Jack Tame: A city disappears between mountains and sea

Photo / Thinkstock

There's a little spot up on Christchurch's Port Hills I like to visit every time I go home.

I first found it on a bike a long time ago; just old enough to ride with suspension and gears and keen enough to ride the hills alone.

The spot is on a little precipice of black volcanic rock.

To reach it, you have to scramble along a ridge, through some tussock and over a leaning stock fence with little wisps of wool caught between the wire.

Once I had upgraded from mountain bikes to three-door hatchbacks, I'd buy five bucks of petrol and a few scoops of chips and drive up with my mates after school.

I think it was the remoteness I liked. A few kilometres above the last lines of houses, you could look out over the peninsula in one direction and over the plains and to the alps in the other.

Ocean, farmland, mountains, plains. The city. From one little spot, all of Canterbury. All its splendid contrast.

I live overseas these days, returning home over summer each year. And this week, with excess Christmas pudding and a few too many ciders to work off, I laboured to the summit. Along the ridge. Over the fence. For five minutes maybe, I rested at my spot and stared out at all of Canterbury: the ocean, the mountains, the plains.

The city.

Returning once a year is like watching Christchurch in a time lapse. Except these days, it's like you're moving backwards.

The points of references, hotels and high rises, are systematically disappearing. There's less to see nowadays than there was this time last year. Much less than the year before that. I don't know how people cope living in Christchurch. Many, of course, have no choice.

Returning to my spot on the summit of the hills I feel at home and yet weirdly kind of lost at the same time.

I appreciate people get disaster fatigue. When you're outside of Canterbury it's easy to tire of the EQC and battles with insurance - it all becomes white noise.

But go to Christchurch. Have a look. The plains and mountains and ocean are still there.

But the city isn't. And it's depressing as anything.