23.2.11 – Goodbye, poor Christchurch, Hallo Dunedin

Morning – still no power, water or sewerage.  The car radio tells us no-one is to go to work today and schools are all closed.  They want people to leave the city if at all possible.  In fact, we’d pre-booked a hire car, and the plan had been to collect it last night, and drive to Dunedin this morning.  Of course, events ensured that we never got to the garage to get it and maybe the garage is now shut.  Bill calls and the most helpful and laughing lady we’d met the other day is indeed there and the car is ready for us.  Ronnie and Ethel are planning to leave too, and drive us to the garage where the lady, still laughing, gives us the keys to a neat sky blue car, covered in bubbled raindrops from last night’s downpour.  As we stand saying goodbye to Ethel and Ronnie on the forecourt, the earth bucks and wobbles again under our feet.  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ says Ronnie and we hug and drive off.

The road is not busy and the area we travel through seems largely unaffected.  Soon we are out among  rolling green fields and poplar trees.  It somehow seems wrong to be leaving the city’s agony and just carry on with our holiday.  But they are telling us to go, there’s nothing we can do, and wandering tourists are only a liability at the moment. 

After about an hour, we stop for coffee.  What a relief to encounter a functional toilet!  On the table in the cafe there is a newspaper, and we look through it as we sip strawberry milkshake and iced coffee.  And what a shock.  The lack of electricity means that we along with most folk in Christchurch, had not yet seen the pictures of the city centre, which most of the rest of the world was by now familiar with.  There in that cafe we saw what had happened to the peaceful, sunny, happy city we had roamed throughout less than 24 hours before the quake.  In 20 seconds it had been destroyed.  That lovely Cathedral, in which we had worshipped, now without its tower.  22 people are trapped within, many suspected dead.  The shallow glittering river I trailed my fingers in is a mud filled oozing torrent.  The gently flowing willow trees have fallen, their green shade gone forever.  The damaged church supported by blue girders where the dummy cyclist and canoeist demonstrated humour triumphing over adversity, are now a jumble of boulders and twisted metal, the figures protruding bent and broken.  The hill we drove down to Somner is covered in tumbled boulders the size of cars, the cliff we passed not 10 seconds before the quake has collapsed onto a house and car – they’re still trying to retrieve the dead.





New Zealand fur seal



Take care!  Penguins!



We drive on, thoughtful, through rich farming land, the sea occasionally appearing to our left, distant mountains to our right.  We stop at a penguin colony and are taken out to see them in their nests.  Very smelly but very sweet – little fluffy balls.  There is a fur seal sleeping on the path and pretty fed up about tourists constantly waking him up. 

The lady in teh centre tells us about them but when we say we’ve come from Christchurch, that’s what she wants to talk about.  Everywhere we stop – a lunch, for coffee – everyone is talking about only one thing. 

On we drive again.  I fall asleep and wake up in Dunedin, quaint wooden houses and a massive harbour and station (only for rail freight).  We phone Emma in Mosgeil and she gives us directions to a quiet street and her house, a white bungalow almost buried in roses.  Dinner and talk and then we watch television and again are dumbstruck at the footage of the places we walked and laughed so recently, now and international natural disaster site, 75 dead and counting.  And I realise I’m very, very tired.