Is it ghoulish to visit the quake-levelled centre of Christchurch?
No.
The rebuilding of our shaken southern city makes for intriguing viewing, and tourist money rings a till just the same as any other sector. On a recent visit, we sat sipping flat whites in Cashel Mall watching as a wrecking ball whacked the seventh storey off a building less than 100 metres away - you just don't see that sort of thing anywhere else.
The locals were easy to spot: familiar with the muntedness, they chewed the fat or walked along ignoring the building being smashed to pieces. Visitors gawped with slack-jawed fascination.
TripAdvisor says that the number of Australians using their website to research a visit to Christchurch has gone up more than 250 per cent in the past year. Those numbers came a week or so after Christchurch bagged sixth place on Lonely Planet's list of the top 10 cities to visit in 2013, something that would have been unlikely in the pre-quake days.
