There’s a CD player in the van. We were expecting a car with a tape deck, which would’ve allowed us to listen to my iPod, but there is a CD player in the van. So we searched through radio stations for a bit, but couldn’t really find any good ones, so we ended up listening to my Kerrang! CD. I didn’t think it would have much to offer Amanda & Alyssa, since it’s mostly metal, some of it hardcore, but it turned out to be really good, actually, and even they like it. The songs by My Bloody Valentine and Atreyu are particular standouts for me, I don’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head and don’t have access to the CD from here. We drove to the outskirts of Christchurch and went up in the Christchurch Gondola, which is like a gigantic enclosed ski lift that brings you to the top of a mountain, where you get to look down at Christchurch. It’s got some spectacular scenery. I bought a T-shirt and a pair of underwear in the gift shop. They’re both sex related. Kiwis (the local people are referred to as Kiwis, by the way, if you didn’t know; Kiwi doesn’t just refer to the bird and the fruit) seem to be way less squeamish about sex than Americans are, which is strange since America pushes sex in your face all the time with advertising, movies, television, magazines, etc while you have very little of that here, at least from what I’ve seen. There was also a weird exhibit called the Time Tunnel or something to that effect in the building at the summit. It was free so we went through it; we sat in this car that appears to have been driven by magnets under the floor as it led us around to different installations showing New Zealand’s history. There were projectors by all of the installations where they showed a video of a little girl narrating the history of the country and I thought she was an excessively creepy little girl, and she does not have a future in acting ahead of her. We walked around the mountain a bit and then returned to the gondola to return down to our car and get on our way.
We spent pretty much the rest of the day driving. First we drove around Lyttelton, a seaside town, and then out into the countryside, which is what most of New Zealand is. We saw sheep. We saw cows. We saw sheep. We ended up on this back country road that took us up into the mountains, where we got stopped briefly by a herd of sheep marching down the road, being shepherded by three dogs and a Kiwi on a four-wheeler. The road quickly turned to gravel and we became hopelessly cut off from civilization for probably six hours while we drove around the mountains at 30kph. I took lots of video, we took lots of photos, because it really was beautiful. We listened to our lone CD probably five or six times. There were no guardrails; in fact I think in this whole country, guardrails are all but unheard of. We were inches from 50 meter or longer drops, or else just from rolling down rocky mountainside with nothing but sheep to break our fall. Essentially, we could’ve died up there. We didn’t see another car the entire time, which was fortunate, because we didn’t think there’d be any way for us to share that tiny road. We drove around the Banks Peninsula for the rest of the day and then traveled south until we hit Oamaru, where we spent the night in The Empire Hotel, which is actually a hostel. We had a tiny room, but there was internet in a common room, which we couldn’t get on because it was only one computer (there were two but the second kept saying "a network cable is unplugged" and I couldn’t really do anything about it) and it was pretty well spoken for. There was a line. We walked around town for a bit, found that the only thing open was a Shell station (it was a small town), so we bought some milk, drank most of it, and went to bed.
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