The Next leg of my Nuffield adventure

It's time to get back on a plane and do some more travelling. This leg of my trip will take me to New Zealand, Australia and Brazil. New Zealand because it has a similar climate and crop growing conditions to the UK. Australia because farmers have to be innovative and manage extreme growing conditions, both lead to improvement in efficiency. My last destination will be Brazil, which is country I have wanted to visit for a long time. So the opportunity to have a look around with some fellow Nuffies was to good to miss. It will be interesting to see how Brazil is developing and how far off reaching its full potential it is? 

 

Thursday afternoon I left a wet and overcast Shropshire to get a train from Wolverhampton to London heathrow. My first flight took me as far as Abu Dhabi, landing in the middle of the dessert, total polar opposite to home.

 

Sunrise over the Gulf

Couple of hours later and its back on the plane bound for Sydney 14 hours later. We were an hour late getting to Sydney and hence had a tight turnaround to catch the last plane to Christchurch, New Zealand. So it was not surprising standing by the baggage carousel and no bag turning up. Just what you need after 36 hours of travel.

Thankfully I was staying with a friend and New Zealand Nuffie, Natasha King, so it was great to catch up with her and see a friendly face.

Natasha took me for a tour round the centre of Cristchurch, to see the damage from the earthquake nearly 3 years ago. The bumpy rounds were good to stop me going to sleep. It was like driving round a deserted city, and the damage was everywhere. A lot of the buildings that are still standing are empty and due to be demolished. Some buildings are being held up by walls of shipping containers. There is a new shopping mall where the majority of the shops are made from shipping containers, which has now become a popular tourist attraction, and has been created it an attractive manner.

A shipping container shop

 

The new shopping area

Some reconstruction work in Central Christchurch