New view of Christchurch

We felt like we needed to stay another night in Christchurch and go to see the central which we didn’t see on our arrival to the south island to get a better picture of the city.

I am glad we did… at least now we understand scale of the devastation that Christchurch is going through after the earth quakes in 2010/11. We learned that 70% of the city buildings were damaged and lot had to be demolished. Seeing the pictures of the city before and then walking around in what you would describe as a city sized building site…we were just amazed! It was nice to see that the whole city had come together and all putting their own piece in the jigsaw to re-build the city.

Our favourite thing to see was a part of the city that was re-built probably initially as a temporary shopping hub called ‘Restart’.

Built from shipping containers, genius! It looked great and had become a bit of a famous landmark in Christchurch. Even the toilets were in shipping containers! Fab loved it.

But It was really sad to see so many old buildings boarded up until it was their turn to be bull dozed down or re-built again. 

Worst of all was the cathedral, half collapsed and all fenced up.

This really taught us how lucky we are living where we are, in safe Devon. We haven’t felt any earthquakes whilst we have travelled in New Zealand even there have been quite few.

As our motorhome travels were coming to an end, we had a massive Mexican meal as our goodbye to our motorhome stint, stunning meal, I couldn’t finish mine though!