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***Warning: Photo-heavy post!***

We woke up in the morning of day 9 to find everything frozen solid! The road was slippery and icy, our car windows were all frosted up…brrrr….!

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Day 8 started off with a gloomy and overcast sky. By the time we finished breakfast and headed out, it had started drizzling. Not ideal weather for a long drive from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo…

We’d originally planned to drive past Ashburton, Geraldine and Farlie to get to Lake Tekapo, but due to the heavy snowstorm a few days ago on June 12 (the deepest Canterbury had seen since 1945…power was cut to more than 10,000 homes, some of them for up to 18 days), the road to Farlie via Geraldine to be closed! We were totally unprepared for this, so we ended up back-tracking to the i-Site centre at Geraldine to get new directions. The staff there were very friendly and organized and luckily, they had maps showing the detours we should take all printed and ready.

The landscape, or rather, snowscape was amazing…thick piles of snow covering rooftops, roads, pastures…we’ve never seen anything like it!

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We awoke quite early next day for breakfast (included in our room package). Breakfast consisted of a spread of bread, jam, salami, fruits, cereal…all prepared by the owner of the B&B. I loved this weird fruit that I later found out was called Tamarillo…it looks like a cross between a tomato and an apple, and it’s tart and sweet with seeds like those you find in passionfruits.

Full from breakfast, we walked outside to see a Korean film crew filming at the art centre right opposite our hotel. Hoping for a glimpse of, perhaps, Bae Yong Jun (seriously wishful thinking on my part!!), I joined the crowd that had gathered around, but couldn’t see anyone. We pottered about for awhile when I suddenly saw a limo drive into the art centre parking lot…quickly grabbed my camera and zoom lens and managed to snap a few photos of a guy that looks like the star of the show…hehe…so paparazzi!

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Day 6 started off with hubby waking really early to take some photos of the famous ‘Beehive’ while I stayed under the blankets still snoring away!

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Decided to finish up my long overdue posts on our trip to NZ…mainly because we’ll be going to Singapore in one and a half weeks time, so that’ll be another photo-heavy post, and also coz I recently showed the NZ photos to some colleagues and was hit by a pang of nostalgia when I looked at the photos myself…so before I forget anything, I thought I’d better blog it all down first!

So lookout for ten upcoming posts on the remaining days of our NZ holiday…or if you don’t want to read about it, then check back here in about a week’s time when the regular blog posts resumes!