I thought I was going to die – tourist
A British couple were among tourists ‘‘absolutely terrified’’ by yesterday’s big earthquake.
Mark Bramwell and his wife, Elaine, arrived in Christchurch on Sunday. They had just checked into their room at the Rydges Latimer when the earthquake struck.
‘‘We checked into our hotel room and within minutes we heard a loud bang, the whole building shook for several minutes,’’ Mark Bramwell said.
‘‘It’s the first time we ever experienced anything like this.’’
Elaine Bramwell said she was ‘‘absolutely terrified’’.
‘‘I thought I was going to die, I thought the building was going to collapse.’’
Mark Bramwell said he knew about the previous earthquakes to rock Christchurch, but believed 2011 was a ‘‘once in a lifetime experience’’. ‘‘We never dreamt we would have an experience like we did today.’’
Elaine Bramwell said her hus- band assured her they would be fine.
‘‘Strangely enough, I said to Mark ‘do you think there will be an earthquake when we’re here’ and he said ‘no, of course there won’t’, and within five minutes of getting into our hotel we have one.’’
The couple were in Christchurch for one night and would get the train to Greymouth today.
French tourist Thibault Despaigne was near Taylors Mistake when he felt his first earthquake. He was just about to take a photograph of the cliffs at Scarborough when he ‘‘almost fell to the ground’’.
‘‘Then I saw the cliffs come down, it was pretty crazy . . . I was hoping my cliff wouldn’t come down too. There was a lot of noise and a lot of smoke coming around the place, I guess some other cliffs were coming down.’’