The Airbnb house was lovely and so comfy that the kids wouldn't wake up early. All the shouting and jumping the previous night must've made them tired.
Aniketh woke up by 8:30 am and we left to the airport to pick up ur car for the next phase of our journey. Our Uber driver was from Chennai....what chance!! He's been here for 10 years and does this as a side job. He said that there were about 200,000 Indians in a country of 4.5M people.
Our next car for the journey was an 8 seater car run by a company called Jucy. You see these green colour vans everywhere. Christchurch is still recovering from the recent earthquake and hence, there is nothing much to do beyond just a night stay here. We had half a day and then we were driving up north to Kaikoura.
The family was up and ready by that time we came back home and off we went to "Punting on the Avon".
No we aren't in UK. There's an Avon here and they do punting here as well. The punting time we got was 1:30 pm and we were there by 11:45 am. We walked around central Christchurch - lots of reconstruction happening post the earthquake. It will be a prettier city when all is done.
Post lunch we got to the Avon in time and the punting (boat ride) was fantastic. Our guide was a French guy who told us all about how the trees in the park came from different parts of the world.
We saw so many Willow trees - Japanese, Chinese and European. It was beautiful to see this in the city center. We bid adieu to my nephew and his family and started our journey to Kaikoura.
A quick stop for coffee and we reached Kaikoura by 8:00 pm. We found out that due to the bad weather in the past few days, whale watching has been canceled and these resulted in next 2 days being fully sold out. We will see what we see tomorrow.
I remember a class by my professor CK Prahlad in Biz school, where he spoke about rental economy vs ownership. Today I stayed in an Airbnb house, took Uber and rented a car from Jucy. The new world is live and flourishing.