wet and wild in greymouth :)

so this is very old news by now, but i thought i'd post about a day trip to the west coast that we took shorly after we'd decided to move back to the states, when "one last time" and a little sigh were being added to every proposed outing. for a reason that i can't quite pinpoint, we chose dreary greymouth over the alpine beauty of lake tekapo but still found plenty of dramatic scenery and windy roads to keep us awake for the 8-hour return journey.



We all look hideous in this photo but it's
the only one I have of the three of us.

we headed off in phil's car on a saturday morning along arthur's pass, the high road through a mountain pass that connects christchurch on the east coast with greymouth on the west coast. in the morning we could look out over the pacific ocean and imagine south america far beyond the horizon, and by lunchtime we were gazing towards australia over the tasman sea. i love living in a small country. our first stop was not, unfortunately, for "world-famous pies" in the town of springfield, but at the scenic and remote lake lyndon, where these first few pictures were taken. we weren't far enough into our road trip to need much time away from the car, so we walked down to the lakeshore for a quick glance, trying not to disturb the fishermen whose tranquillity we were interrupting, and popped back on the road, trying to beat the impending rain.



bryan at lake lyndon



phil at a rest stop along the pass, admiring the hugeness of the glacial valley.



half an hour beyond lake lyndon, having passed only access roads to one or two skifields not yet in season, the hills flattened out and we pulled into a packed little parking lot by the castle rock formations, a series of exposed rocks that have weathered in such a way as to make them resemble castle ruins on a hillside. we'd seen pictures of these before from a trip that the youth group made out here last year to do some climbing, but we weren't quite as ambitious and only managed a brief wander after a single halfhearted attempt to scale a large boulder, which proved to be much too slippery for our tennis shoes. we couldn't believe how many other travellers had stopped here as well, as the roads were nowhere near crowded and tourist season was clearly coming to a close. could be the effect of nothing to see in christchurch since the earthquake.





arthur's pass is a fun road to travel along, as it is soon flanked by steep snow-peaked mountains and high waterfalls flowing down the wide riverbed carved out by glaciers many moons ago. i don't particularly enjoy driving its blind curves, always aware of the thousand-foot drop close at hand, but observing from the backseat with a safe and confident driver is a pleasant thing in this part of new zealand. at times the landscape eases into grassy hilltops dotted with sheep or skinny lakes rimmed with golden trees, and at those times you wouldn't want to be anywhere but in the car on a drizzly autumn day with a few bags of chips and a comfy pair of sweatpants.



the aqueduct diverting rainfall over the road, just past
the highest elevation of the pass

bryan and i had travelled along the western half of arthur's pass on a side trip while driving down the west coast in 2009 with our german acquaintance, david, whom we'd met in a cheap hostel after finishing the heaphy track, so reaching the tiny town of arthur's pass halfway through our drive with phil marked the completion of this route and the beginning of familiar territory. we opted not to stop in arthur's pass, as there's not much to see and it was raining too hard to make even a short hike very attractive, and drove on through to the west coast in miserable weather. the west coast is known for unfathomable quantities of rain, so we rejoiced to see greymouth in its element and actually did enjoy the rugged splendor that a low fog and misty weather lend to the largish town at the mouth of the depressingly-named grey river.   



we didn't last long in greymouth, stopping for less than an hour to restock our snack supply, read about the massive floods of the mid-90s that led to the building up of the river's retaining wall (above), and hit up a good sale at toyworld. the highlight of the day, however, was finding the lookout point above the turbulent meeting point of the wild tasman sea and the powerful grey river, where the waves crashed violently against the rocks and reinforced why the west coast is no popular swimming spot.

on the way back i convinced phil to take a detour along what my map had indicated was a paved road, but turned out to be mostly a rough and muddy gravel track instead. the dense, jungle-like west coast foliage eventually thinned out and revealed little gems like this tucked-away lake that justified (in my eyes at least) the extra time that we spent traversing this wild country. the rest of the trip back was uneventful, since we'd stopped at the few sights on the way in and wanted to get out of the mountains before nightfall, but the setting sun did allow for some pretty, if blurry, shots through the window on the way home.

next up: photos from the two days that we'll spend in queenstown next week...as long as the ash cloud from chile's volcanic eruption doesn't continue to ground domestic flights :(

-rachel

a difficult decision.

i mentioned in my last blog that bryan's job here will end in about a month, creating massive complications for our work permits here. after familiarizing ourselves again with the immigration nz website, it looks like it would be a long shot (not to mention a long and expensive process) for us to gain new zealand residency or any sort of work permit, and so we've decided that it's time to move again, most likely back to the states. we've just purchased tickets with air asia (reportedly worse than jetstar...uh-oh!) to london in july and plan to spend about two weeks in europe, mainly in germany to visit our friends ann-kristin and josh in berlin and hopefully duck down south to rheinland-pfalz to show bryan where we lived when my dad was stationed there with the army.

we really love christchurch, and it's difficult to imagine leaving, especially so abruptly. with much of downtown being closed to the public or demolished as a result of the earthquake, it feels like we'll be leaving without a proper goodbye...without one last chicken soho sandwich from the new york deli on new regent st, without catching one last movie at the tiny arts centre cinema, without a final visit to the central library where i've spent so many hours in the past year. i suppose that just justifies a follow-up trip in a year or so to check out the rebuild, huh? :)

i'll leave you with a glimpse just outside our flat of the gorgeous autumn weather...and also a little reminder of home. strange to imagine that we might be back in springfield, virginia by the northern fall.

-rachel

happy easter!

happy easter, everyone! it's been a long 40 days of lent, and i'm thrilled to be able to partake in all manner of sweets again :) my aunt and uncle sent us three amazing boxes of american food last month, some of which we have managed to save until now, including the package of easter oreos that will go down so well with a tall glass of chocolate milk and the velveeta that we're going to make into a spicy cheese dip this afternoon. yum!

long weekends are only appreciated when you actually have a job to take a break from, and so this is one of the first holidays that's felt like a true holiday for me in new zealand. the company that i work for makes, among other things, chemo drugs for cancer patients, so the hospitals have been stocking up before the weekend and i've had plenty of late nights at work over the last two weeks. everyone here is grumbling about anzac day (memorial day for war veterans) falling on easter weekend and robbing us of another holiday, but in general it seems to me that this country takes every opportunity for a day off.

the disappointing bit about this easter for us is the knowledge that it's probably our last easter in new zealand. bryan found out a few weeks ago that the church would not be able to keep him on staff beyond the end of may, as the earthquakes have meant a drop-off in attendance, a pricey rebuild of our main building and renovation of the small youth hall that we're meeting in, and the loss of car parking revenue from neighboring businesses. so with our visa being tied to this job and our chances of getting residency looking pretty slim, we probably won't be able to stay here beyond the end of our current visa in august :( we're more than a little disappointed, as we'd been planning to stay for at least another two years and had been so thrilled that i'd finally found full-time work just a few weeks earlier. we'll give more updates as we figure out what we're doing and how much time we have left in our lovely city.

-rachel

excellent developments on the job front

just wrote a long blog all about my new job - only to have it post a blank one and delete all of my writing. fantastic.

summary: i found a full-time job. it's sweet. it's as a lab assistant in a pharmaceutical company. this means we can stay in new zealand. hooray!

maybe i'll rewrite it when i'm not quite so annoyed.

-rachel

deconstructing church

Here are some before and after photos that our senior pastor snapped yesterday of our church building getting demolished. Apparently they've just instituted some new policies today that would require a longer permit process for demolishing a building, but yesterday these weren't yet in force and it was taken down, as I hear it, in a matter of minutes. The auditorium that was torn down hasn't been used since the September earthquake, when some bricks from a supporting wall came crashing through our offices, but it had been hoped until last week that it would still be able to be repaired. Actually, the insurance company was still hoping this - the rest of us wanted the old converted building to go so that we could rebuild one better suited to our needs. We've been using our much smaller youth hall building for the last six months, which has proven to be impressively earthquake-proof; this is what we expect to move back into in a month or two. The plan until then hasn't yet been finalized.


After: Just the Youth Hall

Before: Youth Hall (left) and Auditorium (right)



-Rachel

earthquake update: part 2

In the days immediately following the quake we stayed at home, never straying far from the TV where the news coverage gave round-the-clock updates on the rescue and recovery efforts with frequent briefings by our well-spoken mayor, Bob Parker, on whom I have a bit of an older-man crush. We listened especially for information about the CTV building, which had caught on fire after its total collapse, where Paul, one of the elders from our church, had been working on Tuesday morning. Having not had any live rescues since Wednesday afternoon, just 26 hours after the quake, the media were especially sensitive to any possible signs of life and issued reports on a few trapped survivors that were later found to be not true. On Thursday or Friday we were all discouraged to hear the USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) chief declare 100% certainty that the building was no longer a survivable environment and began to acknowledge that we had lost a valued member of our church and a man who had been a good friend to us.

Paul and his wife Nancy were the first people that we met at City Church last January, and if it weren't for their kindness we probably wouldn't have stayed in New Zealand as long as we have. They took us out for lunch at their favorite restaurant, drove us up to the Port Hills to introduce us to a bird's eye view of our new city, and helped us sort out Bryan's internship at the church. At Christmas, knowing that I was still unsuccessfully looking for work, they gave us a lovely gift basket of tasty food as well as a very generous monetary gift that bought us groceries for multiple weeks. We had just invited them over to our place for lunch to repay their many kindnesses to us, but as we were waiting for the school year to get into full swing (Nancy's a teacher), the opportunity hadn't yet come around. As far as I'm aware, his body hasn't yet been found or identified, which isn't surprising, as work at the CTV building has been progressing slowly because of the extent of the damage there. 



Towards the end of the week we began meeting at Westside, one of the other churches in our movement, to arrange food distribution, help shovel liquefaction off of lawns and driveways, and sort out any other needs of families in our churches and in their communities. Bryan headed up the team that hosted sausage sizzles at a couple of water distribution sites on the east side of town, and I went out with them on Thursday to Cowles Stadium in Bromley, where one of the welfare centres was beginning to wind down as the newly homeless sorted out longer-term accommodation options. Our two BBQ stations were swamped with kids and adults who hadn't had hot food in days, most of the residents in that area still being without power and water, and many of them filling their couches and floor space with friends and family whose homes were even less inhabitable.

On Sunday we had a combined church service at Westside with the 4-5 other churches of our denomination in the Christchurch area, the most energetic Sunday service that we've had in a long time. We were surprised at the number of families that decided to venture out to the far side of town, and threw together a kids program at the last minute. We'd originally been expecting to just support the kids programs that Westside was already running, but we found that we quickly outstripped the resources that they had available, especially with many of the normal volunteers needing to sort out their own family's needs as well as recover psychologically from the experience.

Today our pastor will be sorting out the building situation for our church, trying to find a place that's closer to the city as we expect to be out of our building for a month at the very least. One of the options is having an afternoon service at a church that's half a block away from where we live, which would really help us with our lack of transport as the bus system doesn't seem to be anywhere near up and running. We'll see what happens.

-Rachel

earthquake update

Bryan and James shoveling liquefaction from our driveway

So this Tuesday was supposed to be a fairly quiet day - Bryan had gone down to the church to help with a BBQ that we were putting on for the students of Vision College, next door to our church, and I slept in, lounging around in my pajamas until lunchtime. I was trying to talk myself into heading down to the library to do more job searching, but a good book about Scott's Discovery voyage to the Antarctic kept my inside - which turned out to be particularly fortunate on this day.

Just before 1 PM, as I was still in my second-floor bedroom, engrossed in my book, we experienced an aftershock that was particularly startling and felt even more severe than the original earthquake that we experienced in September. I could hear things crashing to the floor downstairs and darted to my earthquake position in the doorway, feeling only slighly more prepared than last year. Though I was immediately able to get a call through to Bryan and knew that he and others with him were all right, I started walking down to the church right away. There's something helpful about being able to see others and share the experience with them that outweighed the potential dangers of leaving the house.

Everyone was out on the streets, and as I got closer to the city I started meeting people who had walked up from the city center. One man told me that he'd been in a conference in the Town Hall when the floor split in two. I passed a corner pharmacy that had suffered minor damage during the last quake and moved to a new location; good thing, too, because the second floor had completely collapsed in on the bottom floor where their store had been, leaving interior hallways and doors exposed for all to see.

At the church I discovered that a 30-ft wall looming over their BBQ spot had partially collapsed just as they were about to start, and a few people had been snatched away from the wall by friends as it began to fall. No one there was hurt, but some friends hadn't yet been able to locate family and were becoming more and more distraught, not sure if their phone's silence meant that their family members were caught in the rubble or simply that the cell phone network wasn't working properly. Finding nothing to do at the church itself, I drove a friend in this situation towards her house on the east side of town, not sure if we could get through but determined to find out if her house, which had been damaged in the last quake, was still standing and if her mom was there. We finally abandoned the car a mile or two from the church after 45 minutes in stand-still traffic, and walked the final mile along roads buckled with pressure and clotted with liquefaction, soil that's been compressed by the pressure and turns to mud, which seeps up through the cracks and holes that are available to it. Fortunately, we found her family safe and well, though their house has moved off of its foundations and they've since moved in with family in other parts of town.

Knowing the traffic to be impossible and expecting the buses not to be running (I had since heard of buses having been crushed by falling buildings in the city), I headed off on foot towards my home, 3 or 4 miles west, at some points finding the streets underwater to knee-level. Most of the homes I saw in this area seemed to be in good condition, as some of the most fragile ones had come down last September and almost none of the chimneys had yet been replaced after their tumbles from last year. I arrived home to find our small back pation area covered with inches of liquefaction, a stream of water running through from an outlet I couldn't pinpoint and slowly filling the area even more.

Throughout the afternoon and evening we sat glued to the TV, amazed at the difference in damage compared to the last earthquake, which was larger on the magnitude scale (7.1 compared to a 6.3) but, being farther from the city center, shallower, and occurring overnight, didn't result in anything near what we were seeing this time around. We had power but not water, and dutifully set out every large pot and unbroken bowl onto our balcony to collect the rain that was now starting to come down.

More later.

-Rachel