Ashburton

Coming down from Aoraki, we continued to the next big city:

Ashburton

from Wikipedia

Ashburton suffers a bit from it's vicinity to huge Christchurch, but it is a nice town worth a visit. As brief as our visit here may have been, it still gave us a little impression of the town.

As a town Ashburton lacks nothing, while offering a lot of interesting little stores to browse through. Everything in the town centre is small enough to be accessible by foot, so you can park your car and just explore the town on your own two feet.

We had three reasons to visit Ashburton:

1: Finding the path to hidden mystical Edoras
2: Getting one of those damn cool Selke Hats
3: Getting our dear Roachmobile through the WOF

1: Edoras

Not far from Ashburton is located the Riddermark, where the people of Rohan dwell. The rough country of Canterburry make it the perfect place for Rohan and Edoras. However it is quite difficult to find. Luckily the Ashburton visitor centre has free maps titles: "Journey to the film location of Edoras". Which we got ourselves a copy from...

2: Selke Hats

We found some shops all over New Zealand selling hats from a company named Selke located in Ashburton. I wanted to bring one of those for my dad, but we couldn't find the correct model or size in aforementioned shops. So we just went to the source. Selke produced all hats handmade. Actually it's only a couple of people with dedication and good marketing skills. The hats are really cool. We had our eyes on one that looked like the one from Indiana Jones. In the end we even bought three hats. One for my dad, one for my little brother and one (with some defect) for myself. Here look for yourself:

3: WOF

In New Zealand a car needs a Warranty of Fitness (WOF). It's a little test your car needs to go through in order to check it's safe for traffic. It's by far not as tough as the German pendant (TÜV). Only indicator lights, lights, seat belts and the brakes are tested. Good old Roachmobile had no trouble getting through and off we went with a brand new WOF. :)

And that concludes our visit in nice little Ashburton. Onwards we went to Edoras. Hail the riders of the Riddermark!