185

Another later start today so time for coffee in bed and a leisurely wake up. The sky was a leaden grey, a couple of early risers swore it was clear at 6:00. We left Hanmer Springs at 10:00 and almost immediately hit the rain. The hills were a washed out ochre colour, very few trees, but the river was still deep blue.

More crazy kiwi humour by the roadside – a sign advertising Unicorn poo for sale.

We were headed to Christchurch; the city was hit by a terrible earthquake in February 2011 and is still recovering. Many buildings are unsafe and awaiting demolition. Large areas of the city centre are open ground. But there is a lot of regeneration going on. The Gap Project has created a number of art, retail and event installations across the city – filling in gaps where buildings used to be. Many buildings have been or are still due to be demolished. The Re:START mall is a buzzing shopping and eating complex created from shipping containers.

For a Saturday morning, the city is quiet; we were told this is because a lot of businesses relocated to the outskirts after the earthquake when the city centre was closed off and people have got out of the habit of coming into the centre.

We started our exploration at the Christchurch Art Gallery. The helpful staff pointed us to some highlights we could see in thirty minutes. The collection has works from the 1860s through to the middle of the last century. There were paintings featuring the surrounding area where we’d driven in the morning and some more modern abstract landscape works. One room had an exhibition themed around hair – Bad Hair Day – a diverse collection of paintings, sketches and sculptures. The last work I saw was a large room painted varying shades of ochre; the shades were very precisely calculated so that each panel had half the intensity of the previous one.

After the gallery, we walked to Cathedral Square, stopping to look at a large mural of penguins and to buy flat whites on the way. The Cathedral is a stone building constructed between 1864 and 1904. It is currently fenced off awaiting repairs, rebuild, demolition or replacement.

The new Transitional Cathedral – known as the Cardboard Cathedral because of the 98 cardboard tubes used in its construction is a few blocks away. It was designed by a Japanese ‘disaster architect’ who did the work for free. The spacious interior has a false perspective effect created by tapering the building to make it look longer. Behind the cathedral is the ‘185 Empty Chairs’ memorial to those who lost their lives in the earthquake – it consists of 185 white chairs, all different to represent the diversity of people who died, the 185 were of 20 different nationalities. 115 of those who died were foreign language students, most of them had only arrived a few days before for the beginning of the new term. The memorial is simple but represents 185 people very clearly. We knew of the earthquake from the news at the time but neither of us had realised how much of the city had been damaged and how much still remains to be repaired. New Zealand lies on the fault lines between two tectonic plates so earthquakes are a fact of life – we didn’t even notice but there was a small tremor last night while we were in a bar in Hanmer Springs.

We left Christchurch at 14:30 having said goodbye to Matt, the last person who was on the bus when we joined, and said hello to four new people.

On the journey to our campsite we went along Hinds Arundel road, the longest section of straight road in New Zealand, 21km without a bend.

We were on cooking duty tonight, a lot of chopping of vegetables and grating of cheese to go into our roasted vegetables and frittata. We had a pinot noir to help it all along.