Advertisement
Published: January 30th 2013
Edit Blog Post
A lot has happened since my last blog and I may go back over some of this when I get chance, but for now I hope you enjoy hearing of our travels in New Zealand. We did over 2,500kms in a tiny camper and I thought it was the most fantastic place I have seen. Although I had researched the area, we had no campsites booked, and no firm plans, which gave us more flexibility and added to the adventure. The people were lovely and the food & wine fantastic (couldn’t find a bad Sauv Blanc or Pinot Noir)! It wasn’t always sunny and it did rain A LOT, but we are British so can cope with that. But it was an ‘awesome’ place and we saw and did some pretty special things in our 10 days!!
8th January 2013 – Just a short 3.5 hr flight to Christchurch from Sydney. Despite a pretty windy, bumpy descent, we caught a glimpse of the incredible scenery in store for our tight itinerary. Took the short 20min bus ride into town, dropped bags at the YMCA where we were spending our first night and off to explore Christchurch,
but weren’t fully prepared for what we found.
Being there made us realize how much Christchurch is still effected by the earthquake damage. Wanted to share some background info I came across which I felt very relevant and pretty much sums it up. I promise its the only heavy bit:
Since the Napier earthquake in the 1930′s every New Zealander has been contributing (via taxes/fuel purchases) to a Government Natural Disaster Fund to aid recovery from any natural disaster, paying the first $100,000 of any damage to a home caused by a natural disaster (provided property insurance held), with the remainder to be covered by the respective insurance company. The entire pot (not accessed since its start) has been exhausted by the 4 earthquakes recently experienced by Canterbury (September 2010, February 2011 (big/shallow one that caused all the damage to the central business district), June 2011 and December 2011) at an estimated cost of $30b and over 385,000 insurance claims – the world’s third biggest natural disaster in terms of insurance claims, topped by hurricane Katrina and the Japanese Tsunami.
181 people lost their lives in the February quake, most due to the collapse of two city
centre buildings, built in the 1970′s, during the 24 seconds of shaking at 1pm on February 22nd 2011. There have been over
10,000 aftershocks since September 2010.
Around 1,000 unsafe buildings in the CBD Red Zone (centred around Cathedral Square) needed demolishing and what we could see through the fence still resembled a building site in it’s early stages.
The Catholic Cathedral is currently being restored at a cost of $100m, but the Anglican Cathedral in Cathedral Square was felt too unsafe to save so a new one known as the ‘cardboard Cathedral’ is being built out of timber, steel and cardboard at a cost of $5m following a Japanese design and planned to seat 700 people.
100,000 of Christchurch’s 140,000 residential homes were damaged, 9,000 of which have been ‘Red Zoned’, where the Government (deeming the land un-repairable), has purchased each house at its 2008 valuation and given the occupants 9 months to vacate. The homes will be demolished and the land returned to nature. There’s a 3yr waiting list for lower priority repairs.
A lot of creative and innovative ideas have grown from the disaster including a ‘pop-up’ shopping centre made from shipping containers.
Arriving late afternoon, we struggled to find a café/restaurant open as these have re-opened in very random places. Someone recommended a little café in an industrial area. It was very non-descript but the food and the wine/local beer turned out to be fantastic and was pretty reasonable after Sydney prices!
Also, the gardens, plants, houses, temperature were more like England than seemed possible. We soon saw more ‘British’ birds such as blackbirds, thrushes, greenfinches and sparrows than you ever see at home these days which was weird bearing in mind we were the other side of the world. The botanical gardens were teeming with them and it seemed a million miles from the chaos just round the corner.
Back to the YMCA for a game of ping pong while Josh tried out their VERY impressive climbing wall before hitting the sack.
Weds 9
th – So, can you believe the person we picked up our camper van from early today used to work for Keith Motors, Christchurch UK, just round the corner from where we lived??? What a small world!! Julian was hoping for something a bit more luxurious, but you can’t always be in 5*hotels and we
try to keep him grounded. Off we went in our little home for 9 days, complete with BBQ and solar shower. Cosy!!
It was midday by the time we had stopped for fuel and stocked up well with provisions for our adventure, but finally we were off. First stop, the very out of the way, but idyllic Opihi Vineyard, on whose land is found a supposedly amazing example of Maori rock art that I wanted to see….only to find you now have to ring for a guide to come out and accompany you, which they were happy to do but would have made us too late. So we settled for some wine tasting instead, before moving on to Lake Tekapo (its incredible aquamarine colour caused by ‘rock flour’ from direct glacial stream flow), with the well placed for photo’s ‘Church of the Good Shepherd on its shore, all amidst a backdrop of snow capped mountains. Absolutely stunning.
Sadly the track up to Mount John observatory was shut due to the high winds so we headed for an ‘out of the way’ DOC ( Department of Conservation) camp ground down a long dirt track, on the bank of nearby
Lake Alexandrina. $5NZ per person a night - very basic, with dunny and not a lot else. But what a fab spot and after a bit of negotiation on position to get the camper out of the gale that seemed in full swing, we set up camp and our little stove for the first time. Lovely.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.148s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 25; dbt: 0.095s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb