Akaroa

Friday 6th to Sat 7th March
Friday was a big driving day - bigger than we had realised. We packed up and set off from Tekapo and James drove the two and a half hours to Christchurch where we were going to meet Jamie. He had flown up from Dunedin to spend our last weekend in New Zealand with us. After we collected him I drove the last hour and a half to Akaroa, arriving mid afternoon. This pretty seaside town was very hot and sunny, and very French with street signs and many of the shops and cafés en français. We found out that the French and British had been racing to get to this area first, when they were held up by a storm. The cautious French took shelter but the British pressed on, and when the French sailed into the bay the first thing that they saw was the Union Jack flying on a hastily erected flagpole. They must have been very disappointed, after sailing for two years, to have missed claiming the land by just four days. They were offered some land by the British, with the option of returning to New Caledonia if they didn’t want to stay, but clearly they did like it, as can be seen by the French influence in the town.
Jamie had brought something new with him - a big tattoo on his shoulder! He has been planning to get a New Zealand tattoo for a while and had worked with a Maori tattooist to create a design containing a stylised albatross. For the first couple of days he needed to keep it covered with an antiseptic dressing, and it was a bit tender.
We went wine tasting to the Meniscus vineyards up on the hill above the town which was a gorgeous setting. Akaroa is in the middle of an ancient volcano so it is surrounded by mountains. The volcano hasn’t erupted for seven and a half million years so we felt pretty safe! Later we walked along the beach and had dinner in a tiny bar right on the front called “Harbar.” James and Jamie had bought some Meniscus wine and after dinner they quaffed it on our balcony.
Saturday was even warmer but that didn’t stop my two Jameses from planning a walk up into the hills behind the town. I quickly became rather hot and bothered but they both urged me onwards and I was rewarded from a gruelling 200 metres above the town with fantastic views over the whole bay. The walk downhill through fields of dry grass was idyllic; lots of birds sang loudly in the trees and there were lupins blooming beside a stream. I got some unfortunate nettle stings when I was going to the bathroom in the undergrowth; James put some insect bite cream on them which helped. I was so hot when we got back to our apartment that I had to have a shower to cool down. In the afternoon we went kayaking in the bay. It was brilliant. There were only four of us on the trip; the other person was a lovely Israeli dentist called Helen. Our friendly instructor Jake (from America) kept us safe and gave us lots of information on the area as we travelled, about the geology, seabirds, and edible seaweeds. We paddled mostly along the coast, and when we came out into more open water it felt quite choppy. On the way back to the beach James and I managed to steer straight into a wooden post that was sticking out of the water; Jake said he had never seen anyone hit it head on before! Jake and Jamie were comparing their time in New Zealand and talking about Maori words - apparently the Maori word for a fantail is piwakawaka which I think is a great word for my favourite New Zealand bird.
Later on we went for dinner to a favourite restaurant of Jamie’s; The Little Bistro. It is absolutely tiny and the food was truly delicious. As we strolled back along the bay to our apartment we chatted about  our brilliant day.