We had a long day travelling from Sydney to Christchurch, our flight that we had a ticket for was to depart at 12:35, however we didn't leave until nearly 10 hours later. We arrived in Christchurch at 3:30 am, yuck!
After not nearly enough sleep, we headed out for a quick walk. Our local area has a good few shops and restaurants and was around 2 kilometres to the city centre. For a Saturday afternoon it was pretty quiet. The harsh weather we'd heard had gripped the country had eased and in the afternoon sun, it felt pretty nice.
We were catching up with some friends who were coming to get us mid afternoon so we headed back to the motel to get ready. We had a great night, good food, plenty of booze and loads of laughs with people we actually knew. Belinda made a pavlova and baked a mud cake for my birthday, both of which tasted amazing and came as a huge surprise. Their kids, Jamie and Dylan made me cards which was such a lovely thing to have done, we were finding glitter for days afterwards. Kerry kept the drinks coming and at 2am, we reluctantly had to call it a day.
Jan woke with a headache for some reason but it was nothing a piece of the mud cake wouldn't sort out and we headed to the city centre.
We walked along the perimeter of Hagley park, it was cold and a little overcast giving it the feel of autumn at home. Nearer the centre the river Avon ran along side the road, the narrow but picturesque water way was shallow but crystal clear. Ducks rested on the banks or floated down stream on the fast moving current. It looked so idyllic.
Then we hit town. The devastation, despite the years of clean-up was on every street, boarded up windows, tumbled walls, buildings in partial states of collapse. The lucky or wealthy had already begun the re-build but they seemed few and far between. We walked around for a few hours taking in what we could. Down the road we could see a small shopping area where we decided we'd stop for a coffee but as we got nearer we could see that something didn't look right, in fact it was very wrong, the signs in the windows still advertised the specials of the day and a variety of dishes from an extensive menu but the places were empty, the insides shaken out of them, the ceiling strewn across the floor and the guts of multiple air conditioning units spilled about the room.
We came across the site of where the CTV building once stood, the place where the largest number of people lost their lives when the tower collapsed and subsequently caught fire. As we stood reading the plaque and the laminated messages left by affected families, a lady came and wove a small posey of flowers through the chain fence. She stood there in silence and we suddenly felt very out of place and we moved on.
The sight of the cathedral was the killer, we were both expecting to see a building site where perhaps a plaque had been laid or worse a cordoned off area of debris but what we saw really knocked the wind out of us. It looked like a scene from the newsreels reporting the blitz. It was particularly horrific seeing this once amazing building which was clearly in so many people's hearts in such a state of distress. There was something about its location, the overgrown grass within the sealed off grounds, that was so long it had laid down under its own weight and become matted and ugly, the recent monuments and dedications to those who died in the quakes that bought it all into stark focus. We had had enough, it was just too sad.
The regeneration of the city seems slow, the estimates from the locals we spoke to estimated that it would be at least 10 years before Christchurch is rebuilt. We hope its quicker but fear it will take much longer.
Dunedin next for a hint of Scottishness.