It feels a bit like stepping on to a Great Gatsby-esque movie set when you first wander into downtown Napier. With pastel-coloured concrete buildings direct from the 1930s everywhere you turn in the self-christened Art Deco Capital of the World, it's about the closest you'll get to time travel in New Zealand.
We've arrived after a picturesque five-hour drive from Auckland, and as soon as we step into the town centre we're doing a Napier version of the slow, stop-start tourist walk, wandering the streets at snail's pace, looking up the whole time, and coming to abrupt standstills to point out the best buildings.
Luckily, we've signed up for an Art Deco Trust Guided Walk, so we join a group of people keen to do that very same thing on Saturday morning. We take to the streets starting with a quick history lesson from our guide, Geoff Bibby, on the earthquake that transformed this entire region.
Although the basics of the 1931 violent earthquake that devastated much of Hawke's Bay are known to most New Zealanders, it is an eerie feeling to stand in the city and imagine the chaos that must have ensued.
Two and a half minutes of violent shaking left much of the town in tatters and, immediately after it, fire broke out, destroying many of the buildings that had survived. One hundred and sixty one people died in Napier, a total of 256 in the district, and newspapers at the time reported the town had been wiped off the map. However, the township of Napier was not about to give up, and rebuilding started soon after the debris had been cleared.
