Another Month in NZ

Wow - so much has happened since my last post! I’ve been working my way around the South Island and can see why everyone loves it. Between WWOOFing, hiking, and taking lots of cool pictures, I haven’t had time to blog! Here’s why, in pictures and words:

After the Abel Tasman trail, Kate and I headed to a wwoof site in Marlborough, which is roughly in the northeast corner of the South Island. Marlborough is New Zealand’s most famous wine region and was certainly lovely. We didn’t get along with our wwoof host as well as others, though, which really put a damper on the experience. We still had a great time seeing the area, but our relationship with our host made me realize how important it’s been to me to get to learn know our wwoof hosts personally and spend time chatting, etc. Our wwoofing experience in Marlborough also was much less of an organics learning experience, as most of the work entailed beautification of an area she was turning into a wedding venue. It was satisfying to see how much we beautified the space, but after about the twelfth cumulative hour hauling and placing heavy rocks, I asked Kate, “Isn’t this what they used to make people do on the chain gang?” Oh well - I left stronger, more confident on a tractor, and down one pair of working gloves!

(view from WWOOF site at Marlborough)

One good thing about our time in Marlborough was that we were able to take a day trip to Kaikoura, a town on the coast where snow-capped mountains come straight down to the ocean. It was really spectacular, as you can see!

(Kaikoura)

Though Marlborough wasn’t bad by any means, I was relieved to move on at the end of the week, hopefully to a better wwoofing host. Kate and I had two days to make it all the way down the island to our next wwoofing site in the south-central region of the South Island. We drove down the famous West Coast (which the guidebook described as being similar to Big Sur; I thought that while it was beautiful and had a rocky coast, the vegetation was entirely different and felt quite new!). Along the way, we stopped at a number of great viewpoints and at the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers.

(Franz Joseph Glacier)

*****

And then we got to Wanaka... my new favorite place! Wanaka has been the definite highlight of my trip so far. This is largely because of our amazing WWOOF hosts there, Frankie and Dom, and their awesome farm. The Wanaka area was also my favorite part geographically, something I feel a bit sheepish admitting since it also closely resembles Colorado in terms of its amazing mountain scenery.

(hiking up Rocky Mountain, Wanaka)

(View from top of Rocky Mountain, Wanaka)

Frankie and Dom are an English couple in their mid-forties who immigrated here in the early 1990s. They have a spectacular piece of land with amazing mountain views, on which they are developing a permaculture lifestyle block - basically a small-scale, self-sufficient farm with a bit of commercial growing involved. They have a huge vegetable and herb garden, a young orchard, a small commercial crop of garlic, seven hens, 2 goats (momma Harietta and a 6 week old kid!) and dear old Matilda, who I think was an especially dumb cow, but maybe she was normal and I have higher cow standards than I had realized.

(The farm at dawn)

(Harietta and baby)

Frankie and Dom were simply amazing. Kate and I fell into their lifestyle right away and loved every minute we spent talking and working with them. We did a lot of planting and weeding, and spent a few days helping them build their new barn! It was so fun - and I’m now a much better hammerer. In our spare time, we baked bread, muffins and scones with them, we helped make feta with their fresh goat milk, and we made delicious vegetarian food, including a Mexican dinner complete with mole sauce! On our next-to-last day, all four of us went out for a long hike to Rob Roy Glacier. It was superb.

(The barn we built... a part of!)

(Dinner with Dom and Frankie)

(hike to Rob Roy Glacier)

(Kea - the world's only alpine parrot! - at Roy Roy hike)

*****

I was, quite obviously, sad to leave Frankie and Dom. Kate and I drove from their place to Dunedin, a city on the south-east coast of the South Island, where we immediately began a 3-day wwoof with an older couple, Terisha and Marvin, in their small back-yard garden. For most of the first day, I was overwhelmed by their oddities and general social awkwardness. But by the end of the third and last day, I felt so tenderly toward them! In terms of work, we spent the first day working with Terisha at the bird sanctuary where she volunteers, and worked the next two days on her small garden. It was fun to spend some time on such a small-scale organic operation, and to see how Terisha cleverly uses “waste” materials like manure and old pine needles from the big farm next door, and grass cuttings from the neighbors, to keep her garden healthy while being thrifty.

It was our free time with Terisha and Marvin that really endeared them to me. Terisha was one of those people that is so kind they couldn’t hurt a fly. In her case, she literally didn’t have the heart to pull up healthy weeds or thin vegetables that needed thinning, and got us to do it for her! She was funny, and really such a dear, dear woman.

Her husband, Marvin, is a Quaker originally from San Francisco, and is really into liberation theology and social justice. He’s retired but hosts a radio show in Dunedin, and interviews all sorts of interesting people. He’s also very enthusiastic about unions, and apparently is in the front line of every strike and demonstration in the city, for every union. On Friday morning, Terisha kissed him goodbye as he took off in his suit, with his lunch bag and poster in hand, to a protest for *her* union! It was very cute.

Marvin had a slightly harder shell, but we got along really well after I told him I’d written my thesis on Martin Luther King, Jr. Actually, I didn’t write my thesis on him (directly), and I didn’t tell him I did, but that was the part he really liked! He also really opened up to us after we offered to make American Thanksgiving dinner. Turns out he hadn’t had a Thanksgiving dinner since the mid-1970s, and he got really into it! Kate and I cooked up a storm all Friday afternoon (Thursday at home - don’t worry!) and had a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, meat stuffing, veggie stuffing, meat gravy, veggie gravy, cranberry sauce, asparagus (in season here!), and pumpkin pie. Yum!!! It was really fantastic, if I may say so myself!

(Thanksgiving dinner... served!)

(Marvin, Terisha and Kate trying out the Bell family Thanksgiving tradition: the Hat Walk!)

We had a lot of fun with Marvin and Terisha. We played card games and Settlers of Catan with them every night. One afternoon, Marvin took us to what he thought was a lecture at the university, but ended up being a small welcoming reception for the newest professor of Peace and Conflict Studies! I ended up having some great conversations, and met the head of the department. I also learned that they’re going to be offering five international scholarships for masters and PhDs in Peace and Conflict Studies... Maybe I’ll be coming back in NZ in a few years!

*****

After Marvin and Terisha, we moved to a farm just outside of Dunedin, with hosts Dennis and Annie. I didn’t get to know Annie very well, but Dennis was a really wonderful man. He has a large veggie farm and sells at the farmer’s market during the summer. Dennis was really good about teaching us about the process of large-scale growing, and was a really fun person to be around! We did things like weeding, transplanting, turning compost and watering. It was cool. We also learned a lot about some side research he’s doing on bio-char, which basically involves adding charcoal to the soil to help it retain its nutrients. It was really interesting, though I don’t have the soil chemistry background he does.

We also had the chance to see a lot of the area around Dunedin:

(Sandfly Bay, Otago Peninsula)

(Tunnel Beach, Dunedin)

(Speight's Brewery Tour, Dunedin)

(Us with Dennis, Annie and wwoofer Max)

Dennis’s farm, TOP Veges, was the first place where we worked with other wwoofers. One was a 19-year old from North Carolina named Zack. He’s taking a year off before beginning undergrad at Harvard, and was a really neat guy. The other wwoofer was Max, an 18-year old French boy. We got along really well, and Max ended up coming with me and Kate on our two-day journey up to Christchurch after we finished wwoofing in Dunedin.

On our way to Christchurch, we stopped at a lot of really neat places. Here’s some pictures:

Moereki Boulders:

Elephant Rocks (featured in the second Chronicles of Narnia film):

Mt. Cook:

Thanks for reading!

Wandering... like Kiwi

After a week of sightseeing and adventures in the rain, Kate and I were really excited to begin our work on organic farms - which is the main activity of our trip to New Zealand. We found the farm through an organization called WWOOF - Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, WWOOF is a network of organic farmers on the one side and volunteers on the other. Farm hosts provide a room, food and share their knowledge of organic farming while volunteers offer 4-6 hours of help each day. Kate and I have a booklet of hundreds of hosts divided up by region. When we know which area we want to visit, we read through the listings and choose eight or ten of our favorites, send them an email, and usually one or two have availabilities for the time we’re interested in. So far it’s worked out great!

The first place we arranged to wwoof at was a macadamia nut farm called Ohiwa Macadamias. It’s in the hills at the end of a gorgeous valley with views of Ohiwa Harbor in the Bay of Plenty. Our hosts, Paul and Anne, are a 50-something couple who bought the property 16 years ago and have been experimenting with 40-odd varieties of macadamias, trying to see what will grow best in their region. They were a quiet couple, but exceptionally nice people and we loved our time with them. They were sooo wonderful! We spent about half of our time picking macadamia nuts, which was a really fun process involving lots of climbing trees and lots of, well, picking nuts. The other half of our time was helping with processing, which was interesting but way less fun. We briefly helped with the de-husking machine, drying, and the shelling machine. The most time-consuming element involved sorting through every single nut, one by one, looking for discoloration due to bugs, water damage, or disease; determining if they’re worth salvaging; cutting off any bug spots, shaving off any discoloration (assuming it was from an acceptable cause) and the “keel” if it was too buttery; and finally placing it in the “Premium Halves and Wholes” bucket or the “Second-Grade Halves and Pieces” bucket. After this, Anne would take over with the cooking: honey-roasted, roasted with light salt, dukkah, macadamia spread, chocolate bars and chocolate bites! They were all pretty amazing. Paul also makes a “Wonder Cracker,” which quite truthfully is the most wondrous nut cracker I’ve ever used, and is made from beautiful NZ wood. That side of the business has been taking off recently and Paul was busy trying to make more crackers while helping Kate and me with our work.

(driveway leading up to Ohiwa Macadamias)

(us with Paul and Anne)

We had the afternoons off to explore the area. The best afternoon, we hiked from Ohope Beach to a little beach accessible only by foot path. It was so beautiful! We also went to the Saturday Craft Fair in Ohope. One afternoon Anne took us on a walk through the section of their property that they’ve been regenerating with native bush. It was spectacular. Another afternoon we bought a pizza from Louis, a French man who sells fresh-cooked pizzas from a brick oven inside his pizza bus (!), and while we waited, we chatted with him about France and solved the trivia my friend Ally emailed me: which 5 countries end in the letter “L”?

(secret hike-in beach)

(Ohope Beach harbor)

In the evenings we’d return to Ohiwa Macadamias and have dinner with Paul and Anne. We chatted about all sorts of stuff, then did the dishes and went to bed pretty soon. It was so relaxing. We were sad to move on!

***

After leaving Paul and Anne at Ohiwa Macadamias, we spent a day in the Rotorua area, which is famous for its natural hot pools and strong (if tourist-exploited?) Maori culture. Being our one day off, the weather turned rainy again (I’m not usually pessimistic about this - but it’s tended to happen). We toured a Maori “living village” and saw the hot springs where people still cook, bathe, etc. It felt a little contrived but was interesting. The best part by far was a cultural performance in which they forced all the men to participate in a traditional haka dance - it was hilarious watching the middle aged tourists get into it. Call me a bad person but I still get so giggly looking at the photos of it!

(hahaha)

The next day we drove into the mountains outside of Rotorua and found our way to Te Kopia Farm, owned by Jane and Ian. The weather was gorgeous again (we’re meant to wwoof...) and their property had awe-inspiring views of the valley. We spent three days at Te Kopia helping with weeding, compost and mulching Jane’s blueberries.

(blueberry bushes and view at Te Kopia Farm)

Jane and Ian were very different personalities from Anne and Paul, but I loved them just as much! Jane was a sweet English woman who had dreamed about being a sheep farmer in NZ as a child. When she was 20, she worked her passage on a ship taking immigrants from England to NZ (this was in the ‘70s - I guess one of the last years people still took ships for these long voyages). It was a five-week trip and she worked 12 hour days looking after the 300 kids on the ship with the help of one other girl her age. It sounded miserable. Shortly after reaching NZ, she met a shepherd named Ian, got married, and ended up staying forever! She had some great stories about their early years together, when she was a cook for shepherds and farmers. Finally they got their land have been farming here ever since! Their kids are in their mid-twenties, and their youngest lives on a house on the other side of their farm.

Ian is a programmer for a kiwi packaging and shipping factory. His first words to us when he came home in the evening were “hiya - want a Tui (beer)?” Ian was loud, opinionated, and hilarious - such a funny match for quiet, English Jane! He had a number of phrases he loved - “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick” being his favorite, whether in reference to farming, hot springs, Jane’s cooking, or anything else, really...

One afternoon Jane took us up to the top of their property, which had 360 degree views to lakes, mountains, towns, everything. It was spectacular.

(Kate and Jane enjoying the view)

Another day, after a cold morning of work, we spent the afternoon at Kerosine Creek, a naturally hot river. We soaked in the hole below the hot waterfall all afternoon, and emerged feeling relaxed and smelling extremely sulfer-y.

(Kerosine Creek)

We could only stay for 3 days at Jane and Ian’s, but I’m hoping to return during blueberry picking season to help out. They were great and I’d love to spend more time with them!

***

After Te Kopia Farm, Kate and I headed south to Wellington (and on the way passed Tongariro National Park again and got a cool shot of Lord of the Rings' Mount Doom, aka Mt. Ngauruhoe). Being a vacation/travel day, of course it rained again. Oh well.

(Mt Doooooom!)

We stayed in an amazing hostel on the beach in Plimmerton, about 20 minutes north of Wellington. Our first night, we met Emma and Neil, a Welsh couple on their honeymoon. We started talking and completely fell in love with them! We stayed up past midnight chatting before making ourselves go to sleep. The next day, we walked around Wellington and went to Te Papa, the national museum. It was a really fascinating museum and we spent almost the whole day there. Then Kate and I took a cable car up to the Wellington Botanical Gardens and walked around for a while.

(Wellington Botanical Gardens)

We met up with Emma and Neil again, had dinner, and went to the Wellington Lions rugby game! It was extremely fun and was helpful to have Welsh people explain it to us!

(Emma and Neil display our free Wellington Lions gear!)

We all took the train back to our hostel and stayed up for hours chatting. The next day, Kate and I spent the day getting logistics done, including about 2 hours at the grocery store picking out light-weight food for our upcoming 5-day hike. We strolled along the beach near our hostel, made dinner, and then rejoined Emma and Neil. Though we promised we’d go to bed early, we talked until 1:00 in the morning and then forced ourselves to go to sleep, since Kate and I had to get up at 5:15 to catch a ferry to the South Island. We were excited to finally head south, but disappointed we didn’t have more time in Wellington, and extremely sad to say goodbye to Emma and Neil!

(Me, Kate and Emma at the rugby game)

***

The three-hour ferry across Cook Straight went smoothly, considering the stories of sea sickness we’d heard from a number of travelers. The full third hour was spent traveling through the Marlborough Sounds area, and we saw dolphins and a lot of pretty scenery despite the clouds and chill. We spent the rest of the day driving and getting logistics done in preparation for the Abel Tasman trek...

***

...which was GORGEOUS! We lucked out and had amazing weather the whole time. We spent five days hiking the trail. The whole five days went something like this: hike for an hour through amazing forests and palms, emerge onto amazing beach and have a snack, hike through amazing forest, emerge onto amazing beach and have lunch, hike, beach, hike, beach - for five days. We camped the first 3 nights and spent the last night in a historic farmhouse that’s been converted into a DOC (Dept. of Conservation) hut. We made dinner, chatted with the other people staying there (2 Germans, 2 Israelis, 1 Australian, 1 Brit, and us) and then went to sleep on the hard mattresses that covered every available surface outside the common room. The last day we backtracked a ways to a beach where a water taxi picked us up, and we motor-boated 45 minutes back to the start of the trek. It was really neat to see the whole coast we’d walked. Hope these pictures give some sense of how beautiful it was!

***

We spent the day after Abel Tasman in the Golden Bay area. We visited a really neat little park with huge boulders and huge plants. Then, thanks to a recommendation from a local woman we’d met the week before, we cut through a few farms to find the trailhead to what was apparently a cave worth seeing. We’d hiked about 45 minutes up the side of a small mountain when we rounded a corner and saw, looming before us, the most amazing - and definitely scariest - cave mouth I’ve ever seen! The pictures don’t do it justice, but neither do words, so here’s the idea:

(Me in front of cave mouth)

It was actually a really awesome experience going into the cave. All birdlife was silent, and other than our footsteps thudding and echoing around the cave, the only sound was water dripping from the stalactites. Creepy.

(looking out from inside)

(the view inside)

The most notable thing about the evening was the bathroom at our hostel. It seems they couldn’t decide between a shower and a toilet, so...

On that note, goodbye till next post!