Journal of a Californian Down Under: Christchurch Continued and On to the West Coast

Here's some videos of the Giant Christmas Tree and Christchurch Cathedral:

I did have videos of our boat ride with hundreds of thousands of jellyfish and dolphins jumping all around and beautiful views, but unfortunately I can't upload it.One thing that was pretty funny was how many famous-people-imposters there were. Among others, I saw Matt Damon, Paton Manning, Elijah Wood, Tom Sawyer, and a Wizard.
After finishing with Cathedral Square, we drove over to meet one of my dad's good friends (Mr. Pickering) from a long time ago. They had two kids my age, and it was nice to have somebody to talk to after nearly a month. We had dinner at their house and stayed for a while. For dinner we got our first taste of New Zealand Pizza and experienced the height (so far) of New Zealand's outrageous prices. An example was the chicken and apricot pizza (it had a very interesting taste) - Pizza Hutt charged us something like 15$ for a "large" (the "large" was like 10" diameter). After dinner I got to try out Michael (the younger one)'s guitar - an Epiphone SG, and that was pretty cool. We stayed pretty late until we had to go back to the motel.

The next day Mr. Pickering came over and gave us a scenic tour of Christchurch, which was pretty cool. One thing that took me by surprise was a Maserati dealership that was bigger than the one in Newport Beach. After lunch, my dad took Haylie, Keiren and I to a place called Adrenaline Forest. That was awesome! It's basically an enormous sort of obstacle course involving tight-ropes, flying foxes (ziplines), rope swings and dozens of other different kinds of rope course obstacles you have to do, suspended high in the air. I don't really know how to explain it better. There are six courses, each one harder and higher up than the last. The first one was easy and just a practice one. You have two carabeeners that you have to have hooked on to the safety line at all times (they're pretty strict about that) while you climb through the forest on all sorts of different obstacles. The first 2 courses were easy, but by the time we got to
number 5, I was barely making it from one tree to the next, they were pretty intense. Also, the end of the 5th one was about 100 feet high, which made a 60 foot uphill tightrope walk fairly scary. Unfortunately, we didn't really get any good videos or pictures. We do have a few videos though - I'll try to get them up later. We just finished the 5th course by the time the place closed, so I never got to do number 6. Next time we come down, we're definitely going to do that again.
After we finished with Adrenaline Forest, we rested for a bit at the motel before the Pickerings picked us up to go to a nice Thai Restaurant (it was Mrs. Pickering's birthday). It was a very nice dinner, and afterwards we had our traditional group photo and said goodbye.

We got up really early the next morning to get on the next big train ride across the South Island to the West Coast. The train goes through the Southern Alps and Arthur's Pass, which I've heard are incredible sights. We didn't find out until after an hour of waiting for the train to go that we wouldn't be riding that day. We were told that there was a train accident on the track just out of town - they said there was a problem because "the train didn't stop for a car". We found out later that it was actually a pedestrian - some lady was walking her dog on the train tracks. The engineer blasted his horn three times and there was nothing he could do when the lady just wouldn't get out of the way. Well, that made a big problem for us because the train people were just going cart us off on buses. There was no way we were doing that - four hours on a big bus on a winding mountain road. So we decided to stay in Christchurch for an extra day and shorten our time in Fox Glacier. We went to the Christchurch museum, which was pretty cool, and went kayaking again.

We relaxed the rest of the day and prepared to redo that morning's adventures the next day.
But luckily for us, the train left on schedule. And boy what a train ride. It was incredible! The whole time there was beautiful views. We crossed an enormous bright blue river several times that looked just like the Anduin and witnessed the Southern Alps, named with good reason. Also there were dozens of scenes that looked just like Rohan.