Days 44–49: Christchurch
Basically, just us trying to sell the van
We spent a whopping six days in Christchurch and unfortunately, we don’t have a lot to show for it. The first day, as I talked about in the last post, was the day the shootings happened.
Our plan for the remaining days was to sell the van as soon as possible and then spend the rest of the time sightseeing. Annoyingly, selling the van proved to be a lot more difficult than we had imagined.
The couple that viewed the van the day before decided to go with another van and that ended up being a recurring theme throughout the week.
On our second day, we went to the car fair in the hopes of finding a buyer. We paid $25 for a spot there along with about thirty other cars. In the four hours we were there, only about half a dozen potential buyers actually turned up and nobody sold their van. It was a very disappointing morning.
On our third day, fed up with our lack of luck, we decided to take some time out to see a bit of the city. We started by visiting the memorial for the mosque shootings that I showed photos of last time.
From there, we went for a walk around the botanic gardens. They were actually really big with some impressive trees and cool sculptures.
One of the weirder things we came across, just lying in the middle of a grassy area, was this hilarious little fella— you may even call him a fun guy…
For lunch, we went to an eatery that had a whole load of different restaurants to choose from. We chose a burger place that did an amazing vegan burger.
It was a cool atmosphere in there and the interior was pretty funky.
We spent the afternoon at the Canterbury Museum which, as usual, was not enough time to do it justice. There were so many different areas to it and the sheer size of it reminded us of the London museums.
We thought our frantic scanning of Facebook for potential van buyers over the previous few days had taken its toll on us, so we went home to relax for a bit before heading to the cinema that evening to watch Captain Marvel.
If you like the Marvel films then you’ll like Captain Marvel, and if not, then… you probably won’t. We enjoyed it!
Other than that one day of freedom, we spent the rest of our time trying to flog the van.
There was one evening when our Airbnb hosts had some friends around and one of them brought their dog! That was my evening sorted as I just played with him for the majority of the time they were there. I really need a dog in my life!
Anyway, back to the van…
Towards the end of our stay, things were looking pretty bleak so we took it to a dealer to see what they would give us for it. The answer was $500. Not good.
We continually dropped the price, and we even shook on it with one buyer before she changed her mind and asked for more time to think about it. It’s fair to say that we went from relieved to disappointed pretty swiftly at that point.
To be fair, when I went with her on a test drive it transpired that she wasn’t used to driving a manual, so we spent the entire drive in the car park while I showed her how to use the clutch and change gears — she didn’t get it into second. It was kind of amazing that she still went all the way to shaking on a deal after that so I guess it was no surprise when she backed out again.
It all came down to our very last day. We had a viewing in the morning that didn’t go well, and we decided our only option was to bring the price right down and at least get more than the dealer offered for it.
As it turned out, this was the best possible tactic as we were instantly flooded with messages — I think, mostly from locals looking to buy cheap and resell in the high season.
The first to respond were two English friends — the guy actually lives in Torquay, about ten minutes from where I grew up. Small world!
We arranged a viewing with them all the while juggling further appointments with the dozen or so others who had suddenly become interested.
If I’ve learnt one thing from that experience, it’s that in future, I’m definitely going to take the approach of starting low — to bring in the potential buyers — and then play them off against each other. In no time at all, we’d managed to bring the price back up to something we were happy with again.
We’d had no interest on Facebook at that price, but it didn’t take long for them all to start raising their offers once they knew there was some competition.
In the end, we sold it to the English couple for $2500. Less than half of what we bought it for but it still worked out WAY cheaper than renting — which was the whole point of buying in the first place. Plus, we always knew that it was going to go for less than we bought it because of the change of season and the fact we’d driven it all over the country for a couple of months, so we didn’t really lose out that much.
It was a huge relief to finally sell it and it meant we could start to properly relax for our final few days in New Zealand.
We didn’t get to experience Christchurch as much as we would have liked, but I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
