We spent a couple of days in Christchurch after returning our RV. The weather has been hot and mostly sunny, which is great. Our Airbnb is near Hagley Park which is near downtown Christchurch.
We went to the Canterbury museum, where they had an exhibition of National Geographic’s top 50 photos, that was pretty interesting. They also had a nice exhibit about WWI. New Zealand seems to have been more affected by WWI than World War 2, since I’ve seen a lot of WWI memorials as we’ve travelled around. Below is the Christchurch WWI memorial arch.
Christchurch has suffered a series of earthquakes in the past several years, starting with a 7.1 in 2010 with a 6.3 magnitude aftershock in 2011 that caused massive damage and 185 deaths and thousands of injuries. Then they had another pretty big one in 2016. There is still a lot of construction, repairs and retrofitting going on. In 2011 they built a temporary mall out of shipping containers, because that was what was available, but now it has become a tourist attraction.
Interesting mural.
Sunset over Christchurch, they are an east coast city so the sun sets over the land, but it was still pretty beautiful.
Final summary of our journey in NZ:
David