The rest of the day, we were out and about in Christchurch, including a walk by the old cathedral that was severely damaged by the earthquakes. As you can see in the picture above, huge parts of it crumbled to the ground or had to be demolished later. There seems to be some debate as to whether they will ever be able to return to holding worship there.
After lunch, we explored the free local museum. We should also mention that Christchurch has a beautiful Botanical Gardens that we explored on Friday when we got to town, and the museum sits on the edge of it. The museum had so many great exhibits, including a few dinosaur fossils, a mummy, an impressive collection of Chinese artifacts, and an entire section dedicated to Antarctic explorations. We spent enough time in there to be utterly brain tired.
On the way back to our hostel we stopped in at the temporary worship space for the cathedral, which they call the Cardboard Cathedral, because of all the cardboard and wood elements in the space. You can see how creative it is in the pictures below.
Our final day in Christchurch was a relaxing one. We returned to the Cardboard Cathedral for a noon choral performance of Christmas music by the Cathedral boys choir, then set out for the Addington Coffee Co-Op, a cafe we had been to that first morning in New Zealand. In the evening we grabbed dinner at a local Cassel & Sons brewpub and returned to the hostel to get packed up for our trip to Te Anau and the Kepler Track. Beautiful pictures and the tale of our journey on the track to follow in the coming days.
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