We had booked a flight from Christchurch to Auckland to save a couple of days instead of sitting on the coach back. Even though we have had a great time on our stray tour and met some lovely people we just needed to not be sat on a bus anymore. After being dropped off we said our goodbyes, we still had to wait a while to check into our motel for the night so we grabbed a shuttle (big communal taxi) and went to unload our bags there anyway. If you check on Christchurch's tourist website it will tell you "there's no reason not to come, we have plenty of things still to do!" I feel this may be a slight over estimation. In our shuttle we were taken aback by the construction work going on miles and miles of roads being laid and building being demolished and we hadn't even gone anywhere near the city yet. I don't think we were entirely prepared for Christchurch, we'd heard it on the news and people still talk about it fairly regularly in other towns but to actually see the how the earthquake affected them was gut retching. A huge city completely shut down, it looked like something from one of the zombie films, big metal fences surround the city edges and army officers with guns are posted on the entrances. Looking at a lot of the buildings its hard to see much of the damage barr a few cracked windows and the contents all overturned and left, which to me gives it a very haunting and creepy feel. Its just the sheer size of the quarantined area that gets to me. The people that we talked to are quite relaxed about it all, they have been living with it for nearly a year now and are just getting on with things, Christchurch centre has been reduced to one street with metal containers as makeshift shops and a couple of yummy food vans along the river. They have even started running buses into the worst effected areas to raise cash and awareness i suppose but we chose not to go on one, i was feeling depressed enough as it was just seeing the outskirts so after a few hours walking round we bundled up in our room until our shuttle came the following day.