Here we see the centre of Christchurch New Zealand, and some of the locations that we would see over the coming few days.

Our base of operations was the Novotel, part of a chain which which is no longer my first choice when it comes to hotels. Actually, none of the hotels in the Accor chain are. I probably didn't despise Accor with their pushy membership sales staff (whose numbers I have blocked) and their laughably described "loyalty" program (where the points expire 5 minutes after you get them) as much as I do now, so it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. To be fair, Novotels aren't awful hotels. They're not the best, but they're far from the pits. It's just unfortunate who they're owned by and what Accor's customer "relationship" policies are.

Just across the road from there is Christchurch Cathedral, which bore a lot of the damage from the 2011 earthquake.

To the south, the C1 Espresso is a funky café with an eclectic décor of books, toys, pinball machines, pieces of merry go rounds and other odds and ends. It delivers some of its food using antique pneumatic tubes of a kind that were invented in the late 19th century to convey objects around buildings. We went there for a late afternoon snack on the day we arrived.

On the far left we see the "Punting on the Avon" site, where we took a punting trip down the Avon River on the second day (Monday the 24th), followed by a tour of the Botanic Gardens (which can be found under the unlabelled red rectangle to the north of that).

We were out west on the map after coming back from the Antarctic Centre on Wednesday the 26th, our last full day in the city. I took some time to take a look at Rutherford's Den, a museum devoted to New Zealand born physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford who was instrumental in discovering many of the key facts about the structure of atoms in general and nuclei in particular.

At the bottom of the map we see the most excellent steakhouse "Bessie" where we had dinner on our last night in Christchurch. Walking back to the hotel from there, we saw the Canterbury Earthquake Memorial alongside the river.