Cruise - Day 6 - Akaroa

Akaroa is supposed to be a small town with one main road along the shore. The big city nearby is Christchurch, almost two hours away. There is an excursion called 'Christchurch on your own' that will take you to Christchurch and leave you there for sightseeing. For $90, thanks but no thanks.

After the exertion yesterday, the group feels  like starting later at 11am, presumably to avoid the rush. We don't feel like waiting around in the morning so we decided to break from the group and go on to Akaroa earlier. We ended up leaving at 9am. Once there we walked a couple of the walking trails up the French Cemetery and the Stanley Park. The French Cemetery trail is very short.  The Stanley Park trail lomger. It is also slippery at places with the rain yesterday. After going half way up the hill, we decided to opt for the paved road when it presents itself. We still have many days on the cruise and I really don't want to get hurt on the hill. It was nice morning and very good views up the hills. It was good thing that we started out early because it started to drizzle not long after we went back to level ground. The slippery path would have been unwalkable with rain.

We were still waiting for the group to come over by tender so we decided to try fish & chips for lunch. It was a good decision as the fried bluecod is much better than any of the fish or other seafood we had on board the ship.

We met up with the group and walked over to the lighthouse and then went for our third trail of the day. The advice from the i-site is to walk up the Garden of Tane area near the lighthouse. It was not good advice because we actually missed the Garden by walking around it. Couldn't find the path leading to the garden area. We found out that we could have gotten there directly if we were to take the earlier ramp up the hill. In any event, we didn't want to walk too much and prefer the pavement so it works out okay.

It is true that Akaroa has only one main road with all the action but one can get off that beaten path and enjoy it a little differently. In fact, the trails are also beaten paths because they are well-advertised in the Akaroa brochure bit with not too many takers.  We did run into a few people up those trails. It was obvious that we all enjoyed being away from the crowd for a little bit.