touring Canterbury

Hopefully the number of pictures in this email doesn't blow up your computer.

My father and I have been kicking around Canterbury for the last week, seeing the sights in this part of New Zealand.  The weather has been really nice, which has been great for touring but bad for the ski area.  Winter has apparently been delayed so far, which means the ski area can't open yet.  Which means that I don't have any work yet.  There have been frosty temperatures overnight which has allowed some artificial snowmaking to take place, but that only covers a very small percentage of the ski area and isn't enough to keep the whole crew busy.  Hopefully Mother nature kicks it into gear soon and gives us some snow.

We had some people take us up in gliders, which was really neat.  A little wind-up rubber band plane tows the glider up to about 4000 feet, then detaches you.  It was a calm day, so it took maybe half an hour per flight.  On a windy day there isn't a limit on how long one can stay up.  I had a great view of the ski mountain and the surrounding hills and also the ocean.  My pilot did some stalls and loops, which was exciting but made me slightly queasy.  Great fun and nice people, though.  

We also did some mountain biking around a lake up in the hills.  It was really pretty, but everything was brown because it is wintertime here.  This was where they filmed some of the Lord of the Rings scenes.  There weren't any power lines or people or anything at all, really.  Just a huge mountain range in the distance and the wind.  One thing that's cool about New Zealand is that there are never any airplanes or contrails overhead.  I guess it's just not on the way to anywhere.  In the US the skies are always full.  

I fell into a patch of thorns.  I've still got some in my hands and I don't know how I'll get them out of my clothes.

We also visited a lake up the way, Lake Coleridge.  There was nobody here.  There was a cold, stiff wind.  I guess in the summer people might fish or windsurf up here, but it was pretty menacing that day.  The water in the lakes and rivers are all a turquoise blue.  It's because of eroded glacial "rock flour" in the water that reflects blue.  I looked that up.

My little town of Methven has about 1000 residents on a crowded day, and for shopping I drive about half and hour to the town of Ashburton, population 15,000 or so.  My dad and I went down so I could get my cell phone set up and we could rent some DVDs and such.  No on-line streaming of media here since internet is outrageously expensive.  While we were there, we experienced a fairly strong earthquake.  I was in the phone shop and the floor and walls started shaking.  I was standing there slack-jawed when a lady grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the building.  Outside everyone was on the street dialing on their cell phones.  The pavement was still roiling for a length of time after.  Feels like you are sickly drunk and woozy, since everything is moving around imperceptibly.   It turns out that the epicenter of the quake was in Christchurch.  This didn't help matters there at all, as I will describe later.  It was Steve's first earthquake.  We also experienced another in Christchurch a few days later.

Something that I think my dad was impressed with is the state of chilliness everywhere, most of all in my little house.  It's a really quaint little cottage near the center of town, and it is one of the older houses on the street.  It doesn't have any insulation or central heating.  It had a fireplace but the chimney fell down in the September earthquake (onto my car), so the fireplace is out of commission.  Now to keep warm, one operates a combination of portable propane and electric heaters.  If you're going to be in a room for awhile, you turn the heater on there.  Then you turn it off when you leave to save electricity.  You can be as warm as you like, but you have to be willing to pay the electric bill.  At night you have to wear a hat to bed or your ears and nose will get frozen.  You also need to remember to pee before going to bed.  It saves a lot of heartache later when you have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the icy toilet.  Don't get me wrong, I love the place, it's got character.

The neighbors have some cats that are outside all the time and often hang out on the fence.  Everyone who walks by stops to pet them.  I guess it will suffice until I can be reunited with mine, who is on vacation at my parents' house for the summer.

I just now left Steve at an airport hotel.  An ash cloud from a Chilean volcano has been circumnavigating the southern hemisphere and disrupting NZ air travel.  Allegedly it has drifted offshore for a couple of days, so hopefully he gets out tomorrow.  

Much love,

Ray

Christchurch

We went to Christchurch today.  We had planned to go to a museum or two, but most of the things to see are downtown.  We decided to go down there to check it out.  I hadn't been there, and I had heard that some of the city center was closed off.  I figured there would still be shops and people outside the cordon, and that we could browse around a bit.  I had seen some chimneys down in the area around my town, and there is a church down the road that lost its steeple.  But that was really all I had seen of the damage and it didn't register that things were much worse.

I was really unprepared for the state of things in the city.  It seems like the earthquake went off directly underneath downtown.  The entire city center was closed off, empty, and eerie.  It was like the beating heart of the city had been surgically removed.

We parked on a side street near a fence that closed off a bridge over the river.  We walked around looking for the parking meter machine.  As we were about to put coins in, a lone lady from across the street yelled "don't bother, they haven't checked the meter since February."  

I figured there would be a place to get a coffee, but there wasn't anything open at all.  It seemed like every building had a red tag on it that meant that it was condemned.  I peeked in the window of a coffee shop and there were cups and plates on the tables, and a dusty newspaper dated Feb. 22, 2011 (the quake happened on Feb. 23).  It was like Pompeii.

We walked around the cordon, satisfying our morbid curiosity.  There is a big casino on the edge of the city center and it was open.  It was a bit of a shock to see some people milling about.  We asked if there was coffee inside, and indeed there was.  We went upstairs to the bar and ordered.  While standing there waiting for our order, there was a rumble and the ceiling shook.  Everyone looked up and halfheartedly moved toward the door.  Later I looked at the http://www.geonet.org.nz/ site (chock full of interesting geological info) which said that it was a 4.4 quake, 6km deep, and 10km from Christchurch.  That's really shallow, and really close.

I think we flatlanders have the impression that an earthquake is an isolated event.  But it's really a long process.  There's the initial shock, then as the force transmits down that fault and on to other faults, there are continuous aftershocks.  They decrease in intensity and frequency over time, but they've been going on nonstop in Christchurch since the February quake there (and since September along the fault in Darfield 30 miles away, which had the 7.2 quake last year).  There have been many thousands of aftershocks since those quakes.  

The twin shocks we felt in Ashburton were 5.5 and 6.2 magnitude.  The February quake was a 6.3.  What's troubling now is that the clock is reset for the aftershocks.  They will now decrease over time, but buildings that might have been saved before Monday are now beyond repair, and there's really no timeline on when the quakes will quit.  We saw some scaffolding that was mangled from falling walls.  It looked like crews had been trying to stabilize the structures when the big shock hit on Monday and stamped out any hope.

We walked the rest of the way around the city and I snapped some photos.  One striking sight was the Catholic church, which looks like it is barely standing.  Out in the large courtyard in front of the church, workers had carefully tagged and stacked stones that were recovered from the church.  I guess the intent was to restore the building and put the stones back into place. But looking at it, it seemed obvious to us that there was no hope at all.  Huge cracks ran up the facade, and the massive structure looked like it could come apart at any minute.  I imagine the Monday aftershock broke a lot of hearts.

Well, here are some grim pictures.

planet of the apes

The famous cathedral in the background.  Some of you have been there.

church organ

toilet and bathtub exposed to the street

the Catholic church