Miranda Waterworth and Laura Jacquemod (behind) and Serena and Kerrie Waterworth (in front).
Kerrie Waterworth, of Dunedin, was holidaying in Te Anau with her two daughters and a French exchange student when Wednesday's earthquake struck. She told the Herald about her dramatic experience.
The sound came first - like a large bus parked right outside our hotel room with its diesel engine running.
As we were staying in the Luxmore Hotel, one of Te Anau's largest, I assumed that's what it was.
I wanted to open the window and scream out, "Turn that
bloody engine off, it's after 9 o'clock and we can't hear the TV."
But then the sound morphed into the deep rumbling roar of an approaching train.
I looked down and the bed was moving. I thought my 15-year-old daughter, Miranda, was playing a joke and kicking the side of it. Then I realised it was an earthquake.
My 11-year-old daughter, Serena, was brushing her hair in the bathroom.
When she heard me say "earthquake", she straight away stepped into the door frame and hung on.
It's good to know those Dunedin school earthquake drills had sunk in.
Our 16-year-old French exchange student, Laura, watched as everything in the room rocked and rattled.
The wooden blinds banged loudly and the glass windows rattled behind them.
We went to the bathroom door frame, but four of us couldn't fit under it and the quake wasn't stopping.
Then the power went off. The lights went out and the TV went black.
"Jesus," I said, remembering we were on the ground floor of a three-storey building. If it collapsed, we'd be underneath it.
Serena screamed and started to cry. I thought we have to get out of here. "Come on, we've got to get to reception. Everyone run to reception."
We arrived there and found 10 other guests gathered in the darkness.
I rushed up to a man with a torch who looked like he might be the manager and asked him if the quake had finished.
He said yes, but warned there were aftershocks to come.
An alarm went off outside somewhere, and then just as suddenly as they'd gone off, the lights came on.
We wandered back to our rooms, but were all too spooked to go straight to bed so we sat up talking.
Then the aftershocks started. Several minor ones, but a big one just after 2am, when I felt the bed move and heard the window rattling.
Then it all went quiet.
The next morning, we had breakfast in the town meeting spot - the Fiordland Bakery, where the shake was the only topic of conversation.
One man had been at the wharf the previous evening, seeing off a 60-person group that had been on a glow-worm tour.
He said that if the quake had hit five minutes earlier, it would have been a disaster.
As it was, the five boat crew felt the wharf move and got off as quickly as they could.
Did you suffer any damage in the quake?
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