NZ South Island Motorhome Road trip 2018 Day 1

First day of the trip , we decided to just stay in Christchurch cos if we were to collect the motorhome , we might not make it to Lake Tekapo before nightfall as our flight reached NZ around 1 pm. This is also to have a better rest as we had red eye flight from SG to Oz to NZ. And because we got a night free stay voucher from Amex , so might we well make full use it.
Bus fare in Christchurch is not cheap unless you get a metro pass , but since we are just staying for one night , we just paid the normal fare. *Do note that the bus fare is more expensive if you take directly to and from airport. Please refer to my first page on informations on how to save money for this.
Basically when we reach hotel is about 2-3 pm so after we check-in , we decided to go to the city centre to take a walk , just to revisit the Cathedral ...... which was destroy by the earthquake in 2011 ? I had been to Christchurch many years ago so i had seen the Cathedral when it was not destroy.

Taken in 2005

Taken in 2018

It's quite sad to and iconic landmark left to rot like this , apparently no repair had been done for the past 7 years after it was destory by the earthquake.
Next I was trying to find the "185 Empty white chair earthquake Memorial" and the Re:start containers but cos did not had wifi with me and i forgot to save the location on my google map so I couldn't find it. In the end , i think the re:Start was already closed in 2017 and when we took the bus then we saw the white chairs memorial. :(
We decided to head to Pedro's House of Lamb , we actually wanted to dine at the main outlet at Colombo Street , in the end , we took the wrong bus and ends up at their Merivale outlet. ( one is south and the other is north) think we took the wrong bus route. So we ends up takeaway and decided to just walk back to our hotel which was about 25 min walk. We had the Lamb at the hotel with beer and L&P ( my fav drink in NZ ) Best to pout into champagne glass and act Atas !

View from our room

Hotel Backyard

Free cookies from the hotel

We stayed at Chateau on the Park , a DoubleTree by Hilton , We stayed for free cos we had a complimentary hotel voucher. The location is a bit off from the city centre , don't think we will had stay here if it's not free but there is a bus stop for the airport bus nearby so it make it easy for use to get to/fro from the airport.
Nothing much is being done other them things mentioned above , plus did a bit shopping at icebreaker - a company dealing with Merino wool , we have outlet in SG but finding my size is much easier there and price is a little bit tad cheaper. ( SG can be cheaper if having promotion ) I seriously recommend everyone to own at least one merino wool base layer. Had one when i was in Norway ( but was using Minus 33 one then ) and it really didn't stink at all though i wore it for 10 days and it was really comfy.
That's all for Day one ........ looking forward to tomorrow where we will be collecting the motorhome from Wilderness , which will be out home for the next 2 weeks.