Things that go bump in the night

Welcome to the first blog entry of my travels, I'll get onto what the title is about later but better fill you all in on the journey over here first.

Well we learned that small infants should be banned from long haul travel although I'm not sure who it is least fair on. I mean, imagine cooping a small child up in such a confined space for 22 hours. Then imagine making that the same place that I am, ahhhh, screaming children should be banned from lots of things but long haul travel is now Number 1 on my list.

So having not slept much at all I finally made it to Christchurch and into my hostel at about lunchtime on Thursday afternoon. On the way in to the hostel you got a feel for just how much damage had been done to this city in the two earthquakes that have struck in the last year (it's exactly 1 year today since the first one). I walked up to the city centre on Friday and you can't get near it, whole thing is cordoned off, so sad because it really is a lovely city. Walked past the stadium as well and it's a huge pity that it wont see any action.

Anyway,so what goes bump in the night. Well at home it might be a door slamming or maybe the washing machine spin cycle causing something to fall over. Oh no, not in Christchurch, whole buildings go bump in the night here. On my very first night there was a 4.9 on the richter scale earthquake. Lasted about 30 seconds but for those 30 seconds I'm not afraid to say that I was bricking it a bit. Happened at 3.30am, bed was kinda shaken from the side of the wall, after it had happened you start to make sense of it, there were earthquakes here before so there will be again, but still pretty scary stuff. Next morning the hostel staff did say that it was a pretty big one but they are used to them.

Anyway, enough of the natural disasters, have made it down to Invercargill today and about to head out and explore the place, should be teeming with Scots in the next few days and it certainly feels like home, all the streets are named after Scottish rivers. Don, Dee, Deveron, Kelvin, Clyde to name but a few.

Hopefully the next entry will have some better tales to tell than those of geological phenomenon.

Take care all

Euan