The foggy city

A day of touristyness for me:

I rode the duck board ie. stood on the step on the outside of the cable car.

 

The driver works two levers constantly, and at the rear another works the brakes.

 

Thank God the brakes work! The streets are really steep - Alcatraz Island is just off the shore in the fog at the bottom of the hill.

 



They have interesting 1950s looking trams too.

 

 

I hired a bike and rode to the famous bridge. It was like a trip to my childhood - being allowed to ride a bike without a helmet!

 

The Golden Gate Bridge slowly revealed itself through the fog. It really is quite beautiful. It is currently being retrofitted to make it more earthquake resistant. There are two fog horns with different pitches that blow constantly to help ships navigate under it. 40 million vehicles drive across the 2.7km bridge annually.



Palace of Fine Arts - a curious Greco-Roman style building - the only surviving fantasy monument from the 1915 World Expo.

 

Lunch - clam chowder in a sour dough loaf - a San Franciscan speciality - with a view over the bay toward the bridge. Very delicious!

Pier 39 sea lions. These are wild sea lions sleeping on platforms provided for them at Pier 39. What a life!

Meeting Harriet's family

I met some of Harriet's family at the Oakland Zoo:

This one is a statue but there were several real ones.

Photo credit: My not quite 4 year old granddaughter

 

 

What ya lookin' at? 

 

 

Another photo taken by my granddaughter. "I took a photo of the rainforest!" Might have a photographer in the making here.

 

Where is the Wayward Wanderer?

Where is the Wayward Wanderer?      Read the previous "Family" post to find out.

Family

My current wayward wanders are all about family - on the other side of the world.

My eldest son currently lives in Berkeley, the famous university area on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. I am here in my capacity as Grandma, to help the family while waiting for baby number two.

 

In one of the San Francisco guide books it states that San Francisco has more than its share of homeless people. This is true of Berkeley too, which is an upper middle class area with lots of university students. Even here, especially in the CBD, aka Downtown, there are 'interesting' characters wandering around. There is one man whose clothes are covered in patches and who has a tail. When I was in a café having lunch with my granddaughter, a woman my age, in her fifties, came in to buy an icecream. Later, I saw her standing outside with a cup, begging for money. It is not uncommon to see people pushing shopping trolleys loaded with all their possessions, and my granddaughter's school is part of a small church complex which runs a program on Wednesdays to feed the homeless. I will admit that I do find this quite confronting. We do have homeless people in Australia but they are not as obvious, even in cities like Melbourne, and certainly not in little old Devonport. Really not sure how to react to them, so I guess I default to ignoring them, which when I think about it is rather inhumane. For all our complaining in Australia, our social welfare system and health system walk all over America's.

In spite of this, Berkeley is quite a nice place to be, and quite good for a young family. There are parks for children and plenty of shops and activities. There is a resident squirrel that runs along the fence outside the kitchen window and he has lots of cousins living in the parks.

 

San Francisco has never been on my list of places to go, but while I am here, I will do some of the touristy things that you do in San Francisco - the foggy city. I have yet to see the famous bridge, apart from a brief glimpse of a blurry outline across the bay. Even though the weather is warm for winter (maximums of 17 to 23) and it has been mostly sunny and very dry, the city seems to be covered in a perpetual haze - fog or smog - maybe a bit of both.

Art City

Another really cool thing that is happening in Christchurch is amazing street art. Some has appeared randomly but a lot of it has been commissioned. It really helps fill the empty spaces and lift spirits.

 Here are a few examples:

Restarting

There are stories of people who have left Christchurch, too traumatised by the earthquake, or burnt out from months and years of trying to re-establish businesses or rebuild houses. But there are also people who love this city and would never leave. There is, amongst the devastation, a real positive atmosphere of optimism for the future.

There are two shopping areas in the city centre which have a mix of cafes, concert spaces, gift shops and boutiques. One is New Regent Street which was not damaged at all! It was constructed in the 1930s after a particularly bad earthquake on the North Island destroyed the city of Napier. Napier was rebuilt using different building techniques and the same techniques were applied in New Regent Street.

The other shopping area is new. The Restart Mall is constructed using shipping containers. It is intended to be temporary but is such a great quirky space to hang out in that I hope it becomes permanent. I ate a seriously good chicken satay pizza here!

 
 
 
 
 



Quake City

We had 13 days of rain during our 15 day trip. Only the last two days were sunny. These were spent in Christchurch - quake city! On September 4 2010 a strong earthquake struck Christchurch which caused considerable damage but no lives were lost. Then on February 22 2011, as the city was beginning to recover, another earthquake occurred. This one was devastating, causing massive damage and taking 182 lives.

It is a strange experience to be driving around a city and seeing where cracks in streets have been repaired, and driving over bumps and waves in the roads, and seeing empty allotments where houses have been demolished and other houses still surrounded by cyclone fencing, waiting to be repaired or abandoned. But city life bustles on. There is plenty of traffic and human activity.

The randomness of the damage in the suburbs is puzzling, but it is in the city centre that the incredible impact is most evident, as well as the quirky sense of quake humour and the positive vibe of recovery that Christchurchians have developed can be seen.

When we rode the historic tram, the driver said they have had so many aftershocks, thousands, than now they don't get out of bed for anything unless it over a 4 on the rickter scale. Between September 4 2010 and May 31 2011, there were 6016 earthquakes detected in the region around Christchurch. 247 of these exceeded magnitude 4. While we were returning our motorhome on the Friday, there was one of 4.2 just west of the city. We were near the airport on the western edge of the city. I didn't not notice it! But, Debbie, who was sitting down waiting, felt something which she wondered about but decided it must have been a large truck driving past. We were on a busy road. But it was not a truck.

In the city centre there are many empty buildings with scaffolding and cyclone fencing around them. There are many vacant lots where buildings have been demolished and not rebuilt.

I was in Christchurch in 2009 before the earthquake. Here are a few before and after photos:

The lovely blue stone building and the wheat sheaves are gone. The wall with the street art below would have been behind the blue stone building. All the shops still standing are closed. The high rise in the background is gone. The tree and the buildings behind it are gone.

Cathedral Square in 2009

 

 The Catholic Church is involved in high court battle to decide what to do about the cathedral which was a truly beautiful and iconic building.

 

Going to church

New Zealand's most photographed church is the little stone Church of the Good Shepherd on the banks of Lake Tekapo. I was a little disappointed as I was hoping to see it surrounded by flowering lupins. (I had seen photos) And I thought it would be romantically remote and lonely and peaceful. (There is a sizable town and tourists by the bus load!)

This photo was taken from the row of shops and restaurants where we had lunch.

 It would be hard to concentrate on the sermon with this view behind the altar and the priest. It would be hard to create a more beautiful window in stained glass - amazing view.

Wild deer

No - we did not see any wild deer. Saw lots in deer farms, but no wild ones. Deer are yet another introduced species which became an environmental problem. Their numbers in the wild have been reduced and now they are farmed.

This is Lindis Pass, a wild tree less mountain range, where the first red deer were released in 1871.

Baa Baa

A New Zealand traffic jam:

Sheep seem to have right-of-way when the farmer is moving them from one paddock to another.
There are a lot of New Zealand sheep jokes floating around and I am not going to repeat them, but New Zealand does have quite a few sheep. Captain Cook put the first sheep ashore in 1773.

In 1982, there were actually 22 sheep per person, but numbers of sheep have dropped and the numbers of people have increased. New Zealand does still have a lot of sheep though - about 7 per person now which is more per person than Australia.

http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/population/mythbusters/3million-people-60million-sheep.aspx

Where there are sheep, there are sheep dogs. The mob that caused the traffic jam above, had 10 dogs keeping them moving along!  This monument to the collie dog in on the shores of Lake Tekapo.