thorndale trekking

After visiting the Pujjis in the morning, Lex, Sabrina and I were picked up in town for a horse trek in Cable Bay, about half an hour east of Nelson.

I’ve probably only been on a horse 4 or 5 times in my life, Sabrina had never been on one, and Lex hadn’t ridden in ten years, so we picked one of the tour operators that catered to the less-experienced. Thorndale Horse Treks ended up being a great company – they clearly were in it for the fun not the money, as they were not only the cheapest option by far but the 2-hour ride we paid for ended up being an hour longer.

I wasn’t brave enough to take my camera along, so I don’t have pictures of Cable Bay from the top of the hill (/mountain) where we stopped for tea, but it looked a lot like the bays we saw on the sailing trip and that I flew over yesterday…blue, blue water over yellow-white sand.

Happy new year!

flight of the micro-light

I woke up way before everyone else this morning, and had to get into a little bit of trouble when I realized how nice the weather was today. See, Sabrina and I were hoping to do this ‘U-Fly Extreme…Pilot A Stunt Plane’ activity up in Motueka this week, but every time we called to enquire about it they upped the price, so we gave up on it a few days ago. When I was left to my own devices for too long this morning, though, I got into all the other aviation brochures we’d picked up, and decided a micro-light flight over Abel Tasman National Park was too good to pass up on a gorgeous day like today.

Described as ‘a motorbike for the sky,’ a micro-light is pretty much a hang-glider with a small motor. The pilot steers with a set of ‘handlebars’ attached to the wings, which appear to be made of plastic sticks covered in heavy-duty Saran Wrap. My pilot, Trevor, was bored with traditional flight by the time it was my turn to go around 3 pm, so every time he wanted to lose altitude, he just aimed the nose of the ‘plane’ into the ground for a few seconds while we plummeted. This, he assured me cheerfully, was not the way it was usually done, but was more fun. It was fun, once I remembered to breathe.

The view from above was absolutely amazing, and it was awesome being up in the sky in a completely open-cockpit craft. We flew along the coast, visiting all the places we went on the catamaran yesterday, and then toward the end of the 40-minute flight we flew over the orchard where I worked for most of December.

sail away

Amy organized a full-day catamaran sailing trip in Abel Tasman for 19 of us a few weeks back, and today was the day for it. We had absolutely amazing weather – clear, not too hot, and just enough wind to keep the boat going without the sea being too choppy.

One of the other girls on the trip organized a pirate theme for the day, which seemed to terrify our skipper a bit, but he did let us on, eye patches and foil-covered cardboard swords and all.

We visited Split Apple Rock (a famous huge boulder that looks like it was sliced in half), spent some time on an island (where, unfortunately, the carcass of a little blue penguin was bobbing up and down in the surf), explored tidal caves, played Frisbee in the water, and just soaked up the sun from the trampoline deck of the catamaran. The water was unbelievable, as clear and blue as the glacial Blue Pools we saw along the West Coast.

(better picture coming soon, we’re collecting ones from the group)

these little fishies went to market

Today was the annual Richmond Market with about 150 vendors filling the main street of Richmond, which is basically a suburb of Nelson. I spent the better part of the day trying to work up the courage to try a whitebait fritter, a Kiwi specialty (I’m not sure if I can say ‘delicacy’) made from tiny little fish stuck together with egg, and fried up and usually served open-faced on white bread.

Despite my eyeball hang-up (with lots of whole little fish in it, eating a whitebait fritter means you’re chomping down on lots of teeny eyeballs), I managed to cross this one off my list of things to do here, and I didn’t even gag until the second to last bite! It actually tasted pretty good when I kept my mind off what it was, and the extra dose of rock salt I asked the vendor to add to it camouflaged most of the eyeball-crunching.

nelson lakes

I drove up to Nelson Lakes National Park with Lex, Charlie and Amy today in search of an adventure, or just a nice place to sit and read for a while. We did two short tramps on the shores of Lake Rotoiti before deciding to call it a day – the weather wasn’t as nice as it was back in Nelson proper, about 90 km away.

Apparently this would have been the place to go for a white Christmas as the mountains surrounding the lakes got a little bit of snowfall that morning.

a berry good boxing day

As usual, things got a little hectic before Christmas, and one of the things that fell off our list was berry picking, so we set off to do that today. We’d seen signs for pick-your-own places between Nelson and Motueka, and the one that was open on Boxing Day was Not The Biggest, But The Best. Haven’t tried any others here, but it might live up to its name – the berries were delicious. I picked a quart of boysenberries (falling off the vines, sweet and nearly 1.5” long) and raspberries (much harder to find the nice ripe ones of these, but I turned over leaves and got a few choice ones), all for NZ$2.

Oh, and then there were the couple of kilos of berries that Sabrina, Lex and I ate while we were picking…

merry christmas!

I'm losing a fight with the computer at this internet cafe, it's not letting me upload any of the 40 or so blogposts I have on my iPod (which is currently serving as my USB drive).

Sooo...here are some pictures. You've seen a lot of them already, but there are a few that didn't make it into the blog. I've only gotten August and September up, but as soon as I get a laptop internet connection I'll post the other months, they're all organized and ready to go in my offline Picasa albums.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lotuselise99 Enjoy!

Have a very Merry Christmas! I'll be celebrating in sunny, warm Nelson with Sabrina and 10 or so others...my first Christmas away from home.

It's been quiet around here lately...

... so we bring you a random photo from the family album. I have no idea what's going on in this picture.

- Charles

pupu springs

We ran into our co-workers Bobby, Edith and Elsie at the Pupu Springs parking lot, then bumped into our former co-workers, Americans Kim and Hope, in the grocery store on the way back…guess there aren’t a lot of people, or things to do, in this area.

Pupu Springs, about 60 km from the orchard, is a freshwater spring that kicks out 40 bathtub-fulls or water per second according to the signs. It is also, they claim, the clearest freshwater spring in the world, with 140m of horizontal visibility. At least until didymo, an invasive algae from Florida, takes over the remainder of the streams in the park – it’s gotten to about half of them despite the intensive ‘clean-check-dry’ campaign.

We could see some huge trout in the water – pretty cool. Which reminds me, one more thing to add to the NZ activity to-do list…

tame eels

Sabrina and I set off in search of adventure, heading first a little south of Motueka, to see tame eels at the Jester Café. A couple places in the area advertise tame eels, and I was curious to see what exactly they meant. I think I could have done without knowing.

The eel experience here was almost as traumatic as the one I had about 15 years ago during a visit to Roberecht’s Seafood near Cabin Point...that time, I found myself peering down into tanks of murky water jam-packed full of size-sorted wriggling eels waiting to be ‘airmailed’ live to Belgium. The fact that I still remember it clearly now probably should have kept me away from this one, but no.

This time, we went down into a sunken garden, and in a dammed section of the creek we saw about 20 two-and-a-half to three foot long eels, all at least as big around as my forearm. And, as we discovered when we ventured within a few feet of them, these guys were not happy just staying in the water. The cafe sells skewers of eel food, and they thought we had some so when we came close they flung themselves out of the water and halfway onto the rocks, mouths gaping open.

I don’t have a picture of that, because we ran.

golden bay

Next on the list is Pupu Springs, ‘up over the hill’ past Takaka in the Golden Bay area. It’s a steep, winding drive over the mountains, but the views are great. Unfortunately, there’s no room to pull over to capture most of the vistas, but there are a couple of look-out points, including this one, near a cave system, which give a view out all the way to the ocean.

migrants

We’re on day two of hourly pay, even though we were only supposed to do a day of it. We’re fine with that, since by our calculations we’d be making less than minimum wage ($11.30 at the moment) if we were doing contract. We’re not very quick.

There were about 8 new thinners starting today, and it turns out I lived and worked with three of them at the hostel/vineyard in Blenheim – Bobby, from the former East Germany, and twins Edith and Elsie from Taiwan. I feel like a true migrant worker now…great.

We started talking to/complaining with a French couple in the row next to us, and they told us how they like to cook clams, mussels and oysters they collect from the beaches. We didn’t realize you could do that, so they offered to show us how and where and cook dinner with us.

After work, we waited around for low tide, which Anais and Kevin thought was around 8 pm. Apparently it was around 5, which was when we started waiting, but Kevin didn’t want to disappoint and insisted on diving for the clams despite the cold water. He didn’t find very many, and most were tiny, but they say it’s a lot easier at low tide and you get more.

We had a delicious clam and potato red curry dish that Kevin painstakingly prepared in our ill-equipped kitchen. We’re very excited about our new free meat source…I have a feeling we’ll be sick of clams by the time we leave here.

those fools

Sabrina and I left Nelson around 7 am to go to Motueka, 57km north, to find apple thinning work. The orchards and packhouses advertise employment on the roadside the same way motels & b&bs do, with a removable cover for the ‘NO’ in front of ‘vacancies.’ The first company we found advertising employment was Birdhurst Ltd, and we stopped in to apply. The HR manager took one look at us, and said insinuatingly, “You do know it’s hard work, right? We don’t get many Americans.” We decided to ignore him, and filled out the forms for contract (per-tree rates) apple thinning work and were on our way to the orchard following his rather vague directions as we heard a couple people sitting outside the warehouse laugh and say, “Those fools just got contract work!”

Great.

Anyway, we drove through town to stop at Warehouse and pick up some sunhats and granola bars for lunch, and then tried to find the orchard. We drove far past it the first time, and didn’t end up getting there until 10 am, so the guy who was supposed to be waiting for us had already left and we had to wait a while until he came back.

Steve, one of our new bosses, found us eventually and we followed him out into the fields where we were issues special apple-thinning ladders and given instructions. We’re to remove all apples smaller than 26mm and thin any remaining clumps of larger apples down to three or four apples depending on size. We’re also told to be very careful to throw the apples into the center of the rows so that they don’t bruise the others on the way down – if we’re caught just dropping them, we get docked $1-2 depending on the price of the tree. We’re starting out on an hourly rate, but once we’re on contract we’ll be making anywhere from $2.50 to $5.50 per tree. Sabrina and I will be working together so it’s less boring, but that means we have to remember to divide the proceeds-per-tree by two when we’re counting how many we’ve done.

We wanted to get started right away on work, so we didn’t check into a hostel beforehand. I asked our bosses if they had any ideas on accommodation, and they mentioned that we might be able to get a ‘bach’ (generally a vacation home, but I guess maybe it means anything you wouldn’t want to live in 365 days a year…) on the orchard. The only one they could come up with was horribly dirty, but it’s very cheap ($35 each per week) and since we’re here to make money before Christmas it’ll do. We spent a good four hours scrubbing the walls, floors and stove before we felt like it was clean enough to sleep & cook in, and we have a lot more to do tomorrow.

i'm baack...

Just got back from a two-week North & South Island roadtrip with Sabrina, Natalie and Christina, blog posts coming soon! I'm less than one month behind now...