Before we caught the bus to Christchurch we carried/rolled all our luggage to town again and got a big breakfast at a cafe.
We took our time as we had to wait for the bus anyway. It was nice to relax for a while and just sit, look around and play SimCity on my phone.
At the same time as we arrived the day before the bus pulled up next to us with the same bus driver at the wheel.
The first couple of kilometres of our trip were on a very curvy road into the mountains but soon it became a normal straight road again.
On this part of the trip,there were not as many sights, so the bus driver had not that much to comment on as on the day before (on the road from Picton to Kaikoura).
We passed by our Motel (that was already booked) with the bus and had to walk back 1.5 km to it.
After a short relaxation break we set out to explore the town centre of Christchurch.
In 2010 and 2011 Christchurch was hit bit a major earth quake (6.3 magnitude on 22.02.2011) which destroyed most of the centrally located and surrounding buildings.
There was basically nothing left to be used, and even four years later now the majority of the buildings had not been restored. Many of them were sealed off, as they might fall in, are braced with steel bars or are still piles of rubble. It's incredible to see that even in such a prosperous country it take so long to restore a city centre and shows that you can not just build one, but it has to grow.
Because there were barely any offices, shops, flats or restaurants in the downtown area there were no people that walked around, no cars or anything else for that matter.
It felt a bit like a ghost town or a city after an apocalyptic event.
It became very spooky when we came to the, once glamours Christchurch cathedral that now was left as it was, just braced by a couple of Steel bars. It had grass and weeds growing between the bricks, piles of rubble stacked up against its walls.
The historic street tram had already been restored but all it did was going in a circle around the centre of town to carry around the odd, lost tourist.
The certainly once lively Cathedral square was surrounded by abandoned buildings that only four years ago housed shops, restaurants and the tourist information.
We could still see the special offers of the 21st of February 2011 in the windows. It was a very strange place.
Not these offers but the fact that we didn't have any food since breakfast made us hungry.
We continued our search until we found a nice, lively (rebuilt) little street, but even there we could not find food. They had a great whiskey bar and craft beer pub but no proper food.
They did however have a great Lego place where kids (and I) could go to play with a huge amount of donated bricks to rebuild the city, at least in miniature scale.
After querying the trip advisor app we found a street that apparently had plenty of restaurants.
On the way there we passed through more abandon parks and past sealed off civil buildings until we got to Victoria Street.
Since we barely cared what we gonna have for dinner at this point, we took the first place which by coincidence was another Thai restaurant. Twice in a row.
And it was good again.
Back home I had no energy left for writing and the internet was too shoddy to upload any pictures. So we settled on watching some Videos about New Zealand on the Laptop and reading our books.
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