Jordandchan

We certainly had an uncommonly interesting friday afternoon at work than normal this week just past. It started with pizza for lunch and ended with us throwing ourselves off a four story building.

We shared lunch of pizza at the office before listening to a presentation by our boss LJ on the internet and the tourism industry that he is giving at various conferences around the place. He wanted some feedback, so we had a bit of a round table about it, then piled into cars and drove into the city.

We ended up at the old Christchurch Women’s Hospital on Colombo St in the city and walked along all the security fencing and though the normally locked gate. We wandered in through the grounds to the main entrance and it as very obvious that the building had been abandoned for a while. We met Brian (another cabbage) out the front of the main entrance and stood around waiting to find out what we were doing.

It turned out we were doing some “rogaining” through the old hospital. Rogaining is a kind of orienteering course normally done outdoors over long time periods, where you have to find certain checkpoints, gaining more or less points for each on depending on the difficulty. Brian volunteers with the rescue service over here, and they use the hospital for training exercises. He and a couple of others from the rescue service had set this up as a thank you to us for doing their website.

So we were split up into teams and given an hour and a pile of floorplans (probably 30-40 sheets) with checkpoints marked on them, and told to be back in an hour with the details of as many as we could find. So we headed into the buildings and tried to navigate our way around empty wards, abandoned hallways and piles of chairs.

The rogaining itself was quite difficult, but good fun and we ended up finding 24 or so of the 30 checkpoints, but it was really something to be wandering around an abandoned hospital. Most of the equipment had been cleared out, but you would pass gurneys in the hallways, piles of bedpans next to sterilisers and we even walked into an old operating theatre and found the old bay of lights they used when operating. I took as many photos as I could while we were running around, and there’s an album of them on flickr if you want to take a look.

After this we all got taken to the roof, put on full body harnesses and all got a go at abseiling from the roof down to the ground. Its been a few years since I went abseiling but it was still a blast. It was an excellent end to the week, and a load of fun.