A gigantic washing machine.

That is what got through my mind when I got down from the couch to the floor, just to ensure I would have maximum stability, while looking apprehensively at the shaking ceiling and the clinking photography frame on the wall. “I am sitting on a freaking gigantic washing machine.” No, there was not any table near me and anyway, I was too incredulous to move much more.

It turned out I was lucky. Again. I was CouchSurfing at the right place, in the Riccarton suburb.

In the city center, two kilometers east from me, people were dieing.

Everything had begun normally – anyway why would it not have had? (God that syntactic construction was awkward.) After a short flight to Sydney before taking a connecting flight to Christchurch, after admiring National Geographic-like landscapes from the plane (make sure you get the window seat if you fly to New Zealand, it is like… “Dude, everything they told me about nature in this country is TRUE”), I landed and waited for Ben, my CS host, to grab me at the airport. Thank you again for everything by the way, Ben.

We met and he drove me to town, showing me the center, and then to his place, a student flat (actually a house but well); I also met his friends and flatmates, incredibly chilled-out people, either students at the University of Christchurch, like Ben, or already working.

As I casually started my trip in New Zealand, trying to organize and prepare things for the trekking I wanted so much to do from the moment I had put a foot in the country and looked around me. I went to the city center, took a picture of the cathedral, went to a few places, got back to the flat. The next day, I woke up late and decided to return to the town center later in the afternoon. Less than an hour after, the cathedral was down.

We could not do much during the aftermath; everything or almost was closed, the transportation in and out of town was paralyzed or, at the best, very difficult. The town center was entirely closed and patrolled by police officers, in order to prevent any looting. We were, on top of that, asked to stay in the houses to avoid chaos in the streets.

Having no idea how to get out of the city – or to help people in need – I hence took these few days to chill out with Ben and the others. I ended up finding a mountaineering equipment store open in the suburbs, selling everything at -40% so that people could cook and bury their waste in the garden, some districts still not having any electricity and/or water because of broken sewer pipes underground. I bought all the equipment I needed (or almost) for my anticipated treks there.

Finally, a volunteering mission of cleaning was proposed to us by the so-called Student’s Army, an association of Christchurch’s students devoted to help the victims of the earthquake. We hence got some shovels and rakes and headed towards the eastern suburbs, where the earthquake had been far more intense than in the western part, to clean some liquefaction in several houses.

So yeah, liquefaction. Basically, Christchurch is built on a swamp, or let us rather say on a patch of soil above some water. Every time the ground shakes, both meld and the soil becomes mud: the whole city collapses a bit further down, and mud starts to pour out of the cracks in the roads, in the streets, everywhere. Like, tons of mud. Tons for the few houses we cleaned up.

A bit later, Ben announced me that he was flying out of Christchurch to go back at his parents’, in Queenstown – the Air New Zealand flights were only at NZ$50 (or 27.50€) so that the maximum number of people could get out of Christchurch quickly; the university was closed anyway, waiting to be repaired (in particular the central library, whose thousands of books had fallen again). He asked me if I wanted to come along, and, happy to have a way out of Christchurch in order to start my trip in New Zealand, I gladly accepted.

And, one more time, I was back in the air.