Love You, Christchurch

Two years on after the quakes, my hometown is still in a state of recovery.  Driving out from the airport, there were small signs of change.  Closer towards the city and the Eastern suburbs, the full effects were more apparent.  Christchurch is dotted with shipping containers, temporary buildings, orange cones and construction zones.

Kiwi ingenuity is also present everywhere.  Although the Lyttelton Coffee Company is still closed, their coffee is served in this container-bar where the Volcano Cafe once stood.

In the (now) vacant lot next door, there's a 'gap filler' community garden where you are invited to help water and weed.

Inside, it's rather beautiful and cosy.

We also visited the Town Ball with my friend Kelly, formerly the giant inflatable rugby ball that toured the world to promote New Zealand as the host of the Rugby Wold Cup in 2011.  It's now a bar restaurant, which serves amongst other things, a pot of mussels (one kilo!). 

Kelly showed us the Pallet Pavilion, another inventive Gap Filler Project.  It hosts markets, live music and generally is a community venue with a difference.

Here's an old Chch favourite, Osaka-Ya restaurant 'cheap but yummy', reincarnated as a mobile cafe.

And a Routemaster which hosts cinema viewings and indulgences of the chocolate kind.

We bought some Kiwi favourites like lolly cake from the market.

The Re-Start Mall stands where Cashel Street Mall used to be, more shipping containers.

The Cathedral, a heart-breaking sight.

The Cardboard Cathedral, a couple of blocks away.

Spare, but beautiful.

Walking through town which was up until recently still 'red-zone'.  The devastation is brought home when you see places that have been left pretty much as they were on the day of the earthquake.

Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy to picture exactly which buildings filled the vacant spaces.

Little touches of humour.

The damage to the central city has affected the traffic flow, causing new areas of congestion during peak hour as people come and go from the surrounding suburbs.

In the Eastern suburbs, whole developments have been vacated and families rehoused.  In areas where liquifaction is too great a risk to rebuild, houses have been demolished or may one day become recycled as a flat-pack house.

The New Brighton Pier is as it was, thanks to its deep foundations.

A beautiful sunset in a beautiful city.