Coming home in T-12 days!

My internet access has been waning into oblivion, which makes it very hard to update the blog. I realize that I've promised pictures as well and there are none to show b/c either internet's been dial-up or restricted broadband (you can only up/download a set amount). I've found a library with pretty fast internet, so I'll do my best to get pics up before I come home. If not, they'll be posted shortly there after.

Since I left Timaru on the 27th of December, I've been making a huge clockwise swoop around the south island. I headed over to Wanaka and Queenstown for excellent schist climbing and then met up with Kara for a trip up the west coast. We went through some crazy landscapes, including Land Before Time (the dinosaurs were hiding) and carst territory (where caves form). Mostly we free camped in forests or by the beach and kept to our $30/day spending limit. Overall, it was one of the best parts of my trip here and Kara agrees. The only thing we'd change, we decided, was that we didn't have enough to eat. Totally our faults, of course. It was partly because we were trying to keep things cheap and mostly because we'd start looking for camp at 6 or 7pm and not find a suitable place until 9pm or after. Really hungry by the time we got out the stove to cook. We got to cook some wild stuff as well - minced pepper tree leaves in a quinoa pilaf and sauteed fern fiddleheads at our riverside picnic. I really loved finding things to eat in the wild.

We headed inland from the coast on our 5th day and up to Golden Bay. This is the paradise of the south island, with rolling purple hills and perfect sandy beaches. We stayed at the Tui intentional community in Wainui Bay, hiked in Abel Tasman park and swam in the warm water of the bay. It was really interesting to learn about how the Tui community does things. They have what's called an energy input system that helps keep the place going. Energy inputs could be helping to care for the gardens, machine maintenance, cooking community meals, grounds care, childcare, visitor coordinator, etc. They have a big bulk foods storage room where they can purchase organic stuff at the wholesale price and an orchard that they share the fruit of. Other than that, people are pretty much on their own for food. There are community meals 2x a week and it seems like mostly the families with kids go to those so they can romp around together. The land is community owned and people build and own their own houses once they become members in the community. It's about 40 people total and they're certainly not all friends or agree with one another. But having that close community does provide a lot of support in different ways, esp for having a homestead-y sort of place where things are pretty much DIY. There's a community business called Tui Bee Balme, at which 6 members work (money goes back to support the community trust). Other than that, people have their own jobs. Kara and I had our own accomodation in the guest lodge and cooked all our meals except when we went down for community dinner. Having just come off hiking and climbing and traveling up the coast, we were pretty hungry when we got to Tui. We spent most of our free time cooking or hanging out at the beach. One day, desperate for calories, I melted down two small bags of old hershey kisses on the stove and added some soy milk and shredded coconut. Boiled some pasta and poured the 'Mounds bar' sauce over. So good. I think we'd been talking about Nutella too much. We also made heaps of cornmeal and zucchini muffins. And I made a tea with lavendar, lemon balm, spearmint, cinnamon, and red bush tea. So fantastic! At the quiet beach in Wainui Inlet, we joined the other Tui families for naked swimming in true hippie fashion. It was fantastic warm water and the beach is so flat that the tide comes in several hundred meters. It's like a kids swimming pool with 2'-4' water for at least a 100m. Kara and I also did a bit of hiking into the Abel Tasman park and ran into a couple of guys who'd been eating cold beans for 4 days. ugh.

Kara and I are now in Motueka at Tree Dimensions farm eating up lots of fruit from some of the 700 varieties on the property. The prunes (not what you think) are especially delicious. They're a less juicy version of a plum and these have a dark indigo purple skin and highlighter yellow insides. Amazing!

On Sunday we're off again, to go climb at Paynes' Ford in Takaka and Castle Hill near Arthur's Pass. And then I fly out.

Supervacations!

Supervacations are when you go on vacation when you're already on vacation. I'm already on vacation in NZ, thus any vacation I take from wwoofing counts as a supervacation. Most of these involve climbing.

Two weeks ago, I headed up to Mt. Somers for a weekend of spectacular trad climbing with Simon, Rik, and Dave. I got out of Timaru early and toured up the Inland Scenic Route, detouring off into the Peel Forest for a while. Unfortunately the sky had been misty raining all day and showed no signs of letting up as I went north. Bored and unexcited about pre-hiking in the wet, I drove to our meet up spot at the base of the mountain two hours early. Rik introduced himself in the carpark and said that he was going to get an early start on the 3.5hr hike in and asked if I'd like to join him. Seeing no point in hanging around in my car for two hours we set off. I was wearing cotton pants, lots of wooly top layers, a "Gore-tex" jacket (how stiff do they have to become before they're actually waterproof?), my Smartwool socks and trail runners posing as hiking shoes. It wasn't going to make life any more fun if I got disgruntled about the heavy pack (climbing gear spoils packing light) and silly bottom layers, so I just tried to concentrate on the warm dry hut that would await us in the mountains. I was so relieved to see the hut, I could feel tears swelling. Warm in the hut I got my soaked socks off, rung them out and set them on the wood stove to steam dry. Don't ask, but I only brought one pair. Yes it was raining when I packed my gear. I never go backpacking, I usually just go to relatively street-side crags where wet trekking doesn't exist except in the middle of a steaming hot summer.

Pinnacles Hut was amazing. Complete with 18 bunks, a wood/coal stove, picnic tables, and a kitchen bench, I couldn't believe I'd paid $5 for 2 nights worth of student-rate DOC (Dept. of Conservation) tickets. Fun that night consisted of drinking and making weird faces in response to Rik's bladder of cooking wine. Wee! Fun in the woods. The next morning it was still misty and damp, and the four of us hung out for as long as we could stand it playing card games. I swear we picked one that made us exceptionally antsy, but maybe that happens with all card games (sober). Just after lunchtime we packed up our gear and set off up the trail (about 30min) for the rocks. Everything was still in fog so we couldn't see the rock until Simon led us right up to it. Here comes the exciting part...

I'd come on this climbing trip mainly to improve my trad climbing abilities. This was going to be my acid test to see if I really was going to get into the world of trad climbing and become a super gear junkie, or just stick to amateur sport climbing. (Trad climbing means going up and placing removable protection in the rock as you go, then removing it all before you set the next pitch. It means knowing which little piece of aluminum to wiggle into the rock so that when you fall 20-30ft you don't die. It's entirely more complicated than sport, where you're clipping into pre-drilled bolts, and much more mental.) We warmed up easy on two 15s (5.7). Rik led ours and I agreed to reclimb it placing all the gear. The rock there was like a ramp, slowly climbing more and more steeply into the sky, but never quite reaching vertical. I racked up and lead the pitch on double ropes easily and smoothly, just thrilled to be able to confidently set gear and know that it would hold me. I led a 15 as my second route and felt just as solid on it as my first. I was super pumped to be getting into the rhythm of placing gear and to be climbing on a double rope system.

Dave and Simon put up a harder pitch (19) on the next wall over and I hopped on it on top rope and climbed the 45+m to the top. The rope got stuck at the top as we were trying to pull it and we couldn't get it to budge. We'd been climbing on double ropes because the pitches were so long (over the 30m you can do on a single rope system), and because of this we had to knot the two ropes together in order to rappel down. When the knot got itself into a wedge at the top of the cliff there was no way to flick it out, even after Simon prusik ascended the rope 15m. I volunteered to go back to camp and start cooking up the burrito makings that were in my pack while the guys freed the rope. And then I got lost Bear Grills-style and decided to follow my way down a scree slope to a river bed and then turn abruptly left towards camp and bushwack the rest of the way. By the time I got to the stream just before our hut I could hear Simon and Dave just behind me. At least I had fun feeling "lost" and running Man v. Wild dialogue in my head while I made my way back to camp.

On our second day we got out reasonably early and quickly got our gear racked up. I chickened out of leading the "hard" 16 straight off since our two experienced crew members were warming up on a 15. Rik belayed me on the second 15 from the day before and it strangely felt no easier. Dave went off with Simon to put up a 21 and I scrounged up the courage to get on the 16. It was a pretty hairy start and I clipped a bolt that was technically off route about 15-20ft off the deck just for peace of mind. I finally found a wire placement, got my nerves settled, and headed up into the crack system. The rock yawned into a wide V that let me stem easily and go hands free to place gear. I couldn't tell from the ground because of the mist, but there were bolts all the way up the route on the arete. It was a much more mixed route than I had anticipated; I could clip my left rope into the bolts and my right into gear. The route felt really good and I got a nice sideways cam placement in along with a whole string of good nut placements. After cleaning the gear off that route and being wayyy too amped up to call it a day, I joined up with Simon and Dave again and wore myself out cleaning out the gear from the 21. I've never had my calves burn so much from climbing. The 21 was in a right angle corner with loads of good jams and great stemming all the way up. Two thirds of the way up, just as the route was finally kicking it up, I really started to lose it. I was trying to shake out the lactic acid in the my legs from so much slow climbing earlier in the weekend, but that required putting more weight on my left arm, and I ended up doing some sort of strange, awkward chicken winging before I fell on the rope and rested. Needless to say, definitely wore me out. Three hours hike out in the beautiful woods I'd missed on the way in and we were soon relaxing at the pub in Methven for a cold beer.

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The second supervacation was this past weekend with Kara down to Hampden and Moeraki. I will write about that shortly, but am heading to bed now as it's 2am. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Photo gallery of Moeraki trip instead:

Oamaru beach

And below: giant hogweed. bull kelp at Oamaru beach. New Zealand flax. me at Moeraki boulders. old iron dock at at Moeraki. the boulder field.

A Dunk of Diesel and Dettol

On Tuesday afternoon Nath, Kara, and I rounded up the chooks into the hen house and closed them in with the corrugated metal panel. Nath had prepared a mix of Dettol and diesel to cure the mites growing scaly on the chickens' feet. As I guarded the door, Nath went after the chooks with the net and Kara clipped each one's wing and dipped their feet. The chooks were going absolutely nuts of course, but once we had them in our hands they were much easier to handle than I thought. If you place your thumb on their knees then the chicken can't move its legs. We snipped their primary feathers down on one side (no need to do both) so that they can't fly off. If you clip their wings young enough they won't ever learn that they can fly. It sounds like a traumatizing process, but the chooks were just as friendly and food-seeking as usual the next morning and laid a good dozen and a half eggs.

In other chicken news, we have 4 chooks sitting up in battery cages to get them off the cluck. Once chickens get broody their hormones keep them on the cluck, but they don't produce any eggs. Putting them up on cages gets air under their bums and cools their body temperature down to egg laying conditions. We give them food and water and take them out once they start laying or seem off the cluck. We're still trying to sort out Araucanas from the brown layers (there are 2 green egg layers in the main run). We've checked at least 8 chickens now and none of them are the culprits! We're starting to get down to the chooks we were so sure couldn't lay green eggs. Ever elusive. Distinguishing Araucanas is tricky if they're half-breeds.

We also have brand new "bock-bocks" as Kara calls them. I found a squacking mother and 4 chicks outside the run last week and they've been captured and placed in a box with straw, feed, water, and a warming lamp. After much ado and tramping through the woods behind the hen house Kara and I weren't able to capture the mother who'd escaped above our heads into the trees. We think she's returned the to hen house, but with so many hens looking alike we can't be sure. The chicks were struggling quite a bit when we brought them in, traumatized from the capture and being separated from their mother. We taught them to drink by dunking their heads in the water feeder and now at least three of the four are happily pecking away in their new quarters. The fourth is getting extra TLC from Kara. Its left eye was shut this afternoon and it hasn't grown as much as the others. This wee bock-bock escaped the initial capture and got separated from its mother when we went after her. The chick managed to find its way into the hen house and was laying outside the box of its siblings when we found it. A rough start so we're trying to help it catch up.

Daily Grind

Wake up around 8-9am, get a quick breakfast together of yogurt or milk and muesli with some extra raisins, coconut, and nuts thrown in. Drink a mug of tea. Lather everything visible in sunscreen, get my gumboots on and head out for morning work. Water the seedlings, feed the chickens, pick up the few morning eggs. Then off to the main morning work - weeding, planting, pruning, irrigation, organizing a shed on rainy days, whatever the day's fancy. Lunch time rolls in about 1pm, usually dinner leftovers; time for a wee break for reading or internets, and then back outside just after 2pm. Afternoon fun of more of the same and then check the chooks for eggs and pile them in the chiller. The Araucanas are in a separate run - they lay fantastic green eggs - and are currently occupied as lawn mowing chickens. Not quite as thorough as sheep, but they do a decent job. Knock off work around 5pm, hang about the house, have a beer, maybe read or do some yoga; dinner around 7-8pm; maybe a movie after. Bed around 11pm.

Nothing to get your blood pressure up. Wittle away the days, clean out a shed. "What's that bag of ...?" "Blood and bone." "What?" "Ground up blood and bone from rendering; put it on the strawberries for fertilizer." Yummy. Sorry vegans. SOL.

Vegetables!

= Happiness! And I have arrived at a vegetable farm. Finally. I spent another 4 days in Amberley along the beach, tearing down a fence (all by myself), and enjoying coffee and yoga and picnics along the water. Then I began my trek south to Timaru. Along the way I stopped at an auto shop to get new windshield wipers since the ones that were on the car actually made it harder to see when it rained. I brought my entire wiper into the shop to get the right size. The girl asked if i need to replace everything or just the blade. I opted for the blade of course, being cheaper, and she just said to cut them to the right length. Seemed simple enough. Did that. Then I had to get the wiper back on. The last (and first) time I replaced my blades in the states the auto guy sold me the entire set and put them on for me (said it was standard service; guessing he figured I had no idea anyway, which I didn't). So I tried to summon the memory of watching him do it for me... and about 40 min later I finally had my new wiper blades on the car. Luckily I didn't have to ask for help. Next stop was a gas station to get air. I've done that tons of times in the states, should be no problem. The air hose has a pressure gauge on it, which should make things easier because then you don't need your own. But it took me another 10min of staring at it and pretending to add air to my tire to figure out the partial release mechanism that gives you the pressure reading for a split second. No tires exploded on my trip south, so I think things are in working order. Now all I have to do is duct tape my right headlight in place so it doesn't disconnect when I go over bumps.

Life in Timaru at Aroha Organics is grand with Nath and Steph. We're right off the Main South Rd and one farm property over from the ocean. I've been trying to think of something that goes on here for every letter of the alphabet, but I get lost around i or j. (much easier to write it out)

Almonds, apples
Bee stings
Carrots
Dok (sp? nasty weed)
Eggs
Fish and chips & Flight of the Concords
Garlic
House (as in the show) and hazelnut trees, honey
Irrigation
Juggling, courtesy Rush, usually with...
Kiwifruit (we just eat it)
Lemons
Mustard (used as living mulch between the strawberries)
Noel (daddy Jack Russell terrier)
Onions
Pumpkins, pears, peaches, plums, peas
Queen bee... missing from one of the hives
Raspberries
Strawberries
Treehugger Organics (Nath & Steph's brand)
UV rays (getting quite bronzed)
Van (decked out in bright purple and green, hippie style)
Wwoofers (lots coming through here)
Xrays - Steph got hit by a bastard driver
Yoga outside in the grass
Zoe (the girl dog of the bunch)

I got stung by one of the queenless bees 4 days ago on the right side of my forehead. My right eye is still swollen, though some antihistamine is helping (works a lot better than the pills). These honey bees are ferocious - they go all anarchy and aggressive when they don't have a queen. Luckily only one of the hives is in this situation. They attacked me twice when I was planting onions (two days in a row), after which Rush and I gave up and worked elsewhere. Bees don't usually attack. They make stellar honey, some of which gets made into HoneyHaze (a spread of 30% hazelnuts, 70% honey) - pretty close to heaven.

There are a number of chickens and one duck here. They like to be free range, as in out of their cages. There are several breeds and the eggs range from brown to white to green. The green ones are really cool. There's also a rooster around, so we float the eggs before cracking them, lest we find a chick fetus on the pan! (Fertilized eggs float)

I'll be sticking around here for a few weeks, then probably south again to see Fiordlands.

I'm not dead yet!!

...cried the chicken. Got up to the first big old lady hen house today and found a chicken laying strangely on the side of the house. Her head was buried in the mud and she still had a heartbeat. I picked her up and she moved, barely. Showing her to Claudia, I asked her what to do with a half-dead chicken. "Smash its head." "Um... you do it." Claudia laid her head on a beam and crunched her head twice. That was it - then the chicken went on our trailer and headed off to the woods to decompose. I like it better when they're all the way dead when we find them.

We had a massive storm last night that carried on until about noon today. Hail, sleet, torrential rains, winds. Apparently this is not unusual for NZ. My much anticipated trip out to Castle Hill for climbing was canceled - they got snow! Heading out to the Port Hills, just south of Christchurch, tomorrow for a little day trip. By the way, my usual outfit of clothes here is (when warm) pants, a t-shirt and a long-sleeve shirt and (when cold) wool long underwear, pants, two pairs of wool socks, top underlayers, two wool shirts, maybe a fleece, hat, and/or jacket... sometimes in the house. Hope summer's coming soon!

And my last bit of exciting news is that I think I'm in love with milk and honey. So far my favorite foods on this trip are butter and honey on toast, tasty cheddar cheese and honey on bread, and yogurt with honey and muesli. hmmm... pattern. We've been making yogurt here from the fresh raw cow's milk. So delicious. I've decided I have to start doing this when I get home. Claudia has an EasyYo yogurt maker (basically and insulated container with a piece of tupperware for the yogurt). I heat up the milk on the stove to simmer and then let it cool off to about 40ºC (warm-hot) and then put it in the container with a bit of left over yogurt. Then pour 40ºC water around the container in the thermos and let it sit for 12hrs. I have to chance the water once to keep it going. The 40-45ºC temp allows the yogurt bacteria to grow and multiply... thus making yogurt. So if it gets too hot or cold, the culture dies and you have plain ol' milk. You get the same volume of yogurt as the milk you put in... so doing the math, yep, way cheaper to make yogurt myself and just buy milk if I've got the time! On the honey side of things, there's a special NZ "honey" called Manuka. It's actually from a flower and more of a dew/syrup (think honeysuckle) so the bees aren't so central. It's delicious, definitely tastes a bit flowery, and regular honey seems bland next to it. Mmmm. Maybe I can bring some back!

Things I'd never really considered before

A chicken can lose its voice. There's an old lady hen in the upper paddock that lets out this hoarse cluck every time I go to gather her eggs. At first I thought it might be like humans losing their voices, but now I'm pretty sure she's got it for life.

Chickens can lay really strange eggs. Again with the old ladies again. Obviously fertility doesn't last forever and neither do hens' ability to lay beautiful smooth brown eggs. We get eggs that have rough sand-like shells, ones with holes in them, odd shaped ones with blunt corners, and occasionally one without a fully hardened shell. I think we scared a chicken when we drove in to the paddock the other day and it dropped a fresh egg on the ground with a thin paper like shell. Weird.

The circle of life for a baby goat. Last week a baby goat was born and its little wet and curly haired self was the cutest thing ever. We brought him and his mama to a separate shelter in the front yard so they could bond and she would learn how to nurse him as a first time mother. The mom had little clue what to do at first and we helped the baby goat who couldn't stand to suck, giving him both formula and mama's teet for milk. We kept up the assisted feed regimen for 2 or 3 days. The baby goat should have been standing by then. He could get his back legs going but his front legs were like rubber when we would set him upright. He'd put the tiniest amount of weight on them and collapse like a pile of sticks. The next day I went out to feed him and he wouldn't suck. We tried the bottle as well and he wouldn't take to that either. Occasionally he'd let out a bleat and turn his face, so we figured he wasn't hungry. He'd had a huge meal the night before. But later in the day it was more of the same. The next morning Daniel came in with a freezing cold goat and put him in a a warm bath. By then I'm sure he was unconscious or possibly worse. I asked Daniel how we'd know if he'd gone and he said the goat would go stiff. Sure enough, later that afternoon he was done. You can't really force a baby goat to drink milk if he doesn't want it and it wouldn't do much good in the long run. Daniel says that whenever they've given their goats antibiotics or fixed their ailments in the past, then those goats are the first to go in a storm. They simply aren't as strong as healthy goats. So we let the baby goat go and now he's being saved in the freezer for possum bait.