter. There was actually nothing so spectacular about Christchurch, it had a pretty enough Rose window and some nice stained glass, but other then that it was just a church.

Jon and Quinn met me back at the square, and we walked down to check out the Arts Center, and just some plain Christchurch street life. We ended back up in the square for lunch and picked up some Chinese food from one of the mobile food carts that had a line full of locals.

I ran back into the Internet café to check the Internet status and got a “Nope!” Actually when we listened to the radio in the camper on the way back to bade camp we heard that Telecom, the internet, ATM, and phone provider in New Zealand was having a total country-wide outage, and a majority of ATM’s were out as well as Debit Card systems in stores.

“Now’s a good time to run down to your favorite store if you have no money in your account, they’ll have to take your purchase manually and won’t find out you have no money in your account until tomorrow,” one of the radio personalities said.

At about 8PM that evening Telecom New Zealand gave the all OK, and apologized for all the mayhem that their telecommunication malfunction produced.

QUINN WAS OUT ALL EVENING at the Holiday Park playing with a whole gaggle of children. The Big game for the Lions and All Blacks was approaching in Christchurch and the Holiday parks were filled with Barmy Army Lions fans and their offspring. The Holiday Park had a huge playground, with another one of those jumping pillows, a couple great slides, jungle gym, helicopter, and the kid’s choice, the hamster wheel. Six kids at a time would load up in the wheel and run like little rodents, until one would fall down and scream while the others kept running and the fallen one scrapped and skidded across the bottom.
Jon also made friends with some young Kiwis who invited him to play some Ping-Pong in the game room and Jon in turn showed them how to play the racecar video game for free. Someone had pulled out the coin mechanism and if you put your coin in and then flipped the box you would get your game and your coin back.

I spent the evening with my laptop and the heater in the camper van dreaming of worldwide broadband WiFi coverage.

See all our pictures from New Zealand in the New Zealand Photo Album.

Comments

[Jack Yan]

It's worth noting that that outage was the first one that had ever happened at that level in my 16 years on the internet in New Zealand.

[Heather to Jack Yan]

Oh I'm sure Jack!
New Zealand is amazing regardless of internet. No complaints!