Between a volcano and an earthquake

It's a ill wind that blows no good and that applies to volcanic ash clouds too. Thanks to the Chilean ash cloud we've had four extra days in Christchurch in a hotel paid for by Qantas. Excellent! However, during those four days there have been over 30 aftershocks from the big earthquakes last Monday. We've only actually felt about 4 or 5 of them. Two mornings we have been woken up by tremors measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale. It's a very strange sensation to wake up and feel your bed, the windows, the doors, everything in the room, shaking. We also had an interesting experience where the cinema we we in started to shake...

On the recommendation of a number of people we took a day trip to Akaroa, a sweet little French-style town nestled on the edge of a harbour about 2 hours south east of Christchurch. After wandering around the town enjoying the french colonial architecture and a good coffee we headed out for a 'black cat' dolphin cruise on the huge harbour formed by a volcano a long time ago.

We were no sooner on the water when the skipper announced that the volcano crater we were sailing on had just been regraded from 'extinct' to 'dormant' due to recent geothermal activity. Great. We thought we were leaving all that in Christchurch, instead we sail out into the middle of it. Then the skipper described how he experienced the big quake on the water a few days earlier.

All that was soon forgotten as we headed out the mouth of the harbour to the South Pacific ocean and were rewarded with a school of rare Hector dolphins coming to play with us. We hung out over the bow of the boat delighted by the activity of these beautiful creatures.



At one point both Nic and I lifted out heads to see a mountain of water ahead of us. Turns out another 4.5. had hit and created some pretty big waves which disappeared almost as quickly and as we sailed back to safe harbour the aqua-green water looked like mercury in the evening sun.



Mostly we don't feel the tremors unless they measure around 4.4 or more on the Richter scale but the buildings in Christchurch certainly do. We walked around the remains of the city again today and retraced some of our footsteps from Wednesday. To our horror there was even more damage visible today than there was on Wednesday - evidence that the constant tremors are taking a heavy toll. Disturbingly, we could also see lots of scaffolding on the ground, twisted, mangled and covered rubble making it painfully obvious that the repair work that had started on some of these building has been a waste.

It also dawned on us that the reason the streets were so deserted on Wednesday might be because only 48 hours after a major earthquake most locals were probably avoiding unstable areas. Once again, I'm amazed how quickly people can adjust to seemingly impossible circumstances and a new, if uncertain, normality emerges allowing life to go on.