The Synapse Connections of a lifetime

Been awhile since I last looked at the blog. I guess my attention was taken away by other priorities =)

Morning of day 1:
Christchurch winter's is at all time high that month. Coming from Sydney's weather really didn't prepare me for the wind chills. Decided to head on straight to our first attraction in Christchurch that morning about 10am. There was a free shuttle service from the airport to the International Antarctic Center. It's actually just about 5 to 10 mins walk away from the airport but not that convenient with all our bags and the cold.


Managed to find a place to store our luggage while entering the site. The rate is reasonable so we placed it for about 3 hours if I remember correctly.


There are three main highlight of the place.

The first one is a room to simulate an antarctic storm. It's basically a hugh fridge with a powerful fan to chill you down to negative temperatures.. Quite freaky to be honest.


Next is the Hagglund ride. It's basically a modified armoured personnel carrier from the people that brought you the swiss cheese.

The driver will take u through a quite cool ride like jumping across ledges, falling a bit, tilting a bit, floating a bit (it's amphibious). Quite cool and fun, I like.. Too bad they dun allow second rides..

The last thing there is the penguins. These guys are pain in the a*** to photograph.. they never stay still! The first time I wanted a tele lens begins here.. These penguins are apparently adopted and are deformed in one way or another. It's part of a rehab program or something.

There's also a section to see them swim underwater.

After this I was like.. what's next?

Then I realised we finished the whole attraction.. What a dissapointment..

Verdict: cool but not worth the price.. :P


And then we left on one of the shuttles. We took the coolest looking one for NZ4 a way.

So next we head on for the city.

Christchurch's cathedral square is quite impressive. Had our lunch there before checking in to our backpacker. The cathedral is quite pretty, so I made a HDR picture of it.

We booked a place at Cokers Backpacker.. it's simply the worse out of all the backpackers we're stayed in. The room is cold, there's only one small lamp and everywhere feels a bit dirty. Guess that's what we get for the price we pay.

Afterwards we head on to check out the city.

There's a weird cup thing in the square, didn't check out what it's really called or bothered to check out the history. But the design is weird.. haha!

Then we went to Pak & Save, something like Coles in Aussie and grabbed some stuff to eat. It wasn't enough.. haha! our attempt to cut cost failed.. coz that night we went to maccas to grab a burger.. Our fast food spree begins!