I hopped onto my bus with a certain jaunty aplomb the morning I left Alexandra, and was soon (soon-esque?) bound for the North Island once more; only a couple of stops (in Dunedin and Christchurch) stood between me and the glorious free accommodation I had organised for my Wellington return. A mere 18 hours of public transport later – cleverly spread over three days mind you – and I would be back at Upoko manor.
Dunedin was a model transplanted Scottish metropolis, complete with rain, clouds, and hordes of people eager to take your money: the haggis festival and/or Robbie Burns statues don’t keep themselves up, after all. My experience there was perforce limited due to my travel schedule, but I couldn’t help the feeling that I wasn’t missing much. Besides, I had my visit to New Zealand’s ‘earthquake city’ to look forward to with a certain childish apprehension.
My goal in Christchurch was to reconnoiter with my American erstwhile roommates (yes, they of the homemade still and semi-permanent party time approach) in order to avoid paying for a hostel. This was accomplished via a needlessly complicated route chosen on my part, which while hot and pointless at least gave me a visual tour of the Christchurch CBD. The short explanation is that it looks more than a little bit like a level from a post-apocalyptic FPS game, even a year after the big shakeup: homes and businesses alike stand abandoned and spray-painted with a series of codes (one assumes relating to their impending demolition). The childish part of you wonders what being in such an earthquake would feel like – you can’t help it – as you make your way through the city; by the time I arrived at the Americans’ place I was a little depressed by the sheer magnitude of it all.
My travel schedule dictated once more that I had to be up very early to make it back to the bus depot, so my celebrations with the Yankees were necessarily brief: a box of beers and a mild burn from their stove later (fun fact: they had no refrigerator. Think about that.) I was upstairs to sleep on the floor of their room. I laid down my head, in fact, just in time for the pounding music of the downstairs house-party to kick in… this of course didn’t bother me too much, as I knew that the people downstairs were having a great time (another fun fact: they were mostly on LSD) and I’m not ‘anti-fun’ guy. I slumbered fitfully on the hard carpet until approximately 3:27 AM, when things got a little strange.
I found myself being kicked/jostled awake, and a large burst of hooting/hollering came from the living room downstairs. Flicking on the light I was surprised to find that nobody else was in the room, and that I had an instantaneous mystery on my hands. I say instantaneous, of course, because Dave the distillation expert quickly came running up the stairs screaming “DUDE DID YOU FEEL THAT EARTHQUAKE? OH MY GOD MAN! SWEET! THAT WAS THE BEST EARTHQUAKE EVER! AAAAAA!”. Christchurch, apparently, had decided not to disappoint the childish corner of my mind from earlier that day, and had dropped a 5.0 magnitude quake on my somnolent form. As my heartbeat began to slow down (to a continuous chorus of ‘oh maaaan! Duuuude!’ from downstairs) I slowly began to approximate normal sleep; alas that I had to get up less than two hours later to walk through the moonscape of the inner city back to the bus.
I bid a bleary adieu to the Americans (who hadn’t gone to bed yet) just before 6AM and bustled myself further north. The bus system in New Zealand is interesting in that there is surely some kind of racket between the drivers and the café owners they stop near on rest breaks. You never really have much of a choice as to where you can overpay for your tea and sandwich – you just suffer along while the driver high-fives the owner and collects free coffee and snacks. In the coastal town of Kaikoura my resolve to not participate in this scam faded enough for me to order a tea to go from the nicely named ‘Why Not?’ café, which led to the following conversation between sleep-deprived me and an airily brainless cashier:
“Hello! Can I have a tea in a to-go cup please?”
“Of course! Milk and sugar?”
“Yes please, both”
(pause)
“So…you want two sugars”
“No no, both milk AND sugar”
(pause)
“So, do you want milk as well?”
A short eternity of weak tea and wave-induced nausea later, I made my glorious return to Wellington, there to stay until I could wrangle a deal on a rental car and get all my belongings up to Auckland. The drive north took seven and a half hours (I did it in one push as a kind of bizarre systemic test), and was suitably arresting as it was all on the wrong side of the road. Nonetheless I made it up to the metropolis – though too late to book into a hostel for the night. The back seat of the rental car served well enough as a bed for the night (and had that ‘you’ve arrived in life!’ kind of feel that I obviously needed at this point), and the next day I rid myself of the vehicle and stepped into the reality of paying summer fares for city hostels. Clearly, this wasn’t something I could happily do for very long…and so I didn’t. An interesting new phase of my NZ travels began not with a bang, but a rustle.
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