January 13

This was our last full day in New Zealand. I was up at 0710, had tea and toast, then showered and dressed. Quite a bit of time was spent organising luggage, but mainly emptying the car out.
We set out at 0900 and went to visit the Antarctic Centre. We arrived at 0915 and finally left at 1115.
During the time we spent in the centre, I spent some time in the cool room. This was normally at –8°C but on occasions the wind machine started up and there was a wind chill down to –21°C. We had a look at the penguins, most of who were either injured or physically incapable of caring for themselves in the wild. When they were being fed, it was interesting to see the different behaviour of the individual penguins – some were gluttons, some shy and some would only take food from a particular keeper. On the way out, we went into the “storm”, down to –20°C. Both the normal temperature and the storm conditions were warmer than yard duty at Werribee on the oval in winter.
On the way out we went for a ride on the “Hegglund” all-terrain vehicle. Fran had to ride in the front because the back was full (normally this would be an area for troops. It was very different, climbing up 45° slopes and traversing 40° slopes and then floating through over a metre of water. I was interested because I had seen fleets of them in the northern areas of Finland and Norway.
We returned to the city and parked on the street. We walked through a mall to visit Christ Church. Here we looked around and I walked up the tower. The view over the city was impressive, but unlike European places, modern buildings had blocked out long-distance views. There was a performance on in the square, which we looked at for a time. There was audience participation, reluctant on the part of some but everyone ended up enjoying themselves. There was also a tourist tram which ran around the central parts of the city. Opposite the tram stop was a giant chessboard, with people playing chess there.
We walked back to the car and headed off to visit the Roman Catholic Cathedral – I had promised the preist at Invercargill that we would visit, and it was quite impressive, but lacking in the grandeur of Christ church. We had lunch at a Burger King and then bought soup for tea at an adjacent supermarket.
After that we went out to the New Zealand Air Force museum. It seemed much smaller than I remembered, but the problem is that I have been to too many since then – and some of them were huge. The afternoon wore on and we went back to the motel. I emptied the car and left Fran at the motel while I drove to the depot to drop the car off. At the same time I was returning the car, there was a French couple picking up a car. I could now appreciate how difficult it would be for them – language, colloquial speech relating to driving, driving on the “wrong side”, unfamiliar road signs and in a different language. I got driven back to the motel.
The shops were still open so we walked around to Westfield Riccarton shopping centre and went through a variety of shops there – but there was no shopping as our luggage was already up to weight. Then we went back to the motel and had tea, using up any food which we had left.
Later in the evening I transferred and processed today’s photos, wrote up today’s blog as a summary and then watched a little TV. We went to sleep early as we had to be up at 0215 tomorrow to catch our taxi at 0315 tomorrow morning to the airport.