Christchurch and Canterbury.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18890, 4 January 1927, Page 8

Christchurch and Canterbury.

One of the pleasant lessons of the holiday season is the difference between Christchurch and Canterbury. So far as the residents of Cliristchurch

themselves are concerned there may seem to be less need of the lesson than there was six or seven or ten years ago, when a day's journey beyond the railway heads was thirty miles, and fifty week-ends out of fifty-two were spent at home. But even the motorcar has a limited range and, we might almost call it, a fashionably restricted inclination. We travel scores of miles between breakfast and dinner for every single mile we travelled in the horse age, but they are not always, and indeed not often, more interesting miles than they used to be, and they are hardly ever at all more revealing ones. In nearly every country in the world to-day the landscape is beginning to be a blur; and even when wc deceive ourselves into thinking that we are examining and enjoying it, what wo see is a dancing panorama punctuated by direction boards. The point in any case is that we are living too fast and furiously to maintain the «)ld intimate contacts that most city people had once with at least a spot of country here and there; and in the country itself there is beginning to be an all-the-year-round rush to other spots, or to the cities and towns. It seems an exaggeration, and even an absurdity, to say that visitors to Canterbury twenty years ago saw more of us and of our province than those who come to-day, but reflection will show that there is a good deal of truth in it. Where we cannot ourselves see the wood for the trees, or will not, •we cannot very well be good guides to outsiders, but we know very well that when we leave Chrfstchurch we seldom stop in Canterbury. Besides, motor roads, like railways, pass through the most picturesque country only when they are compelled to, and since we have given up horses we keep to the roads or go nowhere. It is a pity we could not remember that the delights of Otira, and Hanmer, and Mount Cook, and Kaikoura are not all, or nearly all, or a thousandth part of the delights of Canterbury.