Where are Ron and Ellen?
New Zealand (Ron and Ellen), Fiji (Ron), 5 January - 9 March 2015
Ellen and Ron near Milford Sound, NZ, January 2015
New Zealand South Island, part 2
To see photos of the glaciers, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of Greymouth, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of the drive over Arthur's Pass, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of buskers and the Botanical Garden in Christchurch, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of abandoned buildings and reconstruction in central Christchurch, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Shrinking glaciers and city rebuilding
To see photos of the Christchurch Cathedrals, click on the thumbnail at the left.
25 January 2015
Christchurch Airport, New ZealandWe are in the Christchurch Airport, waiting for our flight back to Auckland for our week touring the North Island. We last wrote from tiny Haast, on the southwest coast of the South Island where it was chilly and cloudy with occasional bursts of rain. We had quite an excellent dinner there at a restaurant in one of the two or so hotels - venison medallions for Ron, venison bourguignon for Ellen, locally grown venison. We had seen venison herds several places, scattered among the cattle and sheep - always with much higher fences!
Monday morning we headed north along the coast to Fox Glacier in cloudy weather, occasional rain, occasional mist, but a beautiful drive nonetheless. When we got to the parking lot for the access trail to the glacier, it was cloudy, but no precipitation. We walked the trail through a sort of canyon (once occupied by the glacier) to the observation point, which was not as close as it sometimes is because of flooding at a creek further on. You could see the terminus of the glacier, impressive, but still quite a distance away. Back to the car, about a 35 minute round trip. Just as we arrived back at the car, it began raining again, and just after we actually got back in the car, the skies opened. It poured. There was lightning. There was thunder, it poured some more. It hailed. We sat in the car and ate our picnic lunch and were thankful for our luck at getting back to the car instead of being caught on the trail during the storm. It finally stopped, almost like a faucet turning off.
We drove the 24 km north to Franz Josef Glacier, and, since it was still drizzling a bit, decided to check in at our motel, where we had a "lodge" in a holiday park that had a full range of accommodation from tent sites to camper sites to lodges to motel rooms. The lodge was two rooms with beds to sleep 5 and a bathroom, and at the end of the building a lounge (tables and chairs, couches, armchairs, fireplace) and full kitchen shared with about 8 other lodges under the same roof. An hour or so later, it was beginning to clear - we actually could see blue sky to the west - so we drove to the starting point for the Franz Josef trails. First we took the 20 minute round trip trail to an observation point on the top of a rocky crest, where we had an excellent view of the glacier. Then, we took the longer 90 minute round trip trail that goes along the valley floor to quite close to the glacier terminus. It was an interesting walk, winding among the rocks dropped by the glacier and along the roaring glacier melt river, steep sides on either side of the valley, with a short steep climb at the end to an overlook point. The glacier is quite impressive, and has varying colors of blue and white and grey as you look at it. Close to the terminus, there are huge hunks of ice that have broken off (they would be iceberg size if in the ocean). Exhibits show how the glacier has retreated over the years, starting with the first pictures of it about 2 centuries ago. It is stunning to see how much it has retreated recently - most recent photo to compare with was taken in 2008. It made us wonder if our grandsons will ever see a glacier. Once again, our weather luck held, as it rained after we got back from the glacier!
Tuesday morning we got up and looked out the window and were amazed. It was bright and sunny, and we could see mountains surrounding us - jagged snow-capped peaks that the day before we did not know were there because they were shrouded in clouds. Although we left the high mountains as we drove north to Greymouth, it was still a beautiful drive, with lush ferns and spectacular banks of red wild crocosmia blooming along the road. Ellen struggles to grow crocosmia at home, and is quite envious of these huge swaths of them - they obviously like this climate better than that of Afton, Virginia! We stopped for lunch at a lovely lake, and as we got closer to Greymouth could see the Tasman Sea off to the left, with huge surf crashing on the shore.
Greymouth is a nice small town, just under 10,000. We enjoyed having two nights in one place, and a whole day where we did nothing more than wander along the river walk, drive to the ends of the north and south jetties where the Grey River empties into the sea and watch the gulls and the waves, and drive to couple of points along the coast where we walked on the "beach," which is composed entirely of round rocks of varying sizes ranging from 1-3 inches in diameter. Very close to the surf the larger rocks become gravel, but it is definitely not a sandy beach!
Thursday morning we set out across the Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass to Christchurch, first across the valley, then up and up through steep mountains, over the top, and down onto the huge flat Canterbury Plain. We’d heard this was a spectacular drive, but, for us, anyway, it was nice but wasn’t nearly as spectacular or interesting as the drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound. It was fascinating to see how the climate changed from very green and wet to much drier as we crossed the mountains. It reminded us of the Pacific Northwest in the US, where there is a huge climate difference between the wet coastal areas and the dry areas east of the mountains. We had our picnic lunch beside a lake, and stopped for tea in a small town outside Christchurch.
Arriving in Christchurch, we knew exactly where on the map our hotel right in the center of town was located, but it took some driving about to get there since many streets are closed off because of reconstruction after the devastating earthquakes in 2010-2011. Christchurch is almost surreal, with buildings looking at first glance like they are fine until you realize they are fenced off, unused, deserted - unstable and unsafe, waiting for either demolition or repairs. Store signs are intact on the front of buildings ("Baked Fresh Every Day!") but the interiors are deserted and gathering dust. Other buildings are obviously damaged, with boarded up windows and support props against them. Some places there are partial buildings or rubble or cleared ground. And other buildings are fine, either new or newly repaired. Rebuilding is going on everywhere, and in every direction you look you can see cranes working (some demolishing, some building).
After checking in, we set out to explore, heading first for Cathedral Square, just two blocks from our hotel. The Cathedral is half standing, with the nave still there but badly compromised, and the tower and entryway completely gone (and all of the stained glass windows gone as well), so the end of the building away from the altar is completely open, with support beams hanging halfway down and pigeons roosting inside. There is artwork all round the city: murals painted on the sides of buildings, sculptures of all sorts in open spaces, part of the effort the city is making to make the central area vibrant again after the earthquake devastation. The paneling on the fence around the cathedral is stenciled with all sorts of brightly colored designs, and there is a huge installation of what look like large prayer flags of several different colors at one end of the square. The explanatory sign said that from a distance the colors make a pattern, but we were never far enough away to see it!
Christchurch has an annual 10-day International Buskers Festival, with street performers from around the world (although the majority were from NZ, Australia, and the UK, and a scattering from other places, including the US). For the entire 10 days, there are outdoor performances almost every hour at a variety of places around the center, and we watched and enjoyed a number of them over our two full days. Street theater at its best! We were told that the city provides the infrastructure (stages, sound, seating in some places, etc.) and lodging, but the performers have to pay all their other expenses, including travel. For all of the performers, street theater is their full time job, so they are quite used to doing their acts under varying circumstances, with different audience members participating (one never knows how that will turn out!), and passing the hat when they are done. Everything is free for the audiences, and you contribute to the performers as you so choose. The performances we saw had audiences ranging from 50-200, and Ron went one night to a burlesque performance, also part of the Festival, at 10:30 pm - way too late for Ellen! - in a packed university auditorium. He said it was hilarious and amazing - a combination of burlesque and risqué humor, acrobatics, and stand-up comedy. There was one pair of performers we thought weren’t very good, but everything else we saw was excellent. One of the performers we saw has toured with Cirque de Soleil, which gives you an idea of the caliber of the buskers. We plan to suggest to Charlottesville’s mayor that Charlottesville would be an ideal place to hold an annual buskers festival in the U.S.!
We spent a lot of time in the huge botanical garden in the city center, beautiful old trees of many varieties, spectacular blooming flower beds, fountains, river, wide green lawns, lots of benches. We visited the Canterbury Museum, which has a nice collection of Maori items and an interesting exhibit on Antarctic exploration and research (many of the Antarctic research groups, including the U.S. Air Force, have their service bases at Christchurch Airport). In an effort to bring back businesses to the center of town, shipping containers have been used to form the re-Start Mall, with a wide variety of shops and restaurants and banks in the containers. It is a thriving area, with food carts, and vendor stalls as well as the businesses in the shipping containers. We also visited the "Cardboard Cathedral," the Transitional Cathedral build for use until the damaged Cathedral is either restored or rebuilt. It is built of cardboard tubes (like the cardboard of heavy cardboard shipping drums), with huge tubes with a Plexiglass-type covering over them as the roof, and all the interior structure (choir stalls, pulpit, chapel walls, etc.) made from smaller tubes. It is quite beautiful, very light and bright. At the entry end there is a huge "stained glass" window (Plexiglass? Plastic? Not sure). When the windows of the original Cathedral were smashed in the quake, there were some pieces, none very big, saved by the lead they were attached to, and those were photographed, and the various fragments were enlarged and reproduced to make the new window, a mosaic of flowers and angel heads and so on from the old window. Shipping containers on the site serve as the church offices.
Good food in interesting restaurants in Christchurch: dinner in an Irish pub, in a Japanese restaurant, and in a café where our sliders (small burger-type sandwiches of various kinds) were delivered by pneumatic tube from the upstairs kitchen, and great lunch sandwiches from a cheese monger and from food carts in the re-Start Mall on the other day.
We really enjoyed our time in Christchurch, and it would be fascinating to come back in a few years to see how the city has changed as they rebuild. What gets repaired or destroyed depends apparently on several factors - the type of damage, the insurers’ willingness to pay, and the state of the ground under the building. City planners here certainly have interesting work, thinking about how to rebuild and what they want the central city to look like.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
Back to the New Zealand-Fiji 2015 index
cfw.com
Questions? Send email to Ellen, ebouton 
Last updated: 5 February 2015
