Boredom and Cheese

I’ve been working at home all day in my cold little office, creating 3D modelling tutorials for a bunch of school kids. I keep walking up to the window and looking out at the little court yard garden trying to imagine what it will be like in summer. At the moment its grey skies and I think it’s leaving me feeling very uninspired to do any ‘real’ work in the world of ‘culturally adaptive computer games’.


So, I shall tell you of our nice outing at the weekend to the beautiful hills of Banks Peninsular and the very French feeling area of Akaroa. The reason we set off on Saturday to Banks was due to the fact that I’d been told that there was a cheese factory out there somewhere that made half decent cheese, something that the rest of NZ seems to be unable to do.

The cheese shop is in a bay that was once the inside wall of a massive volcano. It’s now a calm inlet for the Pacific Ocean surrounded by the rolling hills that make up the crater walls. These hills are at least the height of those in the Peak District and they drop down to the water edge with the most wonderful folds and ripples of rock and field.

We drove around the top of the crater rim with a view of the bay on the right and the Pacific Ocean on the left. Danny being the action man he is took us on an hour’s walk which took in the highest point of the Akaroa Hills. The view was brilliant on both sides and it was well worth the climb through the tuffs of thick New Zealand native grasses that tangled round your feet at the most inopportune times. As we walked back towards the van for a cup of hot cocoa it felt very surreal as the landscape was so like Derbyshire I wasn’t entirely sure where I was for a moment.

This far side of banks peninsula is where the French tried to settle before the British kicked um out. The towns are very much in the French style and there is even a baguette shop. There is also a great fish and chippy (long live English cuisine) we had a battered seafood selection that was like a fishy lucky dip, but it was yummy with bits of fish, prawns, mussels, and things we couldn’t identify by taste alone.

We took our leave of the little seaside haven and took our van, much the worse for wear with the exhaust blowing from all the hill climbing, round the bay and eventually found the reason for our trip, the cheese shop. We bought a good few cheeses to taste but unfortunately for us the factory was closed as it was the weekend so we didn’t get to see them being made. All being said though the cheese was good and local, and it gives us an excuse to go back over to Akaroa, and in a few months the local dolphins might be back in the bay as well.