North....The great escape!

Hello people!

Sorry for not being in touch - as it were - for just over two weeks! So much has happened and I’ve been able to experience so much that I don’t know quite where to start!

As I mentioned in my last entry, Hannah and I were headed north. We had found a place to go WWOOFing (farming and earning your keep) in a small little coastal town called Mangonui. We first went with the bus to a place called Paihia where we stayed the night in an YHA hostel. The last 30min of the bus ride didn’t agree with Hannah at all as she felt very carsick and the extra bends in the road didn’t help things! We had dinner outside in the lovely patio of the YHA and just generally had a lovely quiet evening. The next morning we just explored the town a bit (very touristy!) and walked along the beach where we sat for a long time writing cards and reading until we treated ourselves to some Fish & Chips. YUM! After that we had to run back to the hostel, grab our things and go to the bus stop to catch the bus to Mangonui.

Late Monday afternoon we arrived in Mangonui and after waiting for a couple of minutes, our host picked us up in his very old land rover! He seemed friendly enough but the first impressions weren’t really great! For one, he didn’t come out of the car and introduce himself and he just left us to dump the bags in the back. Maybe I’m just being picky, but it just didn’t seem very inviting! I had a bit of a sinking feeling. He took us to a lovely view point where you got a 360 degree view of the bay and beyond. It was stunning! I kinda forgot I had a camera at that moment which is a pity! Oh well, I do have several other amazing pictures!

As we were driven to his farm, Hannah and I were a bit taken aback by his very judgemental view upon several things. He was very intent on the Organic ways of things and had nothing really good to say about the modern world. For example, he viewed tourism as terrorism! Nice thing to say when you have two tourists sitting next to you in the car about to work for you! He was willingly living like a peasant and just wanted to be self-sufficient. When we arrived on the farm, we were shocked to find a house that was falling apart! Most houses here in New Zealand are made from wood, and you could see that one part of the house had been abandoned because of the rot. I had this sinking feeling which, as I later found out, Hannah had too. We got our bags into the house, met three other WWOOFers (all from Germany), chose where we would sleep that night (there wasn’t that much choice! The whole place was dirty) and then we both went for a long walk along the road and discussed what we should do.

We decided to stick it out for a while but that on Friday or Saturday we would leave. Our host, Doug, was very excited about his composting methods. He enthusiastically showed off his mountain of compost (it was like a little self made hill) and sections of his property on the other side of the river that ran through his 24hectre property. He dreamt of living on top of the hill but according to his daughters, the likelihood of that ever happening was zero since he’d been saying he would live there for the last 10 years and nothing had come of it yet. A lot of the time he was just high on “home-grown-organic-marihuana”. It was just that the house hadn’t been cleaned for probably more than a year and was full of spider webs and bugs. The meals as it turned out, were generally good, though we always cooked them. Our first evening was memorable, when the lights when out and we were introduced to a very big beetle, which was apparently the New Zealand Cockroach! Yuck! When Hannah and I went to bed (thank God we had both taken a sheet bag! ) one of these bugs kept flying towards us because of the torch we were using. Nice and cosy! Lol!

The first morning there and it rained for most of the day. So we didn’t get round to do a lot of work. Instead we hung around and I mainly read a book. Seem to have become a real book worm these days! In the afternoon we actually got to do some work in the garden though it seemed to be mainly cutting weeds down that he could then drive up to his compost heap. We also enjoyed just wading in the river. Absolutely incredible! The clarity of the water and the eels that try to nibble your feet! ha ha! That evening we all had a bit of whisky together with playing cards with the other WWOOFers till late at night. That made me feel a bit more at ease.

Wednesday we worked really hard in the garden, doing a lot of weeding and turning the soil. Doug’s youngest daughter cooked us a meal – Spaghetti Bolognese – which was lovely! By Thursday, we were running out of things to do on the farm because Doug repeatedly just left the farm for most of the day and left us to it. I think the most discouraging thing about working here was that you didn’t have the idea that you were doing anything particularly useful. Doug had a vision, but didn’t really follow through, and Hannah and I felt as if we were working in a garden that would just fall into disrepair as soon as there was no one else to look after it. So after 2 hours of working on Thursday, I gave up. I didn’t feel like it was really worth it. It was this day when we discussed with the other WWOOFers when they were leaving and where they were going. You see, they had mentioned to us that by the end of the week, they would be leaving and this kind of helped Hannah and I to decide to stick it out till the end of the week. But by Thursday, Hannah and I had just about enough of the place (I can’t be all negative about the place but it was a bit icky) and basically went reading up on things to do in Mangonui. I really wanted to go up North to see the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean crash into each other, so we looked for a touring company that would leave from Mangonui. It turns out one did and they did one tour every day! We phoned and viola! We booked a place, asked Doug to bring us into town early the next morning which he didn’t mind too much. Yey! We were going to get out of here!

That evening, Hannah and I felt a lot better and ready to leave!

Have to continue with the story tomorrow or the day after next….