Banks Peninsula

Charteris Bay Cottage
Chateris Bay Interior
Vietnamese Porker

We arrived in Christchurch in the early afternoon, shopped for provisions and got our bearings. To our surprise we found that our dinner on the tram with Ros and John Dekker, friends from Toronto was scheduled for that very evening. We would have to go to our cottage in Charteris Bay and return again – good thing we looked it up or we would have missed our rendezvous. How one loses track of time and appointments when on holiday.
Our cottage turned out to be attached to a beautiful home on a hillside. It was a self-contained 1 BR apartment with a large front room divided into sitting room and kitchen. It had absolutely every convenience and even a resident spotted Vietnamese porker, the daughter’s family pet. We enjoyed feeding him scraps from our dinners. The cottage was an excellent base for exploring the peninsula and getting back into Christchurch, a 45 minute drive over harrowing Dyer’s Pass. The owners had emigrated from the UK in 2006. The husband, a navy man, had been based at Yeovilton right near Duncan’s birthplace, Yeovil in the West Country. Small world! The wife, Belinda, looked and spoke just like Luisa Glasson from my favourite TV show, Doc Martin. She was friendly and bubbly and did everything she could to make us feel welcome including procuring a NZ DVD, Heavenly Bodies, about a murder that took place in nearby Victoria Park in 1954. Two teen-aged girls murdered one of the girl’s mothers and went to prison for premeditated murder. They’ve both been released and the British one is a famous crime writer in the UK now, Anne Perry. I’ve seen her books but never read one. I guess she knows her subject well.