Quake City

Quake City
Christchurch, New Zealand

Christchurch, New Zealand

Arriving into Christchurch was something of a shock to the both of us, having had a bit of a failure of a day in that we had planned on going to the Weka Steam Railway, but when we arrived the train was broken and not going. We had then planned to stay at a novel campsite called Waipara Sleepers which is made up of old train carriages. We arrived to an empty run down mess of a campsite with no people to be found. The upside was that there were two very cute cats to have a cuddle with.

We checked our camping apps and decided that there was pretty much nowhere worth stopping between here and Christchurch so we may as well crack on and headed to New Brighton for the night.

Arriving in New Brighton was like arriving in deepest darkest Peru, the roads were broken, potholed and in some areas just non-existent and it seemed on first glance that every road cone in New Zealand had emigrated to Christchurch. This was to be our first glimpse of the absolute tragic state that this poor city since the earthquake in 2011.

On the 22 February 2011 at 12:51pm the city experienced a quake of 6.3 magnitude with the epicentre just 10 kilometers south east of the city. The main reason that this earthquake caused such wide spread devastation was due to the fact that it was so shallow, only a few kilometers deep. This quake was actually said to be an aftershock of the quake that hit the city 6 months earlier on the 4 September 2010.

The death toll of the quake was 185, 115 of which were lost in the collapse of the Canterbury Television Building, just under 7,000 people were treated for injuries as a result of the quake.

Before the earthquake most people had probably never heard of the term ‘liquefaction’, however now it is a term that everyone in Christchurch is far too familiar with. The definition of liquefaction is a phenomenon whereby saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress, usually earthquake shaking or other sudden change in stress condition, causing it to behave like a liquid. Literally the ground turned to water. Roads and houses sank, sewerage and mains lines broke and became unusable. Houses were without power for between 2 days and 2 weeks, the telephone companies established emergency communications for free calls, the army brought in desalination plants and bottled water supplies, 7,000 Portaloos and chemical toilets were brought in from around NZ and 20,000 more were ordered from suppliers and the sewerage and drain networks were in many placed beyond repair.

As with any disaster I am pretty sure that the reporting over the quake lasted in the UK for no more than a couple of weeks at best, what we don’t get told is that still now people are homeless after the quake, living in damaged homes and fighting insurance companies for what they are due to restart their lives. The main problem is that after the 2011 quake huge aftershocks continued for nearly 2 years and the insurance companies started to split the claims into those caused by the initial quake and those caused by the aftershocks and basically have done everything in their power to just not pay out.

I was personally devastated to see the state of the city. Never in this world would I have believed that 4 years on the city would still look like it did. We ventured out into the suburb where the main liquefaction occurred. It just looks like the set of a zombie movie. The roads are demolished, the remaining few houses are falling down, have been vandalised and broken into and the only sign that this was once a bustling neighbourhood is that the pavements still show the dips where driveways once lead to the houses. There were no people, just cones, barriers and no entry signs for miles and miles. The once thriving city centre is still not much better, hotels are boarded up, empty spaces mark where huge buildings once stood, the cathedral in the centre of the city is propped up with scaffolding and boarded up awaiting its fate as to whether there is enough money to salvage this once grand building.

Efforts have been made in the last 18 months to bring some life back to the city, a shopping mall made of shipping containers has brought a spark of life and normality back to the city, but sadly the vast majority of businesses have moved out to the suburbs. We visited Quake City Museum and it was so tragic to watch the video of the locals talking about their experience of the quake. One that really struck me was a woman who was in the city and was headed to meet her husband when the quake hit. She dropped to the ground and could just cover her head and watch as the pavement acted like a wave beneath her body. She got up and looked at a woman sat on a park bench and asked ‘What was that?’, as Canterbury had been subject to so many earthquakes the first thing anyone did after a quake was to try and guess what number on the Richter scale it was, expecting the woman on the bench to reply with a number this confused European tourist just replied with ‘an earthquake’. Laughing through the tears this woman just showed the pure strength of character of Kiwis. The toilets in the museum were covered with pictures of makeshift long drop toilets, it turned out that even when they were living in a disaster zone the Kiwis had a positive attitude and managed to have a laugh, the local paper ran a completion for the most novel long drop or portaloo so the ever inventive kiwis got on Trade Me and bought anything and everything to create novel toilets. I think the grand prize went to a toilet made from a moped!?!

One video in the museum was just unreal to watch, a cctv camera just pointed at a side street showed people walking and driving past when suddenly everyone just stopped and turned and ran, one man was walking past a building and ran into the doorway. The next second the top of the building just explodes and falls to the ground. The dust settles and the street looks like something from a movie set the pavements are cracked, the huge building opposite the camera is half the size it was and the man that ducked into the doorway just walks out and carries on his day, he must have had a guardian angel watching over him as that split second decision to go in the doorway undoubtedly saved his life.

Our visit to Christchurch was not all sadness and devastation, the city does still have some tourist life and we got well and truly involved. We took the old wooden tram around the city and even went punting on the Avon. It was pretty funny watching the ducks whilst we were punting. NZ has a rather cute little black duck which has the unusual ability to be able to fully dive down to the bottom of the river to feed. The larger mallard ducks cannot do this as they are far too buoyant, but seemingly having spent so much time with the little NZ ducks they are convinced they can get down so you just see them head down flapping their feet for all they are worth and going nowhere. Poor fat ducks!

We were incredibly lucky to have secured a housesit for part of our time in Christchurch, which was a major relief as the campsites were so busy with Chinese tourists fresh off their flights we were being driven slightly mad.

Through the fantastic Kiwi House sitters website we met John who was off for a family holiday to the Marlborough Sounds and needed his 2 dogs, 2 cows and pig looking after for a long weekend. Thankfully John didn’t seem too concerned that our experience of caring for farmyard animals was, well zero. We popped around to meet John a few days before we were due to housesit and we could honestly not believe our luck. Their house was like a show home from a posh magazine, it had a lounge with the most amount of cushions you can fit on a sofa, a reading room with yet more sofas and cushions, a huge garden with a sunbed and just as the cherry on top all of the animals were adorable. We had old Jack the 10 year old black lab, and little Fred the 3 year old Jack Russell. The two steers who did have names but
we couldn’t remember them and as they were going to be dinner we named them Beef and Burger, not forgetting Pete the pig, who’s destiny was also to be dinner so we renamed him PorkChop. Thankfully the farm animals were very low maintenance, the cows just needed to remain in their field so counting all two of them and ensuring their self-filling water tank was self-filling was our only responsibility and Porkchop just needed feeding and the odd scratch. The dogs were also pretty low maintenance, although Fred’s obsession with playing ball was slightly exhausting and also caused us a minor freak-out when after playing ball for too long and getting himself too hot he decided to take a dip in the pond and then run through the immaculate reading room, kitchen and lounge whilst shaking pond water as he went, oh bugger. Fearful of using anything on the beautiful grey carpets we just soaked up the worst of the water and had to confess to John that there had been a minor dog/pond water incident. Thankfully this was not Fred’s first time through the house and we didn’t end up with a bill for carpet cleaning the entire house.

There were very few rules for this house, save that the dogs were not allowed on the sofa. Fred managed to get around this rule by sitting on us on the sofa, I am pretty sure that was a legal move. The dogs were shut in the garage at night, much to my distress as it was so cold when we were staying, so each morning they would be let out at 7am, would have breakfast and a quick run in the garden before joining us in the bed for another 2 hours sleep. This was not too inconvenient with Fred, Jack on the other hand was so huge I barely fit in the bed but I just couldn’t resist those big brown eyes and cosy dog snuggles.

We had a blissful few days living the highlife in our glamourous pad, our main reason for even having been looking for a housesit here was that we had tickets to Nitro Circus, an American show whereby bikes, motorbikes, wheelchairs and pretty much anything else from baths to sofa chairs are converted with wheels and driven down ramps an high speeds whilst crazy tricks are undertaken by the riders.

We somehow managed to get front row seats which were ever so slightly terrifying as if anything went awry on the ramp we were in the direct range of impact. Thankfully everything went smoothly and the St Johns Ambulance crew who were on standby managed to enjoy and afternoon of lying on their stretcher playing on their phones.

The show was pretty cool, with the first ever triple backflip on a BMX, an amazing forward flip on a motorcross bike, flips back and forward on both a quad and a snow mobile and even a successful motorbike backflip with three members of the audience who had just watched a series of videos as to how many times this had gone wrong and the audience members had been shipped off to hospital. Sadly the only stunt of the whole show that went wrong was with Wheelz a famous American who undertakes crazy and mad stunts in his wheelchair. After a long wait for the wind to calm enough for him to do his trick, he came zooming down the ramp did a flip and landed square on his face, it was pretty horrible but thankfully he seemed ok.

Unbelievably an old school friend of mine lived just 20 minutes down the road from where we were house sitting so a reunion had to be had. Chrissy and Jon, proper school sweethearts were now married with 4 gorgeous girls living on a farm in NZ. It was so funny as even though it had been almost 19 years since we had seen each other Chrissy and Jon still looked exactly the same and their girls were just absolute twins of Chrissy when she was younger. We had such a fun afternoon, drinking tea, eating cake, touring the farm, getting selfies with some more animals and learning the intricacies of IVF in dairy cows. Tim was literally the most excited boy ever to get to see a bottle of steaming liquid nitrogen preserving various bull semen samples which Jon had ordered from his glossy Bull catalogue, ha ha! Thanks for a lovely and ‘educational’ afternoon Chrissy & Jon!!

We had every intention of going to visit the Akaroa Peninsular from Christchurch but on two separate attempts our drive resulted in us having to turn around as poor Blondini was being blown off the road, maybe next time!

On our way out of the city we had one more activity still pending on our Christchurch City pass, a trip up the Gondola to get some views of the Christchurch cityscape, the Canterbury Plains, the mighty Southern Alps and the dramatic hills of Banks Peninsula. It was a perfect sunny clear day and we had magnificent views in every direction.

What an eye-opening trip this had been, Christchurch was amazing, but so so sad to see, the strength of character of the locals that lived through the quake and still live day to day amongst the building sites, road diversions and in damaged houses is admirable. In any other part of the civilised world I am pretty sure that there would be civil unrest at the slow progress there has been here, but the Kiwis just get on with it and take it in their stride. Huge respect to all the Cantabrians out there, I know that I couldn’t carry on with life in quake city just wondering if another devastating quake is on the way.

Onwards down the coast to Oamaru.