My bus ride through the north island was the longest I’ve
been on yet, with a stopover in Auckland for 30 minutes. I hadn’t actually set
foot in the city yet, and the walk around the block during the bus layover was
another shock to the system, since it was even busier than Wellington. I
arrived in Waipu just after dark in the midst of a rainstorm, and Peter drove
the short way from town to his family’s home.
When picking this last HelpX position, I ended up turning
down a few places further north where I would have done fruit picking. Even
though my intentions for the trip at the outset were to learn about food
production, I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I was going to be an
employee more than a visitor, and the Grant family just sounded cool. As it
turned out, they were cooler in real life than in their profile. Peter is a
freelance photographer who has recently gotten into the art of hula hooping through
his son’s involvement in a local circus (specifically juggling). His wife Alice
is trained in reflexology and craniosacral therapy and has a treatment area at
home. She is British, and both the kids were born in England, but eight years
ago they set off on a sailboat through the Caribbean and Polynesian islands and
made a new home for themselves near some of Peter’s family in NZ. In addition
to their individual work/hobbies, they also run two coffee/ice cream trucks
called Zippy’s Cafe that have quite a presence in the community, and their
daughter Olive manages one on the weekends.
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| Ruben and Olive hanging out at Zippy's on the beach |
They only arrived in Waipu five years ago, so their home is
still a bit of a work in progress, and home improvement is what helpers have
mostly been doing for them. At some point recently they’ve put on an addition
of an eating area, mudroom and porch, and one of my first jobs was to put putty
in every single screwhole on the floor and the outdoor trellis and then sand it
all smooth. The majority of the rest of my work was priming and painting the
trellis and the solid overhang.
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| Trellis finally completed |
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| This is a feijoa, which I helped process for the ice cream |
One of the hardest days, and one of the highlights, was
working on the coffee truck at a local festival. Alice and her usual employee
worked non-stop making the drinks, and I was in charge of taking orders, making
change, and passing the drinks out to the correct people. It was a good thing that
they made me a coffee at the beginning of the day because we didn’t have a
break in the line for a solid three hours in the middle. It was also good that we weren't selling ice cream there, because that would have complicated things. They way they do it is by putting a scoop of ice cream and whatever fresh fruit the person wants into this blend and swirl machine and catching it all in a cone. Pretty yummy.
I’m not sure if I’ve talked about NZ coffee on this blog
much before, but I’d heard that Kiwis were quite particular about coffee and
have experienced mostly instant coffee in people’s homes. This has puzzled me,
but what I’ve learned is that there is almost no equivalent to Dunkin Donuts
coffee available for sale. To put it another way, at home you do easy, and when
you go out you do espresso. So when I say that the Grants have a coffee truck,
what I mean is that they have an espresso truck, and when I say they made me a
coffee at the beginning of the day, what I mean is that they made me a flat
white, which is what people expect when they order “coffee” from any serious
coffee shop. There are basically six available drinks: short black (espresso),
long black, (espresso+water), flat white, latte, cappuccino (espresso+milk of
increasing frothiness), and mochachino (cappuccino+chocolate, yum!). After
nearly two weeks with the Grants, I might actually be addicted to these
delicious drinks.
Because he took advantage of some unexpected last-minute
opportunities, Peter ended up being away from home for the majority of the time
I was there, so I was often home alone during the day painting while Alice and
Olive were working Zippy’s at the tourist beach or boat launch. Well
technically Ruben was home on school holidays (two weeks starting on Good
Friday) too, but he was playing computer games the whole time and is too young
for a driver’s license, so I was the one who had to drive their car to the
beach for supply runs when they were getting low on cups or milk or something.
The beach was gorgeous and overlooked a bunch of islands that rise sharply out
of the water. I can also now say that I’ve driven both manual and automatic
cars on the right and left sides of the road (legally!)
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| Their dog Elsa enjoying a trip to the beach |
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| Looking out from Zippy's spot |
My adventure for this time period was to take the bus a
little further north to Paihia, the gateway town for the Bay of Islands.
Although the scenery was totally different, Paihia reminded me of Queenstown in
that it consisted almost entirely of traveler accommodation, places to eat, and
places to book activities. It was definitely a tourist town, but that didn’t
stop it from being beautiful.
My bus arrived in the early afternoon, and after checking in
at my hostel I borrowed a kayak for an hour and paddled around three of the 144
islands that make up the region. It was almost warm enough to swim, but I
decided that I got wet enough via the paddle-drips and the holes in the bottom
of the boat. When I returned I started talking to a Dutch girl about her
kayaking plans for the next day, and then we decided to meet back up in a few
hours to go to Russell together.
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| Out on the water |
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| View of Paihia from an island |
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| Stingray thing in the water under the ferry pier! |
Russell, according to my guidebook, was formerly known as
the “Hellhole of the South Pacific.” It was the first permanent European
settlement in New Zealand and was mostly populated by whalers and crew members
passing through in search of alcohol and prostitutes. Nowadays it’s a quaint,
quiet town with a more authentic feel than Paihia. Russell is technically on a
peninsula, but because of the layout of land and roads the quickest way to get
there is via ferry from Paihia, but still with this easy option it’s often
skipped by tourists. Marlon and I were determined, so we took the ferry ride,
looked at some art galleries, climbed up and down a huge hill to a beach for a
while, and then climbed back into Russell’s town to get dinner by the wharf.
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| Oneroa Beach in Russell |
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| Russell pier from our dinner picnic spot |
On Friday morning (which also happened to be Anzac Day), I
got up early for an all-day bus trip to the top of New Zealand. Our first stop
was at a café and gift shop that specialized in things made of kauri wood.
Kauri was a type of tree that used to cover the north island and grew to
gigantic sizes. Lots were toppled by some natural disaster and buried in swamps
thousands of years ago, and lots more were felled in the early logging
industry. More on that later.
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| Ancient Kauri tree transformed into a staircase |
The first major attraction was a drive up 90-mile beach,
which is actually registered as the first highway in New Zealand. You do have
to go around low tide, but the entire “highway” is resurfaced twice a day by
the tide, so we got going pretty fast. There was a stop for photos and then we
continued up the beach to the sand dunes.
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| Driving on the beach! (I got to sit in front) |
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| Beach photoshoot |
The landscape at the sand dunes looked like something I’ve
seen on a preloaded computer background, but in a good way. It was spectacular,
and we could climb all over it. We were all given a sandboard (a boogie board
with a nice slick bottom) and instructed on safe technique and then could fly
down the dunes as many times as we wanted. I managed four times from the very
top. Woohoo!
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| Climbing up the dunes |
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| Ready for the ride down |
From there it was back on the bus and to a road that wound
over the narrow strip of land that makes up the very top of the country. There
were two cool things to see when we stopped. The first was a sort of
checkerboard pattern in the waves where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean
come around either side of the island and meet each other. It wasn’t as cool in
real life as I thought it would be based on other people’s descriptions, but
still cool to know it was happening. The other sight is the Cape Reinga
lighthouse, which marks what is almost the northernmost point in New Zealand,
and sits in a place that is very important to Maori tradition. According to
their beliefs, this is the place where spirits depart for the ancestral
homeland. When I’ve been to places with significance like this, I try to
imagine them as they would have been 200+ years ago, with no access road, no
stairs or pathways, no guard rails or hoards of tourists. I think it makes them even better.
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| The meeting of the seas |
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| Cape Reinga lighthouse |
On the way back south we stopped at Gumdiggers Park, which is a
tribute to the men who had the extremely physical careers of digging gum
(rubber, I think) from the thousands-of-years-old buried Kauri trees preserved
in swamps. After the above-ground trees were depleted, someone somehow figured
out that there were more of these trees buried 3-10 m below the ground,
and then set to work. The gum was somehow processed for something rubber-related, and the wood has been used for building and making tourist trinkets. The park had a path winding through the woods
between deep holes that had just been left in the ground. They had also set up
a replica village with their very basic houses and tools. It was all a reminder
of how much more comfortable and easier life is for the average person today!
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| Part of a trunk at the depth they found it |
When I got back to Waipu the next day, I only had about 48
hours until I would be leaving for Auckland. I spent some time finishing up
painting and doing a computer project with Alice, I washed all of my clothes, and
I did a thorough analysis of the contents of my bag. Somehow, amazingly,
everything still fits inside, but I got rid of a few old and stained pieces of
clothing to make room for anticipated purchases. Hopefully I’ve left myself
enough to wear in Australia!
In real time, I’ve been in Auckland for a day and a half,
and I’m leaving for Melbourne in fourteen hours. An entry on my time in
Auckland and overall reflections is in the works, and I’ll post that at some
point soon. I believe I’m functionally adding two hours to the time difference
between where I’ll be and home, so realtime communication will only get harder,
but it’s just three weeks til I’m home, and then communication will be really
easy. Wish me luck for a safe and painless international flight in the morning!
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