Day 12: back to Christchurch

Today was the last day on the motorcycles. We road from Punakaiki back to Christchurch to turn in the motorcycles. But first we rode about 1 km up the coast from the hotel to the Pancake Rocks national park. These are layers of rock eroded by the ocean to look like layers of pancakes, many layers of pancakes. Here are some pictures from a walk out along a pathway through the sculpted rocks.

Next we rode a bit further up the road to the "glow worm caves." We could not see any worms and nothing was glowing, even in pitch black. Maybe the worms only glow at night.

Disappointed by the lack of glowing worms we headed off towards Aurthur's Pass, the way through the mountains to Christchurch.

After crossing through the pass we came to Castle Rocks, which were named because they resembled old castle ruins. These rocks are favorites for climbers to go "bouldering." This is free climbing boulders with foam "crash pads" to fall on if the climber loses their grip and fall. We did not see anyone bouldering. But the rocks were cool looking and worth the stop.

We continued on towards Christchurch and stopped for our last latte' and pastry break of the trip in the town of Springfield. There are towns named Springfield everywhere, and even in New Zealand. As we got close to Christchurch Howard insisted we take a short detour to add 2 km to our route. This would make the total distance covered on our trip exactly 4,000 km. We pulled into the rental company and the odometer clicked over to 4,000. We turned in the motorcycles, changed out of our riding clothes, and were driven to the hotel where we began the trip.

We had one last thing to do before flying home tomorrow. We took a long walk to downtown Christchurch, through the Central Park, for dinner on a small street with cafe's we had spotted on our first day on the trolly tour. Here is the trolly coming by our outside table at the restaurant we chose for our final dinner in New Zealand.

This trip is a wrap. We have seen most of the South Island. We have criss crossed it and it feels like there is not much of it we have not seen. We have seen mountains, ocean, rivers, glaciers, sheep, cows, and lots and lots of very well tended farmland. We also ate a variety of different flavors of scones on our daily coffee and pastry breaks. And we met lots of friendly Kiwi's, the people that is. We never saw a Kiwi bird. It has been a very enjoyable trip.

Here is a wooden laser engraved postcard the rental company gave us of the two islands of New Zealand, a nice memento of the trip.