Day 215 Saturday, March 5th. Kaikoura, New Zealand

We flew from Sydney to Christchurch, New Zealand today. Emirates airlines told us that they would only fly us if we could prove that we had no intention of either visiting or staying downtown Christchurch. (Which we didn’t). We showed them our camper van rental agreement. We were told that it isn’t possible to get into downtown Christchurch anyway.
Our little camper van has a fridge, stove, microwave, toaster, heater, heated towel rail, dbl. bed, sink, bedding and utensils; and we hope it will serve us well for our planned 1.500 mile circuit of the south island of New Zealand over the next 16 days. We love camping and have paid NZ$1,800 for the 16 day rental. (I think about US$0.75 for one NZ$ and so we are looking forward to NZ being more affordable than Australia). We landed at 4.00pm and managed to get to this first stop (Kaikoura), after a three hour drive, for the evening. It looked like a beautiful drive but it was pouring with rain the whole way. It’s autumn now and we are quite weather dependent for this next two weeks and so we are hoping for some sun as we go. We parked the van and got all set up and then discovered that the propane gas tank was empty, (supposed to be full) and so we had to break camp and head to the local gas station. The lady there was managing the whole thing by herself and so told me that she couldn’t break away to fill the propane tank. I did the “no worries- sorry to have bothered you” -back shuffle toward the door and she gave in and told me to mind the store while she went out in the rain. I talked to a biker in the store while I waited and he was a security guard that had been told to evacuate his family from Christchurch and get out of town for a few weeks. The lady came back and told me that she had only managed to partially fill the propane tank and so it was “on the house”, I gave her $5 anyway and walked away and she came after me with $2 telling me that $5 was too much. I dropped the $2 into one of the Christchurch Earthquake support buckets that are everywhere here and thanked her again.
Newspapers here report that as many as 10,000 homes may have been lost in and around Christchurch and that many of those may not get rebuilt since the land has been so “liquefied” by the recent earthquake that it is beyond reclamation.