WW1 monument

A very broken monument.

My friend JT and I spent a few hours wandering around the Port Hills today. We came up from the small community of Rapaki between Lyttleton Port and Governors Bay. The summit road is empty at that point because it's blocked off to through traffic as tonnes of rocks litter the road further along.

We examined rocks fluro marked for gps tracking as part of geotechnical investigations. We couldn't work out why some rocks are marked and others aren't.

As we scrambled around we came across this sadly broken monument built after WW1. The Feb 2011 earthquake caused the damage with most of the back wall of the seat area gone, along with the plaques that used to be there.

One plaque remains with some names and a poem. It's on the light coloured block on the right. Look carefully and you'll see red poppies. They've been left there some time ago.

Eaiser to see large :-)

I hadn't expected to come across this and unfortunately I didn't have my poppy with me to leave for Granddad. But I thought of the battle of Passchendaele where he served. The toll was horrendous. On one day alone there were more than 2700 New Zealand casualties, of which 45 officers and 800 men were either dead or lying mortally wounded between the lines. In terms of lives lost in a single day, this remains the blackest day in New Zealand's post-1840 existence.

It seems we've learned nothing from two world wars, or at least the men of the world with the power haven't learned anything.

Not good climbing weather around Mt Cook so I'll be back to work tomorrow. We'll make a pleasant weekend trip on the eastern edge of the Canterbury High Country where the weather will be tolerable.