Holy F*cking Shit
by Adam & Lara on 02/26/11We are back in San Francisco, safe and sound. Our year in New Zealand has officially come to an end. And let me tell you, we really went out with a bang.
We left Queenstown and drove up to Christchurch on the afternoon of February 20th. Our flight out was at 6:35am on the 23rd, so we had to get our asses there asap since Queenstowners can't recognize a great deal on a high-miles but well-running campervan even if it were stapled to every god damn hostel message board in town. Luckily we sold the van before 10am the next day to a kind fellow who preferred to sit in the passenger seat and drink beer instead of test driving the vehicle himself. We spent the rest of the day making it rain on the local craft market.
The next day we got up and went for a run since we knew we'd be spending the next 30 hours sitting and drinking at high altitudes. We got back to Stonehurst (our hostel) and showered up. Adam went upstairs to start packing all his crap, Lara stayed downstairs in the bathroom engaging in her mysterious 30-minute post-shower ritual. At that point (12:51pm) was when a giant f*cking earthquake began, shaking the f*ck out of every inch of our building and terrifying the complete living shit out of us.
It was a 6.3 magnitude and lasted for about 10 seconds. When it stopped Adam ran around the top floor looking for other people. There were none, so he ran downstairs and saw Lara in the hallway. We ran around looking for people on the bottom floor and then got the f*ck out.
Most of the windows were busted out of our building, and most of the furniture was either knocked over or had shimmied to the middle of the room. Some cracks had opened up in the parking lot and wet silt was starting to bubble up through them. The sky was clouded up with giant plumes of dust. Beyond that, shit seemed alright. So Adam got on his phone and called our friend Lucy in Queenstown to see if she felt the quake. That's when we saw the other half of our hostel and realized that shit was not alright.
What once was a 3 story building was now 2 because the bottom floor had pancaked and the exterior wall had been entirely ripped off. Adam hung up the phone and ran over to help locate a girl that was trapped underneath the rubble. Firemen were quickly flagged down and they took over the dig and managed to get her out 20 minutes later, hurt but alive.
At that point the hostel owner gathered up all of the staff and guests and did a role call to make sure nobody else was trapped inside. Since it was lunch hour on a weekday, most people were out and about so we couldn't account for them. But from what we could tell nobody was inside - a lucky coincidence of having an earthquake in the middle of the day.
We ran back into our building which appeared to be standing solid, ran upstairs and began throwing our clothes and valuables into our bags. 30 seconds into that an aftershock hit, once again scaring the complete and utter shit out of us. But this one was smaller and we immediately went back to packing. A minute or two later we ran back outside, lucky to have everything we owned with us in backpacks. We headed to nearby Latimer Square Park were people were converging.
Half of the park was filled with folks who had evacuated their buildings and had nowhere to go. The other half had been roped off and turned into a makeshift triage center. Police cars and ambulances were coming and going, and bodies covered in white sheets were beginning to accumulate on the grass. The air smelled horrible - smoke was wafting through the city from several large fires. Helicopters began flying overhead and dumping tanks of water onto burning buildings nearby. Every once in a while somebody would run up screaming and crying because they had just got out of a fallen building that still had others trapped inside. Every 20 minutes or so the ground would start shaking again causing momentary panic. The environment felt nightmarish and the aftershocks instilled a pants-shitting fear of being anywhere near buildings.
We sat down with a group of Israelis who were staying in our dorm room. They mentioned that back at the hostel somebody had arranged to bus us out, so we ran back and checked it out.
Aaron Keown, a Christchurch City Council Member who was in the area, had managed to flag down a city bus and direct it to Stonehurst. He wasn't sure where we'd go (or even if the streets were clear enough to navigate) but he said that we'd be better off getting out of the city center where all hell was breaking loose. We hopped on the bus immediately and 10 minutes later the bus was full and painfully turning away others.
As the bus drove out of the city we became more aware of the full extent of the damage. Buildings all over the city were down, cars were crushed by falling bricks, power was out everywhere, cars were sunk in giant cracks in the road that had filled with mud. I stopped taking pictures for awhile because it felt wrong to be "sightseeing" in the midst of a totally f*cked up disaster.
Getting out of our building unscathed, getting all of our stuff, and getting a ride out of downtown sparked a brilliant crescendo of luck that continued for the next 36 hours. In the late afternoon we decided to set up camp in a rugby field by the airport. The owner of the rugby clubhouse arrived and opened the facility for us to sleep in. This place had chairs and tables, running water and electricity despite the fact that the surrounding block of residences were blacked out. And, we're not shitting you, it had a full bar that the owner opened up for business. And, we're still not shitting you, they had the cheapest beer that we've seen in all of New Zealand.
The radio made an announcement that about 65 people were camped out at Burnside Park Rugby Club, so by the evening locals began stopping by with food and bedding. We literally ended up with more cookies, sausages, meat pies, blankets and pillows than we could possibly consume. By 8pm half of our group had been taken away to neighbors' houses to sleep on beds and sofas. We drank Speights until 1am with our Israeli friends who taught us a new set of rules to Asshole (the card game) involving more strategy and less binge drinking. As we slept aftershocks continued, which caused everybody to simultaneously wake up and poop bricks until the building stopped swaying.
On Wednesday morning Aaron led our group on a 6:30am pilgrimage to the airport, which had reopened for domestic flights only. Our stupidly awesome luck continued when the Jetstar agent booked us on a same-day flight to Auckland. By 9am Jetstar was telling people that the earliest they could book was Saturday. A 4.2 aftershock hit 10 minutes before boarding, which really made us happy to get the f*ck off of the ground.
That was the last we saw of Christchurch. We spent that night in Auckland and flew out to SFO the following day. To recap... Tuesday: giant earthquake in Christchurch. Wednesday: sitting in Auckland watching a jazz band which featured a xylophonist called "The Wizard." Thursday: sitting in Hobson's Choice with all of our San Francisco friends. There are still 200 people missing, still rescue crews working around the clock, still people sleeping in Latimer Square Park. I'm blogging from my friends apartment on the other side of the world.
That is a fortunate turn of events, and for it we will be eternally grateful.
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