Lately I've become more and more of an outdoors guy. I guess you change when you fall in love with someone and decide to spend more of your free time with that special someone. Hence, I decided that this weekend, I would bring Kagami out on another trip to one of the numerous parks in Christchurch.

This is the Halswell Quarry. It used to be a stone quarry, and after people noticed that it the miners were so creative that they carved out a really beautiful landscape out of all the stones that they were mining, they decided to turn it into a park.

We proceeded to walk the biggest hike trail we could find on the park. The first checkpoint was that lookout up there.

We found a little tree gifted to the park.

It was a cool tree.

Not much longer up the trail, I noticed something moving in my backpack. It turned out to be our resident stowaway.

Kagami gave Konata a lecture on why sneaking on to trips uninvited is dangerous and outright rude.

We saw a little plaque that bore the name of a city in England. Its funny how there are two Christchurch's on either side of the world.

Yep, looks like we should follow the red trail.

We climbed up to the point where we could see the huge fields below.

Then at the observation point, Group picture!

Sisters in arms.

The scenery was very surreal with all these huge barren diving slopes, reminding me of Korthos in Dungeons and Dragons Online.

We even got to read about how the stones here came about.

Of course, there were dangers associated with the awesome cliffs.

Basically we were walking on these magnormous stones that had a bit of soil on their surface that grew grass, and most of the cliff edges were barricaded with barbed wire and handrails.

And we noticed that we were on the right track. (well we didn't really know since there were so many crossroads but we hoped anyway)

There was even an arrow pointing where the trams used to go all the way from the city.

And there were so many of these branches that look like they were just burnt, but are surrounded by perfectly unburnt plants. Really weird.

There were times when it felt like an RPG.

An RPG like Myst...

We could see a lot of the southern part of the city from up here, like we could from the Port Hills.

And there were more paths through dark tree cover.

We found nice watering holes along the way too. How thoughtful of them to put them here.

More of those burnt things.

We even came to a junction that led to a pathway labelled this. Now we know where sheep get lambed (yum).

We came to another part where we could choose if we wanted to take the bright sunny way or the dark narrow winding path under more trees. We decided the dark narrow path was more interesting.

It had signs that litterbugs were far from extinct.

... and weird things probably happen around the area...

After several minutes of walking we finally found our way out.

Over our little walk out of the trail we noticed more interesting little things.

Christchurch is also a sister city of Kurashiki.

They built this awesome Japanese style bridge near it too.

And Kurashiki's mayor apparently gave Christchurch this.

Details follow...

The Japanese garden was really different with all its bamboo and stuff growing around

And lots of meditation space.

We even found an awesome piece of marble to sit on.

Tsukasa found this funny looking statue of statues gifted by the Koreans.

There were also these awesome statues with words written on them. I could only make out the left one saying "To Christchurch". I think.

There was an awesome artefact sitting there too.

And a really nice wall.

Though, this sign caught my eye. Kagami couldn't stop teasing Konata after seeing it.

... and Konata didn't seem too happy about it in the car.

written by astrobunny \\ bridge, christchurch, halswell, hiiragi, hike, izumi, kagami, konata, lake, lucky star, new zealand, outdoors, outing, petanque, photo, quarry, real life, sunny, tsukasa, wall