Christchurch’s Night Lights

This is really creepy. Achterdorm in the wonderful old Victorian Rolleston House in the centre of Christchurch. Even two years after the big quake, everything around it is still broken or just rubble and ashes. A laptop LCD glows in every bed. Apart from the typing, everything is as quiet as a mouse. Nobody is talking. Presumably everyone is writing about homesickness for home.

I’m the web designer here! I’m the first and the last to type at night! But I feel great when I’m not typing. It’s really incredible how the travelling world has changed in just five years. Everyone is rushing from hotspot to hotspot, and the free ones are becoming increasingly rare. Travelling in between has become a necessary evil to decorate the Facebook wall with the same pictures over and over again.

Okay, so blogging after all. The bloke lugs a whopping five cameras around the world. Pressing the button wherever he can, rushing from comparative to superlative, always chased by the obscure idea that there is such a thing as a correct travelling speed. And now he’s lying awake – the last ghostly light in the dorm after all – and writing? What could be better about that?

Akaroa is the Cote d’Azur of New Zealand – in terms of colour and temperature. Normally. The sky remains grey, and the otherwise azure blue sea in the crater of the old supervolcano reflects it in exactly the same way. We travel around by boat for two hours, but there is nothing more to see than the tail of a Hector’s dolphin. In the evening we camp in Okains Bay at one of New Zealand’s potentially coolest kite spots. The water is warm, the rain is cold and the wind is gone.

The next day, we heat through the clouds over the crater rim to Christchurch for the Buskers Festival. Small artists are marketed in a big way: the five main sponsors of the festival are all construction companies hopelessly overburdened with the rebuilding of Christchurch. Five years ago, the jugglers were everywhere in the city centre. But this is still a restricted area for a long time to come, a “red zone” with buildings in danger of collapse or car parks already flattened by dust. So the festival takes place in Hagley Park.

The barrier in front of the central Cathedral Square is guarded by the military. The tower of the cathedral has collapsed, the rest is hanging from the outside with makeshift supports. The theatre stands half open in the wind. Clouds of dust sweep across empty squares. There are more orange construction workers behind the barriers than at a Fraggles gangbang. Jackhammers sound from the tower blocks. 185 white chairs on grass. Entire streets are covered with the burnt remains of houses. Even new buildings are so badly damaged that they are no longer allowed to be entered. In the emergency library, a traveller asks me without preamble if I want to buy his car. Now I finally feel like I’m in Mad Max.

There have been 11,000 aftershocks in Christchurch in the last two years. One was also reported yesterday, measuring 3.3 on the Richter scale. We didn’t feel any of them, probably because of the evening activities. We sneak into a metal concert at the nearby Dux Live Club, sipping ginger beer. The audience is a colourful mix of black and white. I can’t help but grin at the numerous little dykes in high-heeled shoes among the kohl-coated neo-metro-punkers. The guests at the legendary Wunderbar in Lyttleton the previous evening were much more monotonous.

We spend the night in an old monastery on the beach in New Brighton. You can’t leave Uli alone for five minutes and she already has new friends. In this case, a hard-drinking construction worker from South Africa. Christchurch’s rebuilding is like the new gold rush, the only posh buildings still standing in the city centre all contain architects and construction companies. We head back to Dux Live for a great free concert by Superfood. I’ll never go drinking with a construction worker again. The earth is shaking.