Christchurch, the city that rebuilt itself

We started and ended the trip in Christchurch, and it is not the city it was. On 22 February 2011 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck directly beneath it, killing 185 people and flattening much of the centre. What you walk through today is a city deliberately, visibly rebuilding itself, and that turns out to be its own kind of attraction.

You feel the loss and the recovery side by side. The Bridge of Remembrance and a handful of restored landmarks stand among brand-new glass and steel, street art covers whole walls, and there are still gaps where buildings simply are not any more. Quake City, a small museum about the earthquake, is sobering and worth the hour, handled with real care.

But the mood is not grim. The rebuilt centre is full of coffee, galleries, riverside markets and pedestrian streets, a young, creative, slightly defiant energy, the sense of a place choosing to become something new rather than only mourn what it lost.

On our last morning we did the gentlest possible thing: punting on the Avon. You sit back in a flat boat while someone poles you slowly down the little river through the botanic gardens, ducks for company, willows overhead. After ten days of bungy and glaciers and skydives, drifting down a river doing absolutely nothing was the perfect way to end.

Give Christchurch a day at either end of a South Island trip. Come for the practicalities, the airport, the rental car, and stay for the quiet, moving story of a city putting itself back together.