Student Bloggers

This trimester at Victoria University, we were given a week long break for Easter and will have another week for the mid trimester break. My friends and I are taking these two breaks as opportunities to adventure.

Easter break was from March 24th to March 30th. My friends and I decided to fly down to the South Island of New Zealand and do everything we could. We booked our tickets from Wellington to Christchurch during the second week of classes and then slowly made lists of what we wanted to do.

The way our schedules worked out, we were able to leave on the 22nd and not miss any class or tutorials. We arrived in Christchurch and stayed in a hostel for the night. We walked around for a while exploring and found the most amazing park! If you even go to Christchurch, try to visit the Margaret Mahy Family Playground (Takaro a Poi). The park consists of a giant slide, rock walls, trampolines, a zipline, and tons of fun activities. We spent easily three hours there.

My favorite part of the park was the zipline. We took turns racing one another and couldn’t stop laughing after we would bounce at the end.

The next day we picked up a transfer car from the airport. Instead of renting a car to drive to Queenstown, we looked into rental companies that needed cars to be taken back to Queenstown. The great part about this is that since you are doing the company a favor, you pay little to nothing. Depending on the company, you will only have to pay for gas, or if you go over the allotted free miles, etc.

After picking up the car we made our way down the South Island stopping on the way at Mt. Sunday and Lake Tekapo where we stayed the night.

When we arrived in Queenstown on the 24th it was pouring rain. We were worried that the weather wouldn’t be ideal during our trip but luckily, after returning the transfer car and picking up a rental car, the rain stopped. We picked up a rental car last minute- we were very lucky they had one still since it was a holiday week. We drove around Queenstown scoping out places to eat, to shop and activities to do. We stayed at a campsite for the days we were in Queenstown. We were only a 5 minute walk to the main part of town where all the restaurants and shops were.

If you find yourself in Queenstown, I recommend Fergburger and Caribe. Fergburger was recommended to us by my friend’s Kiwi flatmates and Caribe we tried because I wanted Mexican food.

Caribe has dishes from different parts of Latin America. Their horchata and flan reminded me a lot of home and everything was delicious to my friends and I.

While staying in Queenstown we also bungy jumped from the Kawarau Bridge, the world’s first bungy jump, and road tripped to Milford Sound. We went from beautiful waterfalls to an adrenaline rush!

We took another transfer car back to Christchurch when our vacation was coming to an end but we drove along the coast this time. There are a lot of campsites you can stay at along the drives through the south island and no matter where you stay, you can see all of the stars. It’s an incredible experience.

Our trip was long and exciting so as you can imagine we were exhausted when we came back, but we have tons of pictures, memories and inside jokes now. To be honest, I still miss home, but when I am with my friends, I have the time of my life. We have our mid semester break coming up soon so we are going to start to plan that. Our strategy is to explore the South Island during our week breaks and explore the North Island during weekends and again after classes and finals are done.

We didn’t have an itinerary for our week, we just went with the flow. We thought that we should have made more plans before we left but we are glad we didn’t because we always had time to stop and take pictures, explore and not stress.

I’m looking forward to our next trip but I’m also looking forward to the days in between!