I feel like I’ve fallen so far behind in sharing my stories and photos. It’s just hard to find places to hook up my laptop at times….so….I’ll start with Abel Tasman, round two.
I had a beautiful weekend in Abel Tasman and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. I arrived on a Thursday to Marahau and decided to stay at the Marahau Beach Camp for three nights. It was only $20 a night for a dorm bed so I thought it was a great deal, and they are right on the water. When I arrived, it was like a bit of a ghost town aside from a few other people staying in RVs. The hostel was a small one floor home. It had a dining and kitchen area, bathrooms, a living room with a TV and two large bunk rooms…one with six bunks, the other with five. I was the only one there. At first I was psyched to have the place to myself…but as the sun went down and unfamiliar noises crept around me, I realized that a little company would have been nice! It’s such a strange feeling to go to bed at night alone in a quiet house when you are used to sleeping with at least 4 people in the room with you. Anyway, the next morning I went out by boat to Torrent Bay, but first our skipper drove us up to the seal colony which was really cool. They were just lounging around on the rocks, mostly females with their pups. After being dropped off, I hiked the same route I did last weekend but this time went a bit further to Anchorage Bay. I crossed one inlet which is only possible during low tide. I’ve never walked across such an interesting landscape. I felt like I was in the desert, with nothing but flat barren land around me, except I kept crunching down on occasional spatterings of shells and sometimes my foot would sink into a sludgy section of sand. The coast at Abel Tasman is really neat because it’s shallow for what seems like miles.
At low tide, you can walk out pretty far. So once at Anchorage, I had two hours before the boat arrived so I walked around, took some photos (which I’ll post soon) and just relaxed on the beach. I stayed at the same hostel Friday night, but a couple had now occupied one of the rooms so it wasn’t so eerily quiet. My last night there, I decided to stay at a different hostel called The Barn, on the other side of the village. I wish I had stayed there the whole time because it was so charming. The owner had an adorable jack russell terrier named Doris, who sat at your feet with a ball in her mouth, looking up at you with pleading eyes. ☺
On the bus ride back to Nelson that Sunday, my mind was wandering about travel. It’s strange how when you wander, with no set plans, wherever you are feels like home. For a bizarre second, the bus felt like home. Maybe because I didn’t know where I was going to stay once I got back to Nelson and it was just a passing feeling of living in the moment. I’ve just finished reading a book called “The Global Soul” by Pico Iyer. It’s basically about multiculturalism and Pico’s travels to find “home” in a world that is getting smaller. The following is a quote from the book that I’d thought I’d share:
“Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri,
are not between places, they carry their places with them.
We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the
sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.”---- Paul Carter
Back in Nelson, I spent two nights at the YHA Then the next morning, I took a 5 hour bus ride to Punakaiki, which is on the west coast, in the heart of Paparoa National Park and home to Punakaiki Rocks and Blowholes. Punakaiki means “pancake” in Maori.
The rocks are stacked like (big surprise) pancakes and it’s a spectacular site. I stayed at a great hostel called Te Nikau Retreat, and it’s in an absolutely stunning setting. The west coast has a very different feel to it, in terms of landscape. It’s more rugged with the dramatic mountains and crags meeting the ocean. The beaches are rougher, the sand is darker (black in some spots) and the vegetation seems more like an ancient rainforest that you’d see back in the time of dinosaurs. The hostel is an 8 minute walk from a beautiful beach, with a waterfall, but you have to be careful as it’s a bit rugged. When they say, “Keep to the track” you don’t question them. It’s by no means a swimming beach due to the currents, strong rip tides and gigantic waves, but you can walk along the sand if you are brave enough to endure the sandflies! I thought I was going to be alone again that night, with the hostel to myself, but then arrived a sweet guy from Leeds in the UK. He invited me to join him in the morning to go to the Pancake Rocks (since he had a car). We got up around 10:00, and luckily the rain was holding off.
The rocks were beautiful and the blowholes quite a force of nature. After snapping lots of photos, we decided to go for a hike along a nearby river trail. The rain started to pick up and the guy at the info center said it would be a nice hike, just avoid crossing the river due to the heavy rain. Initially, we were confused about where the start of the trail was so we started driving down a gravel road and then realized we were actually driving on the trail! So we parked, got out and walked for a couple of hours. I was more engrossed in conversation than the scenery…It turns out that my new friend is touring New Zealand for 4 weeks and then he is headed to Australia to work for a year. We decided to turn around and head back for some lunch. It was only after we were driving back into town that we realized we were not even on the trail that we meant to be on! Nonetheless, it was fun. He offered to drop me off in Hokitika, my next stop, the following morning. He was off to the Franz Josef Glacier. On our way to Hokitika, we came across the most unusual thing. It was a single land bridge for cars, but it was also a rail track for trains. The thing was, there was no warning system in place to tell you if a train was coming. No lights, no bar….you’d have to drive up, and if there was a train coming, you’d have to back up really fast to get out of the way! It was unbelievable. It must be quite an attraction here because when I got to Hokitika they had postcards of these bridges!
Most recently I spent a week in the Waitaha Valley, not really a town….
just a community of farms, 40 minutes south of Hokitika. I worked on a dairy farm and it was an interesting experience. We started milking at 6:00 each morning and it usually takes 4 hours or so, then we have to do it again around 5:00 at night. It’s a very, very messy job. The milking machines are in a shed, in a line, and there are maybe 35-40 of them. The cattle are pushed in on either side and are lined up with their rear ends toward the middle and their heads on the outside. To keep them distracted, they eat molasses out of a trough. The milkers walk down in a sunken area in the middle where the machines are. I had to wear old work clothes, rubber boots, and a long rubber apron.
The process starts with Stu (the farmer) hosing down the cattle when they first come in. Then we have to clean off the teats with warm water. Once that’s done, we put on the milking machines. Initially, you can see the milk just flowing through a little glass bubble that indicates how much is coming out. When it’s done, you take it off and place it on the cow on the opposite row. Once the entire row is done, we spray the teats with antibacterial glycerine and then send them out. In total, we milk around 200 cows. We are constantly being pissed and crapped on. I don’t know if any of you have ever been around cow shit, but it’s not firm. It’s like a niagra of green goo. I’m constantly rinsing off my hands and arms. I had no idea that it would burn! We also feed baby calves. One day we had to pull a calf out of a cow. We had been watching her because she was long overdue and she was giving us signs that she was in labor. So we brought her into the yard and had to reach in, put a rope around the calves front feet and pull it out. It turned out to be a HUGE bull calf, but it died because the mother couldn’t push it out on her own. We also had several other incidents like a cow with milk fever (a dangerous fever that's caused by the lack of nutrients-they all go into the milk) and a couple of sick calves. So the team was Stu, Rina, a young woman from Japan who has been here for 6 months, and Ellie, a 19 year old from Germany.
It’s long hours and hard work…I dare say that was the toughest work I’ve had to do yet. We usually finished eating and cleaning up around 11:00 PM, then it was back up at 5:45 AM. The day I left the farm, I started to get sick. I had a fever for around 5 days or so with no other symptoms. The nurses I spoke to said it was a flu that's going around, and I'm starting to finally feel better, though still a bit tired. When I left the farm, I went to Franz Josef, site of the Franz Josef Glacier. I was so excited about being there, I went and booked a full day glacier hike for the following morning at 8:15. I should have rested for a few days...but oh well. The hike was amazing, although it poured the entire time. Franz Josef gets more rain in a day than some countries! So I didn't get any photos unfortunately...but there are lots of things online if you want to see what it looks like. They supplied us with all our gear such as coats, overtrousers, hats, mittens and crampons. It was like another world out there. At one point our guide decided to take us through a crevasse. It was so thin, you had to take off your pack and walk sideways. Our guide got stuck at one point. It was a tight squeeze for me! An Irish girl in our group got completely stuck and it took them about 15 minutes to get her out. It wasn't a nice place to be stuck. If you think about it, the ice could shift at any moment... It was great fun though. I was happy to get home and get into bed. :)
Currently I'm in Wanaka, an hour north of Queenstown and it's a beautiful town right beside a huge lake/mountains. I'm not sure how long I'll be here... I'm trying to decide what I'm doing next but I'll keep you posted! :)
The girls...
Winnie's Bar-It was their Halloween Party!
The roof opened up with hydraulic pumps!
After a few rum & cokes...
The girls catch me flirting with a cute Brit...
The "Remarkables" mountain range...
View from the top of the gondola...
