The Hidden Jungle

Thick forest in the middle of suburbia all just 2 minutes from our house! Auckland has lots of pockets like this. Why did the early settlers arrive in Christchurch and bulldoze all the trees? There’s nothing like this in Christchurch now except for Riccarton Bush and that tiny bit of bush is fiercely protected. All of Christchurch was once heavily forested as were the Port Hills which are now barren and bare. Madness.

A new tunnel opened beneath Auckland this week for cars travelling from the CBD to the North Shore.  It’s the only way to get to the North Shore if you use the motorway and the motorway is the best way to travel in Auckland because there’s traffic everywhere else and public transport sucks and there’s no cycling infrastructure. I’m not keen to use the tunnel. When I first moved to Christchurch 6 years ago, I made a conscious decision not to drive through the Lyttleton tunnel because I was scared of being buried alive inside in the event of an earthquake. I was terrified of earthquakes even before the earthquakes. It’s a bit unlucky then for me to have experienced a big earthquake not once, not twice but three times given that I was already terrified of them. As it turns out, the Lyttleton tunnel coped very well in all the earthquakes and my usual route to Lyttleton – over the top – was quite treacherous with hillsides collapsing and huge boulders tumbling down. So perhaps tunnels are the way to go. I’ve been through the Channel Tunnel beneath the English Channel and that was fine but then it doesn’t rest above the boundary of a tectonic plate.

There are quite a few dead trees in our backyard. Perhaps the magma chamber beneath us is waking up, causing sulphur to seep into the ground and kill the trees. Or perhaps the people living here previously just didn’t water the garden sufficiently last summer. Funny how once you’ve been through a big natural disaster, it suddenly feels all the more likely that you’ll experience another. I think it’s just that the trees didn’t get enough water. Yes, that’s the explanation.