June 2nd and 3rd - Christchurch

It feels as if we’ve stumbled through some tear in the fabric of space-time to a dystopia of the not so distant future. An organic grocery, advertised on a map to be on the opposite corner from our hostel, has been replaced by dust and rubble. We can’t walk left out the front door lest we run into roadblock of three fire trucks parked lengthwise across the street; one of a number of such barriers that make up the cordon around the CBD. It’s all more than a bit unsettling, and worst of all, inescapable. Reminders are everywhere; the parking lot of the nearby supermarket had become uprooted with many stalls being on miniature hills. The flow of traffic is jagged and unnatural with makeshift routes popping up around every corner. After checking in to our ground-zero hostel we planned to see if the local pub would be willing to put on the NHL playoffs. As I had only brought my hiking boots and my runners with me, I’d wanted a pair of shoes for bumming around the city since we’d arrived in New Zealand but had yet to find a deal that matched my backpacker frugality. Although the timing couldn’t have been worse, I was overjoyed to find a pair of shoes in a bin of free clothes that had been accumulating as a result of backpackers hastily leaving earthquake ridden Christchurch. Being that they were free, you’d think Kelsey would’ve been willing to overlook their many creases and overall dated style, however she was quick to let me know just how much they disgusted her, how much better she thought my hiking boots looked, and a thousand other excuses to get me to reconsider adopting them. I cared not, I was smitten, they have character and with a little TLC can be made to look like a perfectly respectable pair of old loafers. I responded with a simple ‘you’re just jelly’ and slipped them on and paraded back to the room, triumphant. Every third building we passed on the maiden voyage of my new favourite shoes had a caved in roof or bricks spilled about their lawns. Any gloominess we may have accrued during that walk was instantly quashed when we entered the pub to find that the game was already on one of the TVs! We enjoyed the game over drinks and pub grub and both agreed it was a marvellous way to pass an afternoon in an otherwise gloomy place. That evening, while eavesdropping on some fellow hostel mates who were in town working on clean up, I cut my thumb with a knife I was using to slice open my dinner roll. I knew it was a decent cut but I doubled band-aided the wound and wrapped it in toilet paper and thought nothing of it until the next morning when I was packing up my backpack in preparation for being solo once again. I separated all the shirts I’d received as prizes for completing the 4 bungee jumps I’d done into their own little pile as I’m planning on framing them along with their respective plaques. I noticed that, despite having not worn them, they’d become stained red. I must’ve been too delirious from the blood loss to realize that this was the result of my recent blood loss! I somehow managed to get blood from my cut thumb all over my white bungee shirts and blue backpack before putting two and two together and remembering that I was still the walking wounded. I had already donated my other two white shirts to the free bin to make room in my bag so it looks like I’m going to be Johnny Cash, the man in black for the foreseeable future unless I want people thinking I’m some homicidal maniac. In response to the closure of the CBD as well as most of their everyday haunts, the citizens of Christchurch have congregated upon the Riccarton shopping mall as an outlet for their boredom and frustrations. As sad as it was, we were really just killing time there. Kelsey’s suitcases were already at capacity and I was still intent on living on the verge of homelessness. All of the points of interest on our map were within the CBD cordon and even those on the outside were either closed or had disappeared off the face of the earth, presumably victims of the earthquake. So this is it, an unfortunately, but not entirely unexpectedly, depressing end to 6 weeks of colossal highs and emotional lows. Kelsey will get one last taste of the kiwi experience tonight as we enjoy our last local brews together before heading to the pub to watch some Super 15 rugby. Our paths diverge tomorrow morning at 7am when I hop on a bus back to the Marlborough wine region while Kelsey catches her flight to Auckland before heading back to Canada. I’ll leave it at that for now, rather than sum everything up here I’ll write a standalone epilogue to our 6 week adventure to be posted when I’m content with my summation. I will explain my favourite bits, parts I wish we could’ve skipped, and what lies on the road ahead, perhaps to gauge whether or not I will continue this blog. Any thoughts? Are you people out there in internet-land sick of me yet or do you believe I’ve only scratched the surface of this blog’s potential? Leave me a comment or better yet, a suggestion as to what you’d like to hear, if anything at all!