Driving South Island

The boys were eating sandwiches at a Subway on Camp Street, Queenstown. I was loitering around on the pavement outside, having just finished some delicious take-way Thai chilli basil stir fry when Mohima came walking briskly down from a few shops away, the colour drained from her face, and asked if I had "felt it". Felt what, I queried. She told me that there had been just been an earthquake - she had just been looking at some things in a shop window when the whole display started quivering, and she thought she was having a giddy spell. But then it went on for a few seconds, and the shop assistant told her it was a quake.

The tremor in Queenstown was mild, and we shrugged it off and continued enjoying our day. It was only as the news came in over the media over the rest of the day, that we realised that Christchurch had been hit by a major earthquake. One of the chilling images was of the damaged cathedral in the town centre, reportedly with tourists trapped inside. Our camera had pictures of us taken in front of that building, from three days before. Another piece of news, of hundreds of passengers stranded on the Tranzalpine railway from Christchurch to Greymouth, a journey we had done a couple of days before, was another reminder of how narrowly we had missed great distress, if not worse.

It has been a fantastic holiday in the backdrop of New Zealand's hour of grief - there's really no other way to describe it. In the last nine days we have driven round the South Island - Christchurch, Greymouth, Franz Jozef Glacier, Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Dunedin and now in Timaru. We have been taken in the most breathtakingly beautiful green countryside dotted by white specks that reveal themselves to be sheep at closer quarters. We have landed in a helicopter atop a glacier, boated our way through the darkness of a cave lit up magically by glowworms hanging from the ceiling, seen fur seals lolling on the rocks by the side of the fjord alongside our cruise vessel, strolled around the cafes and sidewalks in beautiful Queenstown, slept in a campervan around holiday parks in NZ, stopped at a wayside playground on a cold damp day and cooked Maggi (masala flavour) for lunch. This holiday will be hard to beat.

In a few hours we will be driving back to Christchurch and from there it's back to Sydney in the morning.