Christchurch suffered a massive series of earthquakes in 2011 and the entire downtown was virtually destroyed. Even now, 4 yrs later, most of the downtown is either vacant lot, rubble or empty condemned buildings. Despite that, there is a heroic restoration effort underway. Many beautiful old historic buildings from the 1800s are being painstakingly restored. the locals joke that their skyline has been transformed from skyscrapers to construction cranes. No lie, you can easily count a dozen cranes in just about any vista. City planners estimate that when the downtown is rebuilt, less than 30% of the buildings will predate the earthquake and virtually all of those will have been heavily damaged and restored. Nothing appears to have survived unscathed.

As we wandered about the city, I was at first overwhelmed at the magnitude of the damage and to be honest I found it depressing. But then we started to learn how the people of Christchurch dealt with this disaster and have adapted with many creative solutions demonstrating Kiwi ingenuity. For example: with literally all the remaining buildings condemned, there were no suitable properties for storefronts. So the city built 'temporary' shopping malls from shipping containers (see pict above) and allowed the shop owners to set up there. These turned out to be fully functional mini-malls and actually quite fun. I even found a great pizza there! Another good example is the Cardboard Cathedral, which was built as a 'temporary' place of worship while the half demolished 150 yr old Christchurch Cathedral was being rebuilt. The Cardboard Cathedral towers nearly 3 stories and is built principally from large cardboard shipping tubes on a foundation of shipping containers. It is really quite a beautiful church made all the more remarkable by it's origins. There are a couple of picts of both cathedrals in the South Island gallery in the NZ folder. Despite the excessive damage to the CBD, Christchurch still has a large and beautiful botanical garden and many walking paths along the Avon river. So, even though the downtown landscape still speaks of the massive destruction visited there in 2011 the people of Christchurch continue to demonstrate resilience and commitment to their future.

From Christchurch we visited Littleton which is a small harbor on the other side of a hill and connected to Christchurch by a tunnel. As the only deep water port nearby, Littleton has a long colorful history tied to Christchurch.

From there we continued south along the eastern coastline to Dunedin, which like Christchurch has a rich history and a very English feel. Lot's of parks filled with statues of English explorers and royalty. Since we only stayed one night, we didn't get to really explore Dunedin, but it looked interesting and we did get a to see the Penguins come in that evening. We then turned inland and headed for Queenstown, the playground of the adventurous.