Saturday 10 December – how did we get to the end?

We have booked the hotel room through to tomorrow which means that we can go and explore the city a bit more this morning before trying to jam everything back into the case and heading back to the airport. So our first stop this morning was the trolly bus station so we could do a guided tour of the city by trolly bus. It was a good decision to do this first as by the time we got off they were all quite full. Our driver / guide – Alan was really good with a very relaxed style. Although we had done the tour yesterday we did learn some new things, such as 70 – 80 percent of the buildings in Christchurch were affected by the quake which rather shows why it is taking so long to rebuild, he also said that the container city (or restart mall) is actually going to come down at the end of the summer as they are going to start building on the site and enough retail space will be available for the shops to move into. After this tour we went back to the Quake museum and sure enough they were happy for us to re-enter free of charge as our names were on the list! We listened to the last couple of stories then walked round the museum which was really interesting, they had some before and after pictures of the two cathedrals and the administration buildings – safe to say that if you are going to live in an earthquake zone wood is the way to build your house! One of the buildings was actually made from wood and stone and all the stone parts of the building had fallen down and the wood was all still in place. By the time we finished looking round the museum it was time to head back to the hotel for lunch, a shower, pack and a bit of a relax before starting the journey home. The driver arrived just as we were checking out so after almost 10,000 kilometres, 28 hotels, B&Bs and apartments, 1 boat, 1 large earthquake and 64 days on the ground in New Zealand it is time to leave. It is hard to take in that we have been here for 9 weeks and this time tomorrow we will be back in England!