We came here a year and a half after Christchurch’s February 22, 2011 earthquake, the one that devastated downtown. Much of the city center has been closed since buildings are still being demolished, so Open Streets day this past weekend was our first glimpse at the central city plaza. You can see the cathedral (the place is called Christ Church after all) that was at the heart of the downtown district in the background. Open Streets day invited people back into the central city to see the status of the “rebuild” (which is still mostly underground necessities like sewers and water mains), though residential construction is booming and commercial buildings are starting to go up, if not yet in the city center itself.  Milo got to try out a pink tricycle–what a treat!

The trolley tracks indicate that this was once a trendy downtown walking plaza, but most of the buildings are now gravel lots.  It was the first time I realized how nice a place the central city used to be.

You might not be able to read the yellow spray paint on the window under the “Brave” sign, but it says “cleared,” meaning it was checked for people after the earthquake and everyone had evacuated. Places like this are still in “freeze frame” since the earthquake happened, but there are fewer and fewer still left to be dealt with.

“Former Link Center site” the sign says. Something new will doubtless be constructed eventually, but until then the site is still known by its former inhabitant.

The Cathedral is one of those buildings that has been in long-term limbo. Because it has been such an icon for the city, folks have an emotional attachment to the building and would have liked to see it restored, even at extravagant cost.  The latest news is that the Anglican church has decided to replace it with a modern building.  Personally I like the flower hut, but I imagine something more permanent will be devised.

There are winners and losers in every disaster, and the temporary fence companies were one of the winners in Christchurch! So many areas are still barricaded by temporary fence that I don’t even notice them any more, except these ones that were decked out in pretty plastic patterns to add festivity to the Open Streets day. Milo thought they were pretty cool too.

Open Streets included a bike parade with old fashioned bikes, a highlight for Milo.  Not sure what the stone Milo’s standing on used to support…..

I think Christchurch will be a plucky city and the rebuild will work. Here’s what the city council and retailers did when their retail spaces were “munted.” Shipping containers were being used as barricades and were plentiful and cheap, so they added windows, a lick of paint, planted flowers hung out “Quake city” signs, and carried on. A nifty bike repair station has even been installed (blue pillar to the right of stroller).

Tekapo is a little town perched at the edge of a big old glacier lake in MacKenzie Country, a grassy brown swath of countryside situated on the dry leeward side of the southern alps. It’s where they raise merino sheep, because I guess the breed gets rotten foot problems if they live in lusher moister pasture. Together with a couple of Kiwi friends we rented a house there last weekend. This is the view from the front porch.

I still haven’t learned what exactly what mineral makes these glacier lakes such a peculiar shade of blue. People say it’s “glacial silt,” but as you’ll see in pictures below, the silt at the very tail end of Tasman glacier is quite brown. The village of Tekapo is at the tail end of the lake, which is now dammed for use in the hydroelectric scheme.

The ride down to Tekapo would normally only take about 3 hours from Christchurch, but we made numerous stops on the way. Milo must have had at least 4 potty breaks (the last one being successful, even though it entailed pooping in a cemetery), and Jeremiah couldn’t pass Fairlie without stopping for a pie at his all-time favorite pie shop.

Kiwis love their “savories” and Jeremiah is a devoted convert. The pies here aren’t sweet–they’re meat pies like pepper steak, curried chicken, and the ever popular salmon & bacon. We stopped and fueled up the human tanks both to and from Tekapo.

The house we rented had a TV, so we also enjoyed a Kiwi sport weekend–America’s cup sailing in the morning and Rugby at night. Milo even got to sit and eat his breakfast while watching the sailing action.

At least three big lakes are linked by impressive canal systems that provide hydroelectric power, but also house salmon farms (you can see the floating rafts in the background). Occasionally the nets break and salmon populate the canals, much to the fishermen’s delight. Trout too grow to massive sizes feeding on the salmon farm food, but whether these count as the world’s biggest wild trout or half-domesticated pansies is debatable. We didn’t have any luck luring them at any rate.

The guy across the canal started giving us black looks when Milo splashed rocks, so we shifted down to where no fishermen would complain about scared fish….not that they were biting that morning anyway. You really can’t tell a two-year-old that he must not throw rocks into water–they’re drawn to it like magnets.

Mt Cook (or Aoraki) is the tallest mountain in the Southern Alps, up at the head of the glacier valley just south of Tekapo. We had stunning weather all weekend, but we could see the clouds broiling just over the divide. Yikes, glad we weren’t over there!

Tasman glacier at 27 kilometers is the longest one in New Zealand, in a valley just next to Mt Cook village. We walked up the length of it’s glacier-melt lake and a bit up along the tail end of it.

This glacial valley is the most raw terrain I’ve ever seen. Tasman is receding rapidly now (at estimates of 1,500 to 2,500 feet/year), and you can see along the valley sides the giant walls of gravel that the ice had plowed up during it’s latest peak. The tail end is all dirty and gravelly, not pristine at all. Our friend Damien commented that NZ will never lack for the gravel component of concrete. To me it’s fascinating to see such young land. New York was once covered in glaciers and I used to work with a farmer whose fields were on what was once the terminal morraine. They were ridiculously rocky and irregularly hilly, but looking out at the melting Tasman I could imagine how they formed.

Our friends Anna and Damien sit overlooking the lake at the end of Tasman glacier. Those icebergs drop off the end of the glacier and get blown down the lake where the lodge and make a surreal landscape.

The Feb 2011 earthquake triggered a massive ice-fall from the end of the glacier, somewhere between 30 and 40 million tons of ice, creating a glacier lake tsunami. Apparently the tour boats that were on the lake at the time road the 3-meter high wave without a problem, since they were out in the lake center and not near shore.

Mt John was an old island of hard rock surrounded by glaciers “back in the day.” Underneath the thin brown grass you can see the old river paths that crisscrossed the whole countryside from up there.  Its like seeing the earth’s skeleton.  Interesting landscape, but too raw and barren for me. I like green trees to clothe the land. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, because our Kiwi friends quite like the “golden tussock lands” as they call them.  It’s spring now, so don’t think this countryside ever looks green.

Last week we had a “southerly” for a day, bringing cold rain to Christchurch but fresh snow to the southern alps. We had originally planned to head up higher into the hills and try to use our snowshoes one last time before spring, but the wind was wicked and our planned hike was above the tree line, so we switched last minute to Mt Oxford, just over an hour from Christchurch in the foothills. Most of the walk was through beautiful beech forest hung with lichens and padded with moss.

Good thing Milo was asleep or this bit of the walk–the wind was howling so we covered him in the pack cover.

We actually opted not to go all the way up to the summit. We enjoyed the view briefly as the wind tore at our hair and clothes, then turned downhill for cover. This should have been a nice easy walk, but Baby Number 2 is slowing me down…the energy drain seems not to be fully explained by simple weight gain. I was happy enough to spend the evening sitting on the couch when we got home.  5 more weeks until I get my own body back….but become a milk machine for the next year. 

The path on the way out was strewn with angular rocks. Milo was poking along looking at the ground when he suddenly stopped and exclaimed “Number One!” He found a rock shaped like that numeral, and was pleased to carry it back home in his pocket.  I told him he was a “sharp cookie,” a term which must have puzzled him a bit.  His memory is amazing–we talk about something once and he’s got it. 

The term “whitebait” doesn’t conjure up images of edible delicacies, but that’s what this tiny little fish is….to Kiwis at any rate. Their life cycle is the reverse of salmon–adults live in rivers, the eggs get swept out to sea where the babies hatch, spend a couple months as part of the plankton mass (fish fodder), then swim back up stream to grow into adults. Friday after work Jeremiah got to go out to the Waimakariri river mouth with a colleague, a seasoned white baiter, to tend his nets.

The net set-up isn’t too complicated–an arm to sweep the creatures towards the net where they can be collected. This guy has been white baiting for 40 years–I imagine the collective hours would be impressive.  If you were to buy them, they retail for $100/kilogram, so the cumulative value he’s gleaned might also be impressive.

Right, so let’s just say that Friday’s catch wasn’t all that impressive in quantity, but Milo still thought they were neat. There’s no filleting these little guys–they’re eaten heads, tails, guts and all, usually as a “fritter” held together by egg.  Jeremiah thought they were tasty.  Milo and I passed.

Milo is an unusual name in America, but it’s a household name in New Zealand thanks to their malted barley drink. We soon realized that here it was almost like naming your kid “Nestle” or “Hershey.” No one else names their child Milo, but at least people have no trouble remembering his name. Milo actually likes the drink, probably because he hasn’t been spoiled with a lot of really good hot chocolate, which in my opinion is “heaps” (another Kiwi term) better than MILO. MILO does have one advantage over hot chocolate in that it’s fortified with minerals, so it’s kind of like giving your kid a vitamin tablet as a snack.

This past weekend Jeremiah had a daddy weekend with Milo and I went with an American friend (Jen) to Mt Somers, about 2 hours south of Christchurch. We couldn’t have had better weather if we had ordered it specially. Sun-soaked, very little wind, frosty nights with perhaps 50s in the day. Amazing. The peaks around the area were decked out in fresh snow but the path was clear except in the shade.

If you look closely you can see two women laying on the rock with the spectacular mountains behind….that is Jen and me! The day was so gorgeous that we dawdled on the rocks before descending back down to the valley to the hut. We could see our destination from this shoulder, and only moved on when we noticed a number of people on the trail ahead of us and got nervous about bagging a bunk in the hut for the night. Last time Jeremiah and I were here was about a year ago, one of our first hiking trip in NZ with Milo. We huddled in the lee of a rock while eating our chilly lunch that day.  This time we should have brought sun screen.

The hut did fill up for the night, as you might expect on such a spectacular weekend this close to Christchurch. It seems to be the premier destination for families with 7-10 year-olds who rumbled around the top bunks in the early morning hours unrestrained by parental orders….but I guess next it’ll be us bringing a wailing newborn in to share the sleeping quarters, so I won’t complain. You don’t stay in a big hut if you’re looking for a quiet remote get-away, after all, and the people we met in such places have been fun and memorable characters.

We poked around in a couple nearby swimming holes, imagining if the water was warm like a hot spring, and vowed to come back in summertime. Jen particularly liked the look of this one!

Jen likes swing bridges, oddly enough since she’s pretty nervous about heights! We took the ridge trail back to the car, making a nice scenic loop through tussocklands.  One of the most amazing things about the weekend was that conversation was completely uninterrupted by a 2-year-old.  It feels novel to finish full sentences and even complete thoughts without that strident voice piping up in the middle.  I have to admit that I didn’t really miss him overnight, but I still thought about him plenty and was happy to see him when I got home. 

This past weekend we took Milo to Orana wildlife park near Christchurch. It was originally set up as a drive-through safari-type experience but is now walker-only. The expansive enclosures and dilapidated roads don’t have the feel of a congested city zoo, and the proximity to the animals is refreshingly un-American. Each day visitors can feed the giraffes handfuls of whatever seasonal treat the keepers have cut while these docile giants swing their heads back and forth looking for the next edible bouquet. Keepers gave a brief tutorial on holding the branches tightly so the giraffes can strip the leaves off, then let us at it. Milo wasn’t so keen on getting too close.

Feeding these guys was super neat. Their pre-historic-looking heads bob up and down as their lips smooch out in search of treats. Their purple tongues grasp the branches, yanking them into their mouths. And those eye lashes–wow! Strange but wonderful creatures.

These two are babies, betrothed from youth. The far one just arrived from Australia as the mail order groom, and the female was born here. Zealandia, the company I work for, has a network of trucks that run the whole of the north and south island, so my boss’s mother-in-law volunteered them to transport the new Australian arrival from Auckland (north island) to Christchurch (south island). Good thing giraffes are so docile! We had two drivers that made the trip; one from Auckland to the interisland ferry, the other from Picton to Christchurch. The baby groom just got out of quarantine and seems to have clued into the daily feeding routine quite well!

Here’s a classic New Zealand scene if there ever was one. In a country built on grazing sheep it’s not uncommon to encounter a farmer pushing his herd down the public road with the help of a truck and a couple stringy sheep dogs.  Cars give way.  I don’t know why, but sheep have a funny way of spiraling when pushed–counterclockwise, in this case, but I haven’t watched enough herds to know whether that’s always the case.

We’ve picked mussels at Okane bay on the Banks Peninsula before, but it had been nearly a year. The weather was predicted to be unseasonably fine and low tide was conveniently at noon, so we braved the car-sickening twisting roads to the remote bay and made a day of it. The green lipped mussels (romantic, eh?) are at the far end of an old wharf road that is now falling into the ocean. This is my kind of hunting–no luck or chance involved–the mussels are just waiting there on the rocks to be picked when the tide is low enough and the sea is calm enough.

I say picking mussels is my kind of hunting, but this day I actually just sat on the warm sunny rocks with Milo and watched Jeremiah get wet. Someone has to care for the kiddo…..

I introduced Milo to the love of sea snails. These things fascinate me. I love the little rock pools they inhabit with the sun-warmed water. I love picking them up to watch their door snap closed. I love laying them upside down and watching their foot and feelers ooze slowly out to grip the rock and spin their shell back above their body. Milo didn’t have a lot of patience to wait for their re-emergence, but he did enjoy finding them and throwing them back into the deeper water, or relocating them to different pools.  He asked about eating them, but I told him they were too small….maybe not strictly true, but I like snails and don’t feel the need to eat them.

These rocks were actually sharp and unforgiving, full of barnacles. Milo was an amazingly good sport about me keeping a constant hand on him.

Back at the beach Milo was in little boy heaven. Sea worms make little sunken holes in the sand and though he never managed to catch one (neither did Mommy), he didn’t tire of trying.

His footprints always stop at the shells, which he picked up and tossed into our bucket. He’s still pigeon toed, and I’m duck-footed. “Match; birds” as Milo would say.

Splashing in tidal pools was the other major hit of the day. “Leave no puddle un-splashed” was Milo’s motto. I remember the joy of kicking in shallow pools during family vacations at Cape Cod, and I’m glad Milo can experience something similar, even if he’s missing the warmth and the crab bites and the cousins.

Milo was worried that my feet, disappearing down into the sand, were getting stuck. He grabbed a leg and started tugging upwards. Helpful little bugger!

He didn’t want to let his own feet ooze down too far beneath the surface, but he enjoyed hiding just his toes.

Jeremiah was reticent to pick Milo up the conventional way because he was so soggy, and his pants got so wet that they wouldn’t stay up….but we eventually made it back to the dry clothes awaiting us at the car.

Here’s a small portion of our day’s take. The limit is 50 mussels per person so we got 150 of them, and Jeremiah was kept busy cleaning and steaming for the rest of the evening.  You should have seen the state of the kitchen when he was done….  And no, we didn’t eat them all at once. We’re giving some to friends and we’ll try freezing some for later use.