Patrelli Estate

I've just finished 10 days with Patrick and Eleanor at their home in Amberley, Canterbury. They bought the property 17 years ago when they still lived in Christchurch, and have been gradually developing it. Before they moved a house onto the property they'd come up on the weekends and camp in the now-tool shed. Now they're technically retired and live in a wonderful house there full time growing lavender and olives along with keeping chickens and gardens. It's their retirement paradise, and it keeps them hard at work.

Nectarine tree. If only you could smell a picture.

On my first night there, Patrick took me for a tour of the property. They have more than twenty rows of olive trees. They are mostly Israeli and Italian varieties, but there are a few Spanish types mixed in to help with cross-pollenation. He showed me how the Israeli ones tended to be taller and greener, whereas the Italian ones tended to be shorter and fatter and grayer. I spent many hours over the next two days walking along the rows and pruning off the water shoots from low spots on the trunks. All the olives they grow there are pressed for a blend of olive oil, which will happen in June.

Rows of lavender harvested a few weeks ago

View to the west in the olive grove

Italian trees on the left, Israelis on the right

Tiny green olives

Life was pretty relaxed there. Work started after breakfast and stopped within two hours for a coffee and cookie break. Then came lunch, usually some relaxation time, and more work before tea time (with more, different cookies). Dinner was usually meat, potatoes and salad, and then there was better coffee with little squares of dark chocolate. It took me a few days to figure out how to watch the Olympics... they only air events between 10:30pm and 6am! So I usually stayed up a bit late to watch whatever event was playing first. I finished a hat and knitted an entire other one in my TV time.

Two new hats, just in time for more summer

The other work I did was different every day. I wasn't there for any harvest, so it felt like I was doing lots of different catch-up projects. I did touch-up paint on the outside of the house, weeded and spread mulch in some of the gardens, mowed the lawn and around the lavender with a push-mower, mowed a back field with the tractor, sanded and stained some outdoor chairs, and fed the chickens. The chickens were so funny to watch! There was a pretty apparent hierarchy among them, especially between the older and younger roosters. They also crowed all day long, which could get a bit annoying.

Before, during and after the chair "restoration"

Chickens getting ready for bed

Nero the adolescent rooster

Patrick getting the tractor/mower combination ready

After a few days of laying low at the house, I went for an afternoon outing to hike Mt. Cass. It was just a winding path through pastures, but was a pretty tiring climb that ended with great views. Most of the surrounding area is vineyards, and I could see almost as far as Christchurch to the south.

"Wildlife" on the hike

You can see some of the vineyards at back right

Looking south towards Christchurch

When we went back into Christchurch for a day of errands, I took a bus to Lyttelton and then hiked the Bridle Path back. When British pioneers first arrived to settle Christchurch, Lyttelton was the deep harbor they could sail into, and the Bridle Path was the easiest way over. It may have been the easiest, but I am glad I didn't have to climb it carrying all my belongings.

View into Lyttelton from the path

I mentioned earlier that my hosts were technically retired, but Patrick has also picked up casual work at a local vineyard. It basically means that he can go whenever it feels like it, so when it's too hot, raining, or he has other things to do, he just doesn't have to go. Seems like a pretty good deal. In any case, another of my local adventures was going to the vineyard and winery where he works and doing a bit of wine tasting. When his work friends spotted him we got pulled back into the bottling area and I got a little more of a look behind the scenes.

Pegasus Bay restaurant / tasting room

So overall, I had a very relaxing few days out in North Canterbury, but I'm ready to see more.

Coast to coast

Four days on the road have brought me from the west coast to the east, where I've finally landed near Christchurch. I’ll start from the beginning…

When I got back to Queenstown on Friday afternoon I was pretty stiff from the bus ride, and since the hill I climbed two weeks prior didn’t end up being the one I thought it was, I organized myself and decided to climb up Queenstown Hill. The trail was SO steep, but the views were totally worth it. The first plateau had a piece of artwork that was placed there in 2000 to symbolize a link between the past and the future. Another ten minutes of huffing and puffing got me to the true summit, and I was rewarded with clear 360 degree views.

Taking a break in the "Basket of Dreams"

On Saturday morning I got up early and headed to the Queenstown airport. My hosts at Martin’s Bay had told me about a service called TransferCar, which basically allows you to have a free car rental for a one-way trip. I’d gotten approved (based on very few criteria) to transfer a car from Queenstown to Christchurch, and a side trip to Franz Josef Glacier fit within the maximum allowed travel distance.

The drive north from Queenstown was like something out of a car commercial. The roads twisted around lakes and clung to the sides of mountains, and most cars sped along with all sorts of confidence. This major thoroughfare also had tons of one-lane bridges. There were no lights or signals, just a sign on each side of the bridge indicating which direction had priority, and everyone figured it out from there. Driving on the left side of the road was an easy adjustment, but being confident that I wasn’t going to fall off the road wasn’t as simple. I ended up skipping all of the roadside opportunities for walks and waterfall-viewing in favor of driving slowly and making it to Franz Josef in time for my scheduled glacier tour.

Surprise! One lane bridge.

One of the big differences between the “highways” here and at home is that all the towns and attractions are right on the road. The town of Franz Josef started at one end of a bridge and extended about four blocks along the main road and three blocks back. Tiny! But they’re well equipped for tourism with numerous hostels, restaurants and glacier-exploration services.

My tour took us in a helicopter (again!) up to the top of the nearby section of the glacier and dropped us at the flat section about half way up. From there we put on crampons and our guide took us on a walk around some photo-worthy spots and eventually for a close look at a waterfall before we headed back to the pickup spot. 

Craggy glacier top from the air

Blue ice cave

Our group trudging along

I wasn't very impressed with the guide, but I did manage to drag out of him an explanation for the formation of this glacier that I think I understand. Basically, the ingredients for a glacier are LOTS of snow and a location that stays pretty cold most of the time. The west coast of NZ gets 5-10 meters of rain per year, so in the mountains that turns into about 30-40 meters of snow per year. Check on the first ingredient! Up in a high basin in the mountains, that snow accumulates and eventually the snow at the bottom gets so compressed that it turns to ice, and as the oxygen gets squeezed out you start seeing blue ice. Then all of that gets so heavy that some of it starts getting forced out and down the mountain with gravity. Much like the cracks that appear when you bend a Swedish Fish, the top surface of the moving ice mass starts to crack as it bends over the slopes of the mountain, and you start to see all the beautiful ice formations appear. Of course, all of this depends on the second ingredient, because if it's not cold enough, the snow will melt before it accumulates enough to compress into ice and get so heavy that it forces some ice out from the bottom and down the mountain. It's normal for a glacier to retreat some during the summer (the melting proceeds faster than the accumulation) and advance in the winter (accumulation proceeds faster than melting) but with the climate change going on, they are seeing an overall trend of retreat at Franz Josef, and estimate it will be gone within the century. So even though I wasn't thrilled with the whole tour experience, I'm still so glad I got to see this amazing natural feature while it still exists.

I spent the night at a hostel in Franz Josef and drove on in the morning. I made a planned detour to Hokitika Gorge for the beautiful blue glacier water, and then drove through more stunning and scary mountain roads to the east coast. On the eastern side of the mountains, the scenery is noticeably less green, but empty and beautiful anyways.

Beautiful blue in Hokitika

Rockslide shelter and diverted waterfall on the mountain road

Headed east

I gladly returned the car in Christchurch and took a rest at my hostel before venturing into the city. I first took a walk into the botanical gardens and surrounding park, which were much more Europe-centric than the ones in Auckland. They were created for the first British settlers to help them feel more at home, so the theme makes sense, but they have added more NZ native plants since then.

Later that evening and the next day I walked around wherever I felt like. I had a map for the flower festival that was going on and branched out from there. After lunch I felt like I needed more information, and spent a few hours in the "Quake City" museum/info center. It has been almost exactly three years since the M7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch, and evidence of it is everywhere. There are tributes to the 185 lives lost, the cathedral that used to be a focal point of the city is still in ruins, and abandoned lots and roadblocks make the central city seem more like a ghost town. I watched nearly an hour of a looping film where people told their stories of that day, ranging from funny to tragic. I learned that as a result of the earthquake, nearly 70% of the buildings in the city will be demolished. The one good thing coming out of all this is the opportunity for a complete redesign of the city. During the initial cleanup, lots of businesses moved into the suburbs, making room for new green spaces and public areas. They've already created the Restart Mall, where shops are conducting business out of storage containers, and empty lots are becoming sites of gardens and public art. Much of this is probably temporary, but it is bringing lots of hope into the city in the meantime. It's a good reminder of how lucky I am to have grown up in a place where our big natural events usually just mean a day without power and an excuse to play in the snow.

Cathedral in shambles

Temporary cathedral made of cardboard tubes

Restart Mall

One of the flower festival arrangements

In the late afternoon I got picked up by my next HelpX hosts and have already been hard at work taking care of olive trees. Unfortunately I missed the lavender harvest and processing, but there are still some flowers on the plants that escaped the machines, and they smell wonderful. I'll put more on this position into another post.

As a final note, I'd like to give an appreciative shout-out to the public bathrooms of New Zealand. Plentiful, clean, free, and conveniently located. What a wonderful idea!

Back on the grid! Milford and Martin's Bay

I’ve survived my first HelpX position! Actually, I’ve done a lot more than survived. The past two weeks have been full of incredible scenery, new experiences, and heaps of sandflies (which were probably the biggest threat to my survival overall). During all this time, my phone was basically a glorified alarm clock - zero service anywhere in the area. Now that's nature!

For this position, I started by taking a bus from Queenstown to Milford, which in itself is a stunning drive. Mountains rose straight up from the road on either side, and there was even a tunnel straight through a mountain at one point. After a bit of confusion in Milford, I got to the one and only helicopter company there, and soon met my first hosts. We got the much anticipated helicopter ride straight over the mountains and landed on the lawn in front of Martin’s Bay Lodge.

Big bus, little road

 

Mountains on all sides

The disappearing road

In uniform and ready to go at Milford

The helicopter was still climbing up up up

Snowy mountain tops

Flying over a river valley - don't ask me which

Approaching Martin's Bay Lodge

The lodge is one of two owned and run by the Hollyford Track Guided Walks company. The entire hiking loop is 50-something km through isolated and often flooded terrain, but guests who use the company walk in to Pyke Lodge in one day, get a jet boat ride to Martin’s Bay Lodge on the second day (and do a bit of walking in the area), and then get a helicopter ride out. They see less of the track (trail) overall, but get to hear stories, don’t have to carry any food, and even get chocolate on their pillow when they arrive at a lodge for the night. Of course, I didn’t know the finer details of this when I started out, so I was expecting something more along the lines of an AMC Hut in New Hampshire. Imagine my surprise when I found out my work would involve setting out chocolates on top of down pillows!

The lodge from ground level (staff quarters are off to the right)

Inside the lodge to the left

Inside the lodge to the right

Covered walkway from the back out to the guest rooms

Guest room complete with chocolates

The lodges are staffed by revolving hosts, so for my first week, Brooke and Phil, a Kiwi/Irish couple ran the show, and for the second week, Jimmy and Laura from the UK were in charge. Both couples were young, friendly, fun, and really made me feel appreciated. I’ll be really lucky if all my HelpX hosts are as cool as they are. My schedule worked on a revolving basis, since groups of guests arrived every other day. Here’s an outline:

“Day 1” : Wake up. Fold yesterday’s laundry. Clean bathrooms, wipe fingerprints off windows, vacuum, weed etc. as needed. During this time the hosts are cooking up a storm and they deliver lunch for the guests to a small cabin a little ways away. I hang out, do more upkeep tasks, and then midafternoon get to take the 4-wheeler out to the lunch cabin to clean up. Come back, work out, and hide away for the night once the guests arrive. Delicious dinner is brought to me, and I knit/watch movies/read until bed.

“Day 2” : Wake up just as the guests are headed on a morning walk. Strip all the guest beds and start laundry. Set out all the sheets and pillow cases and sometimes even make the beds. Vacuum guest rooms. Hide away as guests come back for lunch. Watch the helicopter brigade take all the guests away and unpack any deliveries. Finish cleaning/weeding/whatever for the day and enjoy a free night. Repeat.

The hiding away when the guests were in was a little bit weird, and the hosts said they felt the same way. But apparently some of the first volunteers they had in were not entirely respectable, and so it was decided by the higher-ups that we wouldn’t be able to interact with the guests at all. Oh well.

Even though I just wrote a whole lot of work tasks in my daily schedules above, I usually only worked about four hours per day. With such long summer days (sunset after 9pm), I had lots of time to explore the area.

I walked through a podocarp forest full of big vine-covered trees to Lake McKerrow for a quick swim. I took the trail up to Long Reef to see the seal colony there, and was rewarded with dozens of adorable seals and pups. On one night off we took the jet boat across the river to a beautiful beach for a sunset bonfire. On another night off we cooked up a bunch of Indian curry.

Green podocarp forest

On the shores of Lake McKerrow

Seals seals everywhere!

Lots of curious faces

Pup and its mama. Eeeeeek so cute!

Climbing the dunes up to the beach

Sunset bonfire 

Jimmy, Laura and I with our Indian dinner

I even got to ride in the jetboat all the way to Pyke Lodge one day when the administrative staff were in. While they were having a meeting, I walked up to Lake Alabaster and made a detour on the way back to one of the biggest swing bridges in Fiordland. It connected to a trail called “Demon Trail” which seemed appropriately named considering how narrow and twisting it was compared to the other flat and well-established trails in the area. I apparently got really lucky with the weather during my stay too – almost no rain in my entire two weeks – and got to do some really clear stargazing .

Swing bridge

View from Pyke Lodge once the clouds cleared

The only catch to being outside was that you had to keep moving or else swarms of sandflies would engulf you. Bugspray didn’t even work that well to keep these tiny monsters away. I would say that they were the size of a blackfly and caused a welt about the size of a mosquito’s. Luckily they only itch for a few hours after the bite, but these bugs are out all day long, so I was constantly getting new ones. According to Maori legend, the goddess of death was so impressed by the work of another godlike ancestor who dug out Milford Sound that she feared humans would forget their mortality when looking at it. So she created the sandfly for the area to remind them not to linger. That seems to match up with another little saying of the area, that if the sandflies weren’t there, everyone would be. Other creatures that I encountered were possums, which are a pest animal here and have very valuable fur, and deer, although only in the forms of scat all over the place and venison.

Possom on the porch of the staff rooms

I think I got really lucky with this experience overall. It is such a remote area that I never would have had a chance to see it if not for the work exchange opportunity. I was living along a river and within an hour’s walk of a lake and an ocean. The forest was basically a rainforest, full of lush green trees and vines and the constant chatter of birds and insects. It made me wish I knew how to identify bird calls - One funny one was a combination of singing notes and quacking sounds. Sometimes I got my kicks by repeatedly entering the “staff only” or “authorized personnel only” areas because I could, and it was really interesting to see behind the scenes of this type of hospitality – no dirty secrets, just lots of chuckles about how different my expectations were compared to those of this trip’s target audience.

I haven’t said much about the TWO helicopter rides either. On the way in I think I was a little awestruck and rushed, but on the way out I got to ride the scenic route with the guests and made sure to focus. The takeoff was straight up at first, but the really cool part was when we leaned forward at what felt like a 45 degree angle to really get going. Then we flew along the coast and through Milford Sound, and it felt like we could just reach out and touch the rock faces. Super cool. On a side note, Milford Sound is technically not a sound but actually a fiord, because it was carved by a glacier and not a river. By the time they’d worked all that out though the name had already stuck.

Flying back to "civilization" along the coast 

Helicopter pro

But wait, the adventure continues! I’d arranged for my transportation back to Queenstown to be pushed back a day, so from the Milford airport, I walked along the road to the Milford Lodge. After dropping off my stuff I got a shuttle ride back into town and proceeded to walk through its entirety and back to the lodge in less than an hour. In a town that gets 7-10 meters of rain per year, I somehow managed to see it on two sunny ones. Lucky me!

Milford Sound panorama

That didn’t stop me from getting wet though. After a quick snack, I was off for kayaking. A guide, four others about my age and I got a boat ride about half way out into the sound and then loaded into kayaks from there. To start, we paddled right up to Stirling Falls. It’s fed mainly by glacial waters, so we were the first people to feel those droplets of water in about 15,000 years! As I was approaching, I said that I felt like I was in the movie Avatar because of the lush green wall rising straight up. As we got close to the falling water, though, it suddenly got dark, wet and windy and I had a quick taste of The Perfect Storm before getting pushed back onto sunny seas.

Stirling Falls at a mist-free distance

After a paddle through the icy mist

From there we paddled, did a bit of surfing, and even used our paddles and a sail to make our kayaks into a sailboat and fly along the water. Our guide talked about the dwarfing effect, where tall things make other tall things seem small, and I could totally recognize it. The mountains around us were 1000-2000+ meters tall, mostly rising straight out of the water, but at a glance they didn’t look nearly that big. After picking out a single tree or something on the rock face, though, you could start to grasp the immensity. Since we were an evening kayak trip, the last tour boats went by at the beginning and we had the sound to ourselves. We were tiny little people in a big, deep piece of nature.

Three little kayaks vs kilometer-high mountains

Since the sailing helped us cover distance quickly, we had time for a stop at Bowen Falls, which is the biggest permanent waterfall in the sound. These are visible from certain parts of town, but we got to get up nice and close. From there it was a short paddle back to our landing zone, and I got to bed early back at the lodge. I caught my bus back to Queenstown in the morning and here I am!

Triumphant at Bowen Falls

There are a couple days of travel ahead of me, and I’ll be writing again from Christchurch.