The Far North

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.

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.

Trellis finally completed

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!)

Their dog Elsa enjoying a trip to the beach

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.

Out on the water

View of Paihia from an island

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.

Oneroa Beach in Russell

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.

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.

Driving on the beach! (I got to sit in front)

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!

Climbing up the dunes

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.

The meeting of the seas

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!

 

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!