I promised a blog post about my
expected journey to the nether regions. Even if I didn't promise it, you knew
it was coming. Here is part one, focussing on my hub for Christmas, the city of
Christchurch, and my important mission...
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I had been told many a-time that Speight's does not travel well and that
New Zealand's own is better than Singapore's imports. Well, how can I resist a
challenge? I arrived in New Zealand determined to put long-held beer-swilling
wisdom to the test.
Of course, it was Christmas time. I had never spent Christmas in summer
before, but it was something I wanted to tick off my bucket list. As Air New
Zealand flight 523 approached Christchurch Airport, Christmas music blurted
through the speakers, but it was not Christmas music as I had ever known it before. They have their own, and it is, naturally, topsy-turvy. When you think about it, it makes
sense. How could anybody in New Zealand or Australia sing about "walking
through a winter wonderland" at Christmas? It would be unimaginably
confusing for them. For the delicate task, Air New Zealand hired the former pop star Ronan Keating,
who crooned about "strolling through a summer wonderland", while, I
imagine, suspended from the studio ceiling like a bat. This rendition was a
portentous warning of the music that was to come over the next ten days. I have
often heard it said that the Antipodes are about 20 years behind the UK
culturally, but still they won't back down, as Tom Petty repeatedly sang in
virtually every location I visited. I must have heard that song seven or eight
times, but it could well have been lurking in other places, just out of
earshot.
Well, anyway, below are the results of my Speight's-testing experiment
in the Upside Down. I've given the date and location of each practical run. The
number is a mark from 1 to 10 against the Speight's at our much-loved Prince of
Wales pub in Singapore, for which I have chosen a benchmark of 7.
24th December, Christchurch: 4.
26th December, Oamaru: 5.5.
29th December, Queenstown: 7.
31st December, Christchurch: 6.
1st January, Akaroa: 9.
The final Speight's (a creamy mid-strength ale from a pizza bar in
Akaroa, a seaside town about an hour's drive out of Christchurch) was the best
Speight's and the only NZ one that I would rank higher than Singapore's. There
are two Speight's breweries, one at the company's headquarters in Dunedin and a
North Island hub in Auckland. I wonder if Auckland's Speight's fares better
than its South Island counterparts! There was a third brewery, in Christchurch,
but it was lost to the 2011 earthquake.
We all remember the headlines that followed that fateful moment at 12:51
on 22nd February 2011 (11:51 GMT on 21st February), but I had not come close to
comprehending the scale of it until I saw for myself the decrepit shells of
buildings and piles of mangled debris that still lie around the heart of
Christchurch, and the large tracts of bare, overgrown land where rows of houses
gave way to liquefaction (a process described as a bit like the ground turning
to quicksand) have now been cordoned off ominously as "red zones".
This was the fate that befell the AMI Stadium, Lancaster Park, once New
Zealand's preeminent cricket and rugby venue. Only now have people come to
realise that the ground was too soft for buildings to survive. You can come
upon the red zones suddenly while walking through the city centre, but access
to these large, conspicuous gaps between buildings is virtually forbidden. The
magnitude of the earthquake was 6.3, but the vertical ground-shaking that the
city experienced remains the most violent earth movement ever recorded in a
major population area. Some estimates of the damage to Christchurch state that
70 percent of the city was destroyed; others say 80 percent.
The earthquake was only the first hit that Christchurch has taken of
late. In the subsequent year, there was a mass exodus of its residents, who
fled in fear of further shakes. That migration was apparently so large that it
led to Christchurch being displaced as New Zealand's second-largest city by the
capital, Wellington.
And so it's a testament to the resilience and community spirit embodied
by the people of Christchurch that they banded together to work with what they
had left and reignite the city. This boldness has allowed Christchurch to start
resembling its old self since reconstruction gathered pace in 2014. The
population level is recovering, Christchurch is again the economic hub of South
Island, and it is becoming the pinnacle of earthquake-proof architecture in
Oceania.
Natural disasters have a weird habit of galvanising people. Buildings
that might once have been described as soulless fell in the quake, and some,
like the City Mall, have been replaced by developments that illustrate the
ingenuity of the city's people. The Re:START mall, so named because it typified
Christchurch's renaissance after the earthquake, is a shopping centre
constructed entirely out of shipping containers. It was what they had, so they
used it. By October 2011, the shopping centre was open again. It has since
become an iconic symbol of post-earthquake Christchurch, popular with locals
and tourists alike. The phoenix-like rebirth of Christchurch was one of the
most striking things about my whole trip. The city will be an unforgettable
part of my holiday for that reason.
---
By:
The Imperial Orange,
7th January 2017
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