Being settled in a place for nearly a month now (which we hadn’t done since leaving Quito, Ecuador in April,) has been really nice.

Christchurch is a place where you can get pretty much anything you need or want, everything is within 15 minutes by bus or two hours walking (that may sound odd to people who haven’t been doing much walking), and people (as all over in New Zealand) are really friendly.

But we didn’t know if we were going to stay.  What was weighing on our minds was:

1. Christchurch is nice, but there’s so much of New Zealand we haven’t seen yet and want to see while we’re here.
2. Our apartment was rented to us under false pretenses (long story which actually involves a large crystal meth bust the police did a few weeks ago – not here, but near here and involving the person we rented from), and we didn’t know if that would get resolved in time for us to stay.

For point #1, it’s easy to get to those places from where we are here… the furthest place away we want to go on the South Island is Milford Sound which is 8 hours or so by car (driving on the “other” side of the road).

So we can have the apartment and not have to lug our stuff with us everywhere.

For point #2, I’m happy to report that all has been resolved, and it’s in writing (with the proper people this time) that we are staying here another month.  So that’s good.

Sorry to be cryptic about that – just don’t know if I should talk about it until it’s all resolved.  But we’ve been safe and fine the whole time.  It just left things up in the air (as far as staying here is concerned,) for us for a couple of weeks.

But we’re good to stay in Christchurch, at this great apartment, and will be making plans to do some travels to other cities on the south island of New Zealand from here.