The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Christchurch

It is a shocking video. Taken from a closed-circuit security camera outside of an artist’s studio in downtown Christchurch, the first 20 seconds show a normal city street - a delivery truck turns the corner, people haphazardly jaywalk, talk on their cellphones, and generally go about their business. Then, the earth moves, and you feel like you’ve been thrown into a shaky handi-cam horror movie with no warning. The street rolls in waves towards the camera. A crack suddenly appears in the sidewalk and splinters outward into a gaping mouth. A man ducks into the doorway of a warehouse only to have the entire building collapse in a cloud of dust and rubble around him. People run into the center of the street, the confusion evident on their faces. Just as quickly as it started, it’s over. The people gathered in the street run off, searching out loved ones, or answers. The man from the doorway emerges from the wreckage like some Hollywood hero and walks off down the street as if this were a normal occurrence in his life. And you, the spectator, realize that you’ve been staring slack-jawed at this silent movie, merely imagining the rumblings and the sounds of sirens and the screams, when all you can really hear is the soundtrack of Christchurch, the constant thrumming of heavy machinery and the crunch of rubble being moved. 

Search and Rescue tagging on a building that hasn't been touched since the quake

This video played on a loop at the museum in the city center that was dedicated to the earthquake of February 22, 2011. New Zealand in general, and Christchurch in particular, have weathered their fair share of earthquakes - the whole country rests on a massive fault line with a propensity for trembling, leading early Europeans to nickname it ‘The Shaky Isles.’ Their modern history is peppered with earthquakes of varying magnitudes - one previous quake had managed to knock the steeple off of Christchurch Cathedral, although it was dutifully reattached later. In September of 2010, a massive earthquake hit just outside of Christchurch, decimating a number of homes, and giving rise to floods of ‘liquefaction’, which, as far as I could understand, is basically liquid mud that shoots and oozes out of the ground and consumes streets, cars, and slow-moving animals. Amazingly, there were no fatalities, and while people were scared and battered, they displayed remarkable resilience in getting themselves, and the community, back on its feet. Unfortunately, the earthquake had caused extreme structural damage to a lot of buildings, which, combined with some very lax building codes and a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense that I am not remotely qualified to speak about, meant that when the February 22 earthquake hit, buildings in the city center started collapsing like doll houses.185 people were killed. It is one of the deadliest peacetime disasters to ever hit New Zealand.

In the aftermath, search and rescue crews from dozens of countries landed in Christchurch to help with recovery efforts. Some people fled the city, and those remaining began a very slow process of determining how to move forward. Three years later, the city is still a symphony of demolition noises, and every Christchurchian (I am sure that is not the technical term) has an opinion on government management, or lack thereof, of insurance funds and the rebuilding process, but to an outside eye, the city has found a remarkable balance between honoring the past and embracing the future. Apart from the slew of half-destroyed buildings dotting the urban landscape, there are numerous memorials to the earthquake scattered around the city, interspersed with temporary structures and clever uses of public space that seem to make the most of being a city in transition. 

I had two whirlwind days of touristing in Christchurch, and now writing about it I keep feeling compelled to fall into a pompous Travel-Section-of-the-New-York-Times voice - ‘a simply charming little cafe in the post-Industrial style’, ‘an excellently curated museum which is a must-see for enthusiasts of Maori culture’ and so on. So please bear with me while I take you on a little tourist jaunt and I will attempt to leave my professor-voice at home.

It rained the entire time I was in Christchurch, giving everything a very gloomy British feel that, while not actively bothering me, didn’t necessarily incline me to outdoor activities, so I skipped the botanical gardens and headed for the Canterbury Museum, which, all joking aside, really did have a fascinating exhibit on Maori history and culture, and also sported a reconstructed Victorian-era street, complete with stores that you could walk into and explore, and a taxidermy horse that bore a sign begging adults to not sit on it under any circumstances, which made me wonder how many stuffed horses they had lost to bros taking selfies. The most compelling part of the museum, however, was a special exhibit of police photography from the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Japanese rescue workers bow as a body bag on a stretcher is carried out of the rubble. Rescue dogs disappear into caverns of exploded concrete and bent rebar. Crushed cars are marked with a spray-painted letter ‘C’ to indicate that they are all clear. Excavating machinery appears to bow its head in a moment of silence as it pauses in clearing the wreckage. A house, the roof half-collapsed into the living room, has ‘We’re ok’ spray painted on the outside in huge neon letters. It was beautifully put-together, a dark room with spotlights picking out each of the photos on a black wall, the better for every individual picture to hit you with maximum impact. 

Sufficiently sobered, I walked past the Christchurch Cathedral, which was split open by the quake and now sits, exposed and eerie, behind a high security fence. A tunnel of flowering plants leads up to the gate, where you can look through and see the ravaged innards of the beautiful neo-Gothic church. A few blocks away, standing proudly in the middle of an empty lot, is the Cardboard Cathedral, which was designed by a Japanese architect in the wake of the earthquake. True to its name, much of it is made of huge tubes of cardboard, supported by steel and local wood; it is also, one might note, built to very exacting earthquake codes. It’s actually a wonder to behold, light and airy, with a comforting hardware-store smell; I never would have imagined cardboard could be so lovely. For a city, like Christchurch, that was built around a cathedral, where the structure was so much more than a religious symbol, but rather came to represent the city as a whole, this ‘Transitional Cathedral’ seems to be an important part of the healing process. Across the street from the Cardboard Cathedral is another empty lot, this one filled with 185 unique chairs, each painted white and facing toward the site where the CTV building collapsed, causing more than half of the deaths associated with the earthquake. It is a haunting memorial.

Significantly less somber is the Container Mall, which is about the most whimsical use of ugly metal boxes I have ever seen. With all the construction and demolition occurring around Christchurch, the city is liberally dotted with shipping containers, those huge metal rectangles painted offensive colors and frequently used as surrogate dumpsters. Some ingenious soul decided to stack a whole bunch of these on top of each other, outfit the exterior with some tables and chairs, and offer the containers up as mall space. I never thought I would describe a mall as charming, but the Container Mall is, in fact, quite lovable. It speaks to a willingness to accept the current situation without being broken by it, and to have a little fun while seeing what the future holds. So it was that I could sip a coffee in a little metal box cafe across a patio from another little metal box containing a lululemon store, under another little metal box containing New Zealand souvenirs. I almost could have believed I was in any other cafe, except that every time the door slammed, the entire container shook, which, in a town recovering from a devastating earthquake, seems like a bit of a sick joke. 

After a bit of R&R at my lovely hosts’ home (I was allegedly WWOOF-ing, but my hosts let me get away with being completely useless for anything except sightseeing), I finished my tourist sojourn with the Antarctic Center, which was a bit like a small, cold SeaWorld. Christchurch is considered the gateway to the Antarctic, even though it is still well over a thousand miles away, and the center provides a wonderful and accessible history of the early expeditions, as well as information on the research being done there now. Really though, I just wanted to see more penguins. The center serves as a home for a bunch of disabled blue penguins (the tiny, adorable kind), who, through injury or birth defect, would not be able to survive in the wild. There was the little female who loved to swim, but had a gimpy wing, so in order to avoid swimming in circles would coast back and forth along the glass wall and eyeball the spectators. There was another female who hated the water, and could only be lured in by the promise of food, which she would grab and gobble, and promptly haul ass back to the shore to exuberantly scream at the trainers. And there was the plucky old blind broad with Alzheimer’s (because apparently penguins can get Alzheimer’s too), who had a one-legged companion that helped her find her way around. I watched the penguins for so long that I think people started to wonder who this weird redhead was laughing to herself. 

The Antarctic Center also sported a room where you could ‘experience an Antarctic storm!’ I’ll try anything, so I kitted up in the big down jacket and boot covers they gave me and stepped into a frozen diorama. A well-constructed igloo squatted in one corner. Real snow covered the ground. A big thermometer on the wall told me that it was 0 degrees Celsius, and then the ‘storm’ began. It was an impressive sound and light display, and the temperature dropped down to about -15 degrees Celsius, accompanied by giant fans kicking up some windchill. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was voluntarily subjecting myself to something I have to deal with every winter anyway; if I want to be cold and wind-battered, I can manage very well by myself in January, thank you very much. A better gimmick was the Hagglunds ride. A Hagglunds, as far as I can tell, is a Hummer on steroids, and a much more effective method of negotiating frozen tundras than dogs and sleds. The center had built an obstacle course for their Hagglunds, and so we got to ride along while the driver told dad-jokes and drove us over 6-foot wide crevasses, up and down increasingly steep hills and finally down a near-vertical hill into a lake, because the Hagglunds is also amphibious. I am not even remotely ashamed to admit that I felt like Indiana Jones, and it took all my willpower to not shout, ‘Again! Again!’, the second it was over. I don’t know how that driver got her gig, but she may have managed to find one of the coolest jobs in the world. It never occurred to me that I wanted to go to Antarctica before, but if it means riding in the Schwarzenegger of Hummers and playing with penguins, I’m ready to put on 47 layers of clothing and sign up.