Bahrni's Website

Christchurch
At the least, it doesn't contain Jar-Jar Binks
Saturday 26th March 2005

It's amazing how your perception of a object or location is fundamentally shaped by it's context and the duration of its observance. Take for example, Star Wars Episode I. I saw it in Sydney and was very, very excited to have tickets to the opening day showing. A number of my friends and I queued for some considerable time and got ourselves more and more hyped up in the queue. We watched the film with rapt attention and cheered at the end. Huzzah for Star Wars! Weren't the effects great? Wasn't Darth Maul cool?

Even that evening though, the cracks in the facade had started to spread. The enthusiasm waned as we discussed how annoying Jar Jar was. It dipped further with our perceived under-use of Darth Maul. We didn't like the explanation of the things that caused the Force. The characters weren't memorable, the effects were often an eye-searing jumble, the...

...and so it continued. The initial sheen and goodwill eroded away leaving an accurate but not-all-that-appealing centre.

You may be wondering where I'm going with all this. I'll explain.

In early 2000 I had a couple of weeks holiday from my time in Oz to see some of New Zealand. I arrived in Christchurch (after some protracted visa issues that nearly resulted in my being deported) and was simply glad to be out of Newtown, away from its beggars and weirdos, and off work for two weeks. Christchurch came across as a breath of fresh air, a place with attractive gothic architecture, pleasant parks and interesting museums. In my head that's how I've always remembered the place.

This time though, I got a little more time to really see the city and, like Star Wars, the gleam looked increasingly tarnished.

It does have an attractive central square, with its cathedral and trams, and even the recent addition of a strange funnel'o'ferns seems to add to the charm rather than diminish it. There's a pretty street (the one I remembered from my last visit) which leads from Cathedral Square to the museum and the Botanic Gardens. But lurking behind and beside these are staggeringly ugly buildings, relics from that era of the last century when "progress" seemed to mean demolishing intricate brick and stone buildings and replacing them with featureless concrete. There are an inordinate number of "adult" shops scattered about. In the evenings the number of drunk and abusive teens wandering the streets were... well about the same as most depressing English cities to be honest. I suppose my feeling of disappointment stems from a rose-tinted memory of the previous time, but knowing that doesn't really make you feel any better.

So... stick to the tourist bits if I were you. Which is basically what we did. Adjoined to the tourist information centre on Cathedral Square itself is a interesting and entertaining (if not overly large) aqaurium, which has fish (obviously), crustaceans of various varieties, seahorses, and a touch pool where you poke and prod starfish and crabs to your hearts content. It also has a pair of Kiwis, which you can queue up for and eventually be lead into a dark room to quietly observe. I've seen stuffed Kiwis in assorted museums before, but I've never seen them up close and still vital and my impression of them is that either the Creator or evolution (depending on your standpoint) must be having a bit of a laugh. They're an endearingly ludicrous beastie, with a long thin beak and pear shaped body, completely lacking in wings beyond some tiny unseen vestigial protuberances on their sides. How they cope if they fall over I don't know. And given their deliberate and comical waddle like something made by Jim Henson, I'd have thought that would happen fairly frequently.

Sadly you're not getting any photos of them as they're nocturnal and the lights in their habitat were very dim and you're not allowed flash-photography, but thankfully not as dim as the nocturnal house in Wellington Zoo, which is basically pitch black.

Back in the eye-blinking daylight, and after an extremely tasty kebab from the mobile van in the square, we jumped on the restored tram for a run. They're a highly worthwhile way of seeing the more attractive and thus touristy bits of the city. They don't run all that far, just from Cathedral Square down to the Botanic gardens and then back one or two streets over, but they're fun and not very expensive. You also get a running commentary from the driver about landmarks you're riding past, which is a nice extra.

The trams also, as I mentioned, take you down to the Botanic Gardens, which are definitely a high point of Christchurch. I enjoy Botanic Gardens from a purely aesthetic standpoint, being blissfully ignorant about any of the vegetation found within, but Christchurch's gardens are airy, open and full of some of the most staggeringly enormous trees I've ever seen. I can only assume they're either quick growing, were there when New Zealand was settled by Europeans or were transplanted at a fairly advanced stage, because some of them are massive. I took a photo of Jo and her sister Bernie next to one of the biggest just so I could get some scale in there. They can be seen resolutely staring at the trunk with their backs to the camera.

Returning back along the same street we'd travelled along on the tram, there's the old buildings of Canterbury College on the right, which is now Christchurch Arts Centre, amongst other things. One section of the buildings in now preserved as "Rutherford's Den", where once upon a time one of the foremost figures of nuclear physics did his early scientific research. The "Den" in question is actually a small concrete basement beneath the floors of the lecture theatre, but was useful for Rutherford for the stability that the concrete floors provided, preventing vibrations upsetting his delicate apparatus. Whilst the Den is now empty, one end has a projected visage of the scientist (well, actually an actor _playing_ the scientist) talking about his work and his experiences in Canterbury College. There's also a lecture theatre preserved from the era and details of his discoveries, Nobel prize and other awards. All in all, it's pretty well done for a free exhibition, although donations are warmly accepted.

Other things that are worth doing in central Christchurch include the Canterbury Museum, which I didn't visit this time but I remember as being interesting, and punting along, or at least walking beside the Avon. It's all very reminiscent of Cambridge, with trees bending over the river casting dappled sunlight as straw-boater'd puntsmen push their charges up and down the river. Well, except that their charges are ice-cream scoffing Yanks rather than public-school types in blazers and most of the puntsmen are asian.

I wasn't really in a mood to be prodded along the Avon on this visit, so we walked along various sections of it over the weekend and it's a very pleasant walk. There's a replica wooden water wheel built to commemorate an 1859 flourmill and a memorial to Kate Sheppard, a leading figure in the Womens Suffrage movement in New Zealand, apparently from the Han-Solo-in-Carbonite school of civic decoration. Just off Worcester Boulevard there's a more traditional sculpture of Robert Falcon Scott, better known as Scott of the Antarctic, evocatively carved in his polar gear by his widow. Christchurch had been the departure point for the tragic expedition that claimed Scott's life along with his four companions.

And talking of ill-fated expeditions, the following day Jo, Bernie and I went for what was supposed to be an easy half-hour wander at the top of the Christchurch Gondola. Whilst we didn't starve and perish in freezing temperatures, we did manage to get comprehensively lost on completely the wrong trail and return several hours after we intended to. You can read all about it on the next page.