The drive from Hokitika to Christchurch was another 4 hour-ish drive, and as Justins leg was hurting him so much because of the glacier walk the day before, I had to do all the driving myself. We left quite early in the morning as soon as we were up and set off. The route we chose took us straight through the island back to Christchurch, and through a place called Arthur's Pass. I personally think this is the best drive we have done so far as views go and I really liked it, apart from the fact that my right foot ached once we had finished. The weather still hadn't improved much from the previous day and it was still raining on and off at first. The roads were fairly straight to start with but then became more and more winding, and the weather became worse especially as we reached Arthur's Pass itself. We had gradually been climbing higher and higher in the mountians and eventually there was quite a bit of snow on the ground, and although it had melted on the road there was still a bit of ice on it. Arthurs Pass is very high up and the road really windy. The town itself is the highest altitude town in the country. The road wasn't the best to drive on and all the other vehicles on it seemd to be huge lorries. Even they were driving slow, and the highest gear I was able to drive in because of that was first for most of the time. Anyway, we eventually made it and almost as soon as we came through the other side of the pass the weather changed dramatically. There were no clouds in the sky and it was a lovely day. There were loads of mountins about covered with snow and it was really beautiful. It carried on like this for another couple of hours until we neared Christchurch, and it probably took us longer than it should have as we kept stopping to take pictures.

As we had already stayed in Christchurch before and we knew where a campsite was so we went straight and checked into the same one we had stayed at before, as we knew it was nice. We stayed there just the one night, and then left early in the morning. We parked up by the Botanic Gardens and walked through them towards the town. This was done quite slowly as our legs were aching still from the glacier walk we had done a couple of days ago. We just stopped for lunch as we had seen quite a lot of the city the last time we were there, and then made our way back to the van so we could move on again. We timed this well as it started to rain, again, by the time we made it back. It was hard to belive that exactly two weeks ago was the day we had arrived in Christchurch for the first time, and that our time in New Zealand was pretty much half way over already!