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!
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!
(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):
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