February 2016 Round the World in 27 Days – Chapter 2.

After a pleasant evening in Taupo marred only by poor service at the restaurant we enjoyed a delightful bed and breakfast before setting out to enjoy a cruise on the lake on board a replica steamboat.  It looked like the steamboat but was powered by a diesel engine (disappointing for the engineers amongst us) The 2 hour cruise was very pleasant and took us to see the impressive Maori Rock Carvings at Mine Bay that are over 10 metres high and only accessible by water.

We then set off to return to Auckland via the real Middle-Earth at the Hobbiton Movie Set near Matamata. James and Gerry were a bit iffy about the entrance fee but soon decided it was well worth it. The whole place was quite special and extremely well maintained. If readers are interested in The Lord of the Rings films and are ever in the area a visit is a must.

After a wonderful 9 days with Lucy and James we left Auckland to stay with our friend Penny in Christchurch South Island. We arrived in Christchurch a few days before the fifth anniversary of the earthquake that devastated the city in 2011. Our first encounter with the effects of the quake was in Penny’s home which had only been repaired a few months previously. This had involved Penny moving out for several weeks whilst repairs and a complete redecoration were undertaken Christchurch itself is a massive building site and it has been estimated that the recovery is only about 50% completed.  The Remembrance gate was just one of many many places where major work was in progress. One of the first sites we saw in the centre of Christchurch was the ruins of the Cathedral. We had been to a service there in 2005 and found it hard looking at the steel bracing holding up part of the building. In fact the wall that the bracing had been supporting had collapsed the week before when Christchurch was hit by a 5.2 magnitude earthquake.  As a point of interest there have been over 17,000 quakes since Feb 2011 most of which were very small but we felt at least one during our stay.

The view of the old undamaged cathedral was a photograph of a photograph fixed to the security fence around the ruins.  Another very poignant site was a collection of 185 different white chairs including a child’s car seat and a wheelchair. The chairs represented one for each life lost in the earthquake. It was a simple memorial that could not fail to move.

A sign of the resiliance of the Christchurch population was the new so called Cardboard Cathedral. We found it to be a very spiritual place made special by the simplicity of construction and the simple symbology.  The side walls were originally iso containers. The roof struts were not really cardboard but hollow compressed paper tubes braced with local wood. The roof was like a Perspex sandwich with apparently excellent thermal qualities. The building was designed free of charge by a Japanese architect who specialises in using ‘cardboard’ to build cheap buildings quickly after natural disasters in his own country.

The building should have a long life and last until all of the different ideas about repair/replacement of the ruined Cathedral are debated (I suspect that will take a considerable time).

In the meantime Christchurch has a Cathedral it can be proud of!

 

The day before we left Christchurch Penny took us to the Botanical Gardens.  They were a haven of peace after seeing the devastation that still pervades Christchurch.