Time to head to Auckland

March 1, 2011
Surf Sessions = 16
Km Driven =5950

Today we broke camp and headed to Auckland. George was able to "convince" the airline that having us depart NZ from Auckland instead of Christchurch was in their best interests. Christchurch was still reeling from the 6.3 earthquake that hit on the Feb. 25th and the airport was just beginning to function there. A third of the downtown central business district has been severely damaged and a rescue effort was still ongoing for people trapped inside the collapsed CTV Building (which apparently was fairly new). The quake was a shallow one which resulted in a huge lateral shift. The fact that Christchurch sits on land reclaimed from a river bed (similar to the Mexico City quake's circumstances) exacerbates a shallow quake; kind of like sitting in a bowl of Jello. Another circumstance also "enhanced" the force of the quake...reflection of the quake off volcanic rock back towards Christchurch. This effectively made Christchurch the victim of 2 quakes, the first primary quake with the "second" quake directly on the heels of the first one. All in all, it appears from the TV news reports that we have seen that this is New Zealand's darkest hour. Pray for those trapped, for those who have passed, and for their families.
After an hour and a half of wrangling the airline reservation agent on the phone, we were able to reschedule our flight to leave from Auckland instead. This did present a problem for us, which was that now we did not have a car dealer's guarantee of purchasing our Honda Odyssey back from us at an agreed price...because he was all the way down in Christchurch. This fact prompted us to leave the Coromandel a couple of days early to ensure we could get rid of Chewbacca at New Zealand's largest automobile auction house. Our trip to Auckland was uneventful with one exception...no place to stay. This proved more problematic than we had envisioned on a weekday. Apparently many native Christchurch folk were staying in Auckland along with many tourists. There was not a place to be had. After 2 hours of searching, we finally found a hotel in downtown Auckland. We settled in around 6 and went out for some yummy cafe food.