From the Towers of Manhattan to the Hills of Beverly

A new dawn: We Go Bi-Coastal.  With all due respect to Peter Allen.  We got up early, we took an Uber to the Christchurch “International” Airport, and caught a flight to Auckland, then rented a car, and drove southwest to the Taranaki region in the southwest of the north island.  So from the bright lights of east coast Christchurch to the west coast glitz of New Plymouth. 

 

Here’s what’s novel about domestic air travel in NZ: For local flights, say Christchurch to Nelson, you walk into the airport, show the boarding pass on your phone, and get on the flight.  You read that correctly: No security.  No waiver on fluids.  Got a bottle of water?  No problem, get on the plane.

 

For our flight, we actually did have to clear security.  But nothing came out of the bag.  No items of clothing came off.  Personal water bottles went through the scanner no problem.  It’s all an article of faith down here.

 

Our plane (thankfully an Airbus A320 and not a twin prop F27, like the Aer Lingus we took recently, a twin prop from Edinburgh to Dublin.  Ugh) ran a few minutes late, but smoothly, from a rather fine day in the south to a rather cloudy and humid day in the north.

We picked up a rental car midday and made our way south on the #1 motorway, then exited onto the #3, a two-lane, rural route which meanders down through spectacular rural acreage, farms, fern forests, expansive landscapes of ranches and bush, then turns out to the ocean, the Tasman Sea, and led us to our destination for four days, New Plymouth.  What follows are several images Stephen took, from the passenger seat, while travelling at 100 km/h.  So good on SS for the navigational record!

We checked into a pretty basic hotel, but beautifully situated off the oceanfront.  After a short walk around the old town, we took dinner at a tapas restaurant, then walked a bit more for exercise, and called it a night.