The Geography of Unhappiness

A few years ago I read this interesting and entertaining book called The Geography of Happiness.  The author, a journalist by trade, begged the question “what makes one place ‘happier’ than another?”  To research his oeuvre he visited a few of the countries that are recognized as being happiest places on Earth; Places where the population is, for the most part, and for most of the time, happy (how he must have suffered for his craft, eh?). He spent time in Bhutan, Thailand, Switzerland and Iceland – countries that obviously vary wildly in terms of climate, GDP, topography and culture, yet all report unusual levels of happiness.

In the end, what the author found was that each country attributed its general sense of wellbeing to internal forces within the people living there. To the mindsets they have adopted and perpetuated.  For example, Icelanders were happy since failure was not a shameful thing while Thais had an “ignorance is bliss” approach to life and didn’t think about, or sweat, the small stuff.

The reason I mention this book is that I’m currently living my own geography of unhappiness in crappy ol’ Middlemarch New Zealand.

I hate it here.  I hate the lack of a body of water. I hate the close-minded attitude of many of the people.  I hate how everyone seems to smoke. I hate the cavalier attitude I’ve seen towards dogs’ safety (sliding around in the back of pickup trucks like a barking toolbox).  I hate having to sidestep sheep dung while walking to town.  I hate not having a social life (I had thought I’d have some coworkers with whom to do things and hang out, but after a few people quit, I’m down to two coworkers, one who is 18 and the other who is 16).

I hate the lack of amenities and the difficulty in accessing….anything, really.  Middlemarch has barely anything to offer its inhabitants and visitors.  There’s our little over-priced store, another café that’s sometimes open, but often not, a pub/hotel that is pretty grungy and intimidating, a post office that’s open three hours a day and an unclean, unsupervised, unheated pool.  That’s it.  No garage, no hardware store, no pharmacy, no doctor, no hairdresser, no bank, no library, nothing.  I grew up in a place that I thought was small and remote, but this is a whole other isolated kettle of fish.  At least in Lafontaine you can go to the bank, get your hair cut, order a (delicious) pizza, go to the beach and have access to everything else you need within a 10-minute drive. Here, the nearest grocery store is a hair-raising 45-minute drive over some of the windiest, steepest roads I’ve seen on the South Island. 

And my job is killing my soul. Apart from the unkind work conditions (no breaks, lack of proper training, lack of communication from and with the bosses), there’s so much about my job that goes completely against my nature. I despise selling cigarettes and contributing to an unhealthy and addicted society.  I loath handing out plastic bags which will invariably end up in a landfill or floating in the ocean.  I abhor that the shop doesn’t recycle – every time I see someone tossing a bottle or can into the rubbish bin, I die a little.  I hate charging people 60% above the price they’d pay in a grocery store. Seriously, the mark up on products is 60%, which means that if the bosses go to the Countdown (a grocery chain) and buy a box of crackers for $2.99, they’ll turn around and sell it for $5.79. Robbery, I tell you.

And it’s not easy to get around without a car.  None of the big, affordable bus companies run through here, so I’ve had to use the overpriced shuttle services on occasion.  A one-hour trip from Dunedin to here costs me $35.  To put that in perspective, I took the bus from Wanaka to Christchurch in October, a seven-hour trip, for $40.  Despite the costs, whenever I get the chance, I take off.  I reckon I’ve spent close to $1000 on transportation over the past three months.  I consider it an investment into my mental and physical health.  Whenever I leave this place I almost immediately start to feel better, the reverse is true when I come back.  To whit, last week I was starting to get a cold, I had a day off and went to Wanaka for a quick visit, on the ride there, I started feeling much more alert, less achy and my sore throat and cough disappeared.  The day after I got back to Middlemarch, the cold returned with a vengeance and I’ve been a coughing, miserable mess.

This isn’t a life.  It’s purgatory.

Middlemarch has done what I had thought impossible: it’s seriously harmed my love affair with New Zealand. I’m meant to stay another three months, but we’ll see.

Middlemarch: Where the "middle" is short for "middle of nowhere"

So here I am in Middlemarch.  Never heard of it?  Not surprising.  Few have.

It’s in the Otago region on New Zealand’s South Island, which means this summer it’s one of the few dry places in the country.  As the rest of New Zealand is mucking about in incredibly wet conditions, Otago is living through a drought. 

The village is pretty remote – it’s a 45-minute drive to the nearest “real” grocery store and gas station in Mosgiel (itself a small town), and an hour to the city of Dunedin.



Mainstreet of bustling downtown Middlemarch facing north...




...and facing south.



It’s a place where people wander around town on horseback and pigs occasionally roam the streets.  Where rubber boots are “de rigueur,” and mullets are unironic.

It’s somewhere famers remove their mud- (and other matter-) encrusted boots at the door of shops and wander in their stocking feet (this act of decorum is greatly appreciated by those of us who clean the floors). Where the library is open an hour a week and to use the pool, you rent a key at the pub and let yourself in as you wish.

Middlemarch has a shabby, run-down feel to it, like a dust storm rolled through a few decades ago and nobody has quite managed, or bothered, to shake off all the residue.  Some of the locals even have a visible layer of dust on their person at the end of the day that gives them a sort of washed out, blurry look.

Most buildings could use a good paint job; quite a few of them obviously once housed businesses that are no more.  Many a yard is riddled with disused farming equipment and the only landscaping some lawns see is at the hands (or more precisely, mouths) of the sheep, cows or horses that live there. 

The aforementionned disused farming equipment and the poor horse who lives among it.  I give him carrots sometimes.

And, yes, there are a good many animals about. I have to watch my step while walking through town lest I trod on the sheep pellets, horse dung piles or dog poo that pepper the sidewalk in places.  It’s at once disgusting and charming.

As in small towns the world over, there is an incestuous air about the place. Not the literal “I’m my own grandpa” kind of incest, you understand (though you can never count it out) but more the “everyone’s linked to everyone else” kind.

It’s a little claustrophobic.

Since I’m here without a car, and bus service out of Middlemarch is both inconvenient and expensive, I’ve been feeling a little “landlocked,” if you will.  For a few glorious days I did have access to a “company car” but unfortunately, a coworker took it out on her first week and crashed it (this was especially gutting as the car itself was in the company’s possession for all of two weeks).

The town owes its existence mainly to the gold rush of the late 19^th century when a railway line was built to connect the gold fields to Dunedin.  As the rush slowed to a crawl a few decades later, trains became more and more disused. In the 1980s the line the Otago Central Branch Railway went the way of so many other lines around the world, and 150km of it was ripped up and converted into a cycling and walking track.

Near the end of the line.

The end of the line: Middlemarch station.

Nowadays, it is this track and the remaining bit of the railway line to Dunedin which is the bread and butter of Middlemarch. Every year thousands of tourists travel the Taieri Gorge railway between Dunedin and Middlemarch and cycle the Otago Central Rail Trail.

At the end of these unused tracks is the start (or end, if you do it from the other direction) of the Otago Central Rail Trail.  Pretty funky arch sculptures, eh?  And how about that cloud?  There are often cool cloud formations -- I think it has something to do with the Rock and Pillar range of mountains to the west.

I’m working for a combo café/info centre/bike rental business.  Basically, I’m a short-order cook and barista. It’s hardly mentally stimulating, to say the least.  To be honest, I have been questioning my decision to stay – why am I working for little more than minimum wage doing a menial job in a small town hundreds and thousands of km away from anyone I really care about?

My situation does have its strong points though. The cost of living is decidedly low.  I’m paying $100  of rent a week (for some inconvenient reason, rent is paid weekly, not monthly, in New Zealand), for a which includes all bills. 

My home in Middlemarch.  I'm sharing it for the moment with my coworker Adam, which is pretty cool.  He's a 25-year-old American dude who wishes he were Canadian (I told him he could be a South Canadian like my Californian friend Ben).  We also worked together at Treble Cone over the winter, and I hooked him up with this job.  It was nice having a friendly and familiar face when I first arrived. 

I often get food from the café – savoury pies, sandwiches and the like that are past their prime – and even when I get the urge to spend money, there’s really nowhere to do so;  Other than “my” shop, the only places of business are the post office/farm shop and a dairy down the road. Not much in the way of tempting shopping, in other words.

For another thing, it’s really pretty (it’s in New Zealand, of course it’s freaking pretty). The landscape is riddled with really arresting rock formations that jut out of the earth.  The (simplistic) explanation I've been given for their existence is that the whole area used to be kilometres below the ocean, and the softer rock was eroded away.  What remains is the the denser rock on which grass and other plants can't grow.  There's also a cool inland salt lake (more of a pond,really) nearby, which obviously is a bit of the ocean that never disappeared.  Pretty cool.

One of the thousands of rocky bits that define the Middlemarch landscape.

The Sutton Salt Lake.  Evidently, it's got nothing on Lake Huron. On the day I went to the lake it was teaming with millions of small flies.  Luckily they were happy siphoning salt off the lake and surrounding eart and left me and my sweaty skin alone. Each step would send a swarm of them airborn and they'd quickly jostle for space on the already crowded ground.  It was kinda gross, but also kinda satisfying.





Me in some of said rocks near the lake.

Also, I’ve been interacting with animals more than I ever have before.  The paddock (what I would call a “field” back home) next to my place is home to two real horses and a sheep called Rammy who believes he’s a horse.  I regularly go feed them bits of carrot and handfuls of grass from the other side of the fence (it’s always greener, you see). I’ve also been privy to the delightful scene of be-mulleted men and women chasing a pig down main street, and used to be greeted daily by lambs on my way to work (until they disappeared two weeks ago, presumably they were someone’s Christmas dinner…sad).

I'm sorry you were eaten cute little lambs.  You'll live on in my blog though.

So, yeah.  Here I am in Middlemarch, and I’m meant to be here until early May. Afterwards, who knows…again.

Cool bridge.

Possibly the saddest park in the world.  It's literally a patch of grass, a few trees and two concrete pipe things that I presume kids are supposed to crawl through.  Don't worry, there's a better park by the rugby field and at the school.

An artsy shot of my neighbour's windvane (windvane? weathervane? whatevervane) at sunset.  That's the Rock and Pillar ranges in the distance, and it was about 10:00 at night.  The sun sets late in these parts this time of year.

Me at the old sheep yards.

The week the Hobbits came to town

My love for all things Lord of the Rings (well...the movies, anyway) is what first brought me to NZ way back in 2004, so it's fair to say that those movies changed my life. 

So you can imagine how chuffed I was to find myself, by pure cooincidence, staying in the same village where filming for The Hobbit was going on.

For the past five days I've been a giddy little girl, unashamedly asking people to take my photo with them and chatting up whomever I can, so long as they're somehow linked to the movie.

At first, I only encoutered crew members (drivers, caterers, etc.), all of whom received these hoodies a few days prior:

That dude in the background owns this hoodie.  He goodnaturedly offered to let me wear it for a photo. 

I'm such a geek.

 A few days later, I came across some of the lesser-known actors such as Richard Armitage, Graham McTavish, and Stephen Hunter.

But, finally, on Monday this happened:



Martin Freeman! He plays Bilbo.  You might also know him from The Office, Hitchhiker`s Guide to the Galaxy and Love Actually.
(Stupid blogging site!  Why have you made vertical pictures unusable?)



And the main event:



Yup.  That's me with Sir Ian Freaking McKellan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gandalf/Magneto himself.
He was lovely.  Friendly, funny, gracious and all round awesome.  Defnitely not the diva he has every right to be.

How amazing is that????? I was shaking when I first talked to him, but he was obviously used to it and took it all in stride.  I'm sure I came off as a ditzy chick. Oh well. 

Sadly, they've wrapped up their filming here, and they've left me bereft. 

Snowboarding and other random pictures

I am happy to report that after being employed at a ski field for the better part of three months, dating a ski instructor for the same amount of time, and taking two lessons, I have reached one of my goals for the year.  I can finally say I'm comfortable skiing down some of the blue runs at Treble Cone (which would be considered black runs anywhere else. That mountain be STEEP).


Woohoo!


And, as of Tuesday, I acheived another goal -- I tried snowboarding.


Dave very kindly took time out of his work day up at the Cardrona ski resort where he works to show me how to board.  We went there cause it's a much easier mountain on which to learn anything thanks to its mercifully flat beginners' area and actual green runs (as mentioned above blue runs at Treble Cone = black elsewhere.  Same goes for the green run.  Green at TC = blue anywhere else).


It was a lot of fun, despite the multiple painful and embarassing spills and the inevitable mocking from my oh-so-helpful instructor (anyone who's ever tried to learn a new skill or teach a new skill to a romantic partner knows what I'm talking about). By late afternoon I managed to make it down the oh-so-flat slope once or twice without falling!  Go me!  Dave had to (begrudgingly) admit that I "turned out to be pretty average" after all.  Yay!  Mediocrity!


Though I am devastatingly without a camera at the moment, luckily Dave has one and has been very generous about my borowing it.  So, I have pictures!


Heading up the "magic carpet" (basically like an escalator in the snow).

After one of my many spills.



Still smiling though.  I'm a trouper.

We have motion! Look up Nadine.  Look up! 


I'm planning on taking another lesson on Monday or Tuesday up at Treble Cone, so hopefully I'll be able to actually make it down a run or two by then. 


In the meantime, I'm nursing sore muscles, limping, and groaning like an old lady.


Let's see, what else has been going on lately?


Dave and I went down to Invercargill again last week to watch a Rugby World Cup game between Scotland and Georgia.  It was fun, though expensive and the game itself was rather a snoozefest since not a single try (goal) was scored.  All the points were made thanks to penalty kicks.  Yawn.


Here are some photos.




Some sheep bedecked in the flags of the four nations that played games down in Invercargill.

A dude in a jaunty Scotish cap watches as the national anthems are sung before the match.

Heineken is sponsoring the RWC, so they're the only beer you can buy on the spot.  They come in these awful four packs, with environmentally unfriendly rings from which the beer is hard to extract (especially since they open the cans before selling them to you).  We ended up spending $72 on beer between the two of us.  That's for 12 beers.  Damn it.  As a result, I don't remember much of the second half of the match.

Unflattering shot of moi during the match.  Notice the be-mulleted man to my left (your right)?  He made a point of giving the finger to the TV camera every time it was pointed in his general direction.  Classy.  Also, it was raining, thus the hood.

Have I mentioned that Dave is also a volunteer fireman?  Pretty sweet eh?  Well two Saturdays ago there was an event to hand out plaques and stripes and pins and medals and such to various members of the Wanaka, Luggate and Hawea (three regions near here) fire brigade to recognize their years of service, and I got to go as Dave's date.


Not going to lie, the night was interminibly long what with the pomp and circumstance and the speaches and the awkward conversations.  It was like being at a high school graduation and a wedding where you know nobody all rolled into one.  On the plus side, I got to dress up and go somewhere with a man in uniform (awwwwww yeah!) and there was an open bar.  And you know I availed myself of that.




Me in a dress for the first time in months, and Dave in his fancy fireman suit for the first time ever.




Dave and some fellow brigaderes (not sure if that's a word, but I like it anyway) line up for some official welcome thing.  He's the fourth from the left.

 And I've had a few fun nights out with people from work.  Often I don't have a camera with me, but this particular night I did.


Me and the blondies: Jade, Jenny and Amber at Amber's house.



Amber and I looking as happy as we were (notice the glass).

 And Dave and I went to the old mining town of Arrowtown one day last week too.  He used to work at one of the resorts there and brought me on a little tour. It was quaint.



Me near the waterfall beside the Millbrook Resort.



Very likely the highlight of the week -- This is around where they filmed the Ford of Bruinen scenes in Fellowship of the Ring.  You know, the scene with the horses and the river.  I annoyed Dave with quotes from the movie for a good ten minutes after this ("Give us the halfling She Elf!"  "If you want him, come and claim him!").  Ahhhhh. Now that I look at it though, I think I should have gone another few hundred metres upriver.  Oh well.  Close enough.

And of course, in my jobless state, I've been spending a lot of time with a furry and barky creature.  He's taken to following me around wherever I go during the day on the off-chance that I might bring him for a walk (I do take him out once or twice a day).  Poor Scruff.




Scruffle Ruffle!  Happy to be out on a walk.



Speaking of Scruff, I really should bring him out.  He's been ever so patient all morning. Toodleloo!

Crouch. Touch. Pause. Engage! * (Rugby and other stuff in Invercargill)

Can you believe I've been here eleven and a half months?  Unbelievable.  What's even more unbelievable, is that during those eleven and a half months I had never seen a rugby match. 


How un-kiwi of me.


You see, rugby is to New Zealanders what hockey is to Canadians; it's basically a religion, and I am a bit of a convert. 


I've never understood why soccer is such a big deal in most of the world.  I think The Simpsons summed my feelings up rather well: "High kicking! Low Scoring!  And ties? You betcha!!" Not to mention the ridiculous fake dives some of the players take to try and get penalties awarded to the other team (tossers).


And North American football?  Gag me.


Now rugby, on the other hand...wow.  These guys are as hard as nails.  They head out there with nothing but a cup, a pair of (tight!) shorts and a (tight!) t-shirt to protect their gorgeous manliness (you really must check out their thighs.  And torsos. They're a sight to behold. Here, let me help. And again! and since I'm so generous, another! And if you're inclined towards the lads, I strongly suggest you google "hot men rugby" Yowsa!) Phew! Where was I?  Ah yes.  So these scantilly clad, well-shaped men get knocked around, pulled to the ground, tackled mercilessly, and jumped on.  If one of them gets hurt, more often than not, he'll wipe away the blood, pop his broken nose back into place, and head straight back out onto the field.  Hard. As. Nails.


I won't pretend I understand all the nitty gritty details of the game, but essentially the goal is to get the ball over the line at your end of the field and touch it to the ground (so you can't just carry it over, or fall over onto your back holding the ball, the ball has to make firm and direct contact with the earth) to score 5 points (they call that a "try").  To get it there, players can pass the ball to each other, but only to players behind them.  They can kick the ball forward, but I think there's some rule about when you can or can't kick it (offside rule, I presume). You can also get 3 points through penalty kicks and simply kicking the ball through the goal posts (that kind of look like the ones used in N.A. football).


So all that to say, I like rugby, and up until last week, I had yet to see a match.  When Dave suggested we head on down to Invercargill, NZ's Southernmost city, to catch a Ranfurlly Shield match between the Southland Stags and Taranaki, I very happily agreed.


It was really great to see.  Unfortunately for the hometown crowd (and Dave) the Stags lost the match 12-15, and not a single try was scored all match. So not the most exciting game in terms of runs or action, but still fantastic.  There are some pictures on Dave's camera, but I don't have it with me, so you'll have to go without for now.  I'll try and post them in the coming days!




*For the uninitiated, those first four words of the title of this post are how a rugby scrum gets going. 


The players huddle together in an organized mass, facing the oposing team.  The ref tells them to "Crouch", they do so.  He tells them to "touch", which basically means the guys on the outer sides of the front line jab the oposing player in the arm (apparently, this is to prove that the players are in fact supporting their own body weight and not leaning on the others...not sure how it does though.)


Then there's the very brief "Pause" portion of the scrum which, again, serves to prove the players aren't leaning forward too much.  Finally, we get the all important "Engage!" where the players surge forward with a big, meaty, muscly, grunty crunch into the players in front of them.  Somehow, a ball gets thrown into the middle of this mess and comes out on one of the two sides, thus determining who has posession of it.


Wow.  Explaining that (and likely explaining it wrong) took about ten times as long as the actual process.

Snowed in and robbed

Today, the country ground to a halt. 

Schools were closed.  Roads made impassable. Even a local ski field stayed shut. 

The reason: Snow.  Now, for a Canadian, the paltry amount on the ground was laughably small.  In Wanaka, for instance, we had a dusting of barely two cm coating the grass.  Nonetheless, it crippled most of the country.

I would post a picture here, but I can't.  As you may have read on Facebook, my cameras are now no longer in my posession thanks to some petty thief (or thieves) that decided to pay my apartment a visit the other night.

It is partly my fault. After having locked myself out of the house once, and learning that many people around time leave their doors unlocked cause it's such a safe town, I had grown complacent about securing the door. Evidently, Friday evening was one of the unfortunate times I neglected to turn the key on my way out, and some douchenozzle(s) benefitted from my negligence.

Along with my cameras, the stellar human being(s) also took my external hard drive, my e-reader, i-pod, a DVD collection (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 5), some cash, (ironically) a bible, and, most devastatingly, my passport.

Ugh.

I'm hopeful that my travel insurance will cover at least some of the taken items, and there's not much I can do now after the fact. It was an expensive lesson that, despite living in a small, safe town where many people don't lock their doors, I should do so nonetheless.  So now, with only a short month to go I have to sort out my documents.  It's especially annoying since without a passport, I can't book any flights, and therefore can't really plan my life. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Nay, invited.

Working in Wanaka

Treble Cone has been open and operational for nearly three weeks now, though it feels like I’ve been working there much longer.  Well, I guess technically I have been under TC’s employment for nearly two months, but have only really been actually employed (as in used…and paid) since mid-July.

So what do my days look like?  Well, for one thing they start off pretty dark.

I wake up at 6:30 or so and walk in the dark to the meeting spot about 400m down the road from my place.  At about 7:05, a convoy of vans of the mini and mega variety pull up and I and the other staffers living in the area pile in.  We finish off “the loop” of pick up points, then make our way along the side of Lake Wanaka to the base of the mountain some 15 minutes away. From there, it’s another 7 km of zig-zagging narrow dirt road with dizzying drops on one side up to the TC base building.

I’m not going to lie; the first few times I made the climb I was frankly terrified.  It’s amazing what can become everyday and commonplace after a while.

This view, however, has not become either of those things:

It goes a long way to helping wake me up when I stumble out of the warm van into the cold, mountain winter air at 7:45.  You see, in town, the temperature usually sits in the high-single digits and even sometimes the low double-digits.  On the mountain however, where the base building sits at some 1200 metres above sea level, it’s considerably colder.

It’s not so bad on the days I work inside selling lift passes, lessons and rental gear – there I’m warm and protected from the elements. On the days I’m outside working the gates however, it’s less pleasant. For eight hours I stand in the cold armed with an iPad to make sure punters are making their way through our automatic gate OK, and to do crowd control.  It’s rather mind- and toe-numbing.  I’ve actually developed chilblains thanks to those shifts.  For the (lucky) uninitiated, chilblains are basically itchy, swollen, painful toe ulcers.  Yum!

At least on those days, I’m guaranteed a decent shift.  On ticketing days I often finish up at one or two in the afternoon, which usually means waiting around a few hours for staff transport down the mountain or hitchhiking down with some of the customers.

Naturally, on those days I can take advantage of the big snowy mountain and my free lift pass, but given that I’ve had exactly one lesson in my life some twenty years ago (man I’m old), and that the hills I’ve skied before were of the small, docile variety, I’m reluctant.

Treble Cone, you must understand, is a great mountain for the confident, skilled skier or boarder, but a daunting one for anyone learning.  It’s big.  It’s steep. Its only “green” run is narrow with hairpin turns and big drops running alongside it.  I overheard an instructor refer to it as the “beginner’s cliffs of doom.”  Charming.

I’ve been spending most of my time on the learners’ slope with the kids and the people who have never been on snow before.  Sigh.

But I’m happy to report that, thanks to the (uncharacteristically) patient tutelage of Dave, a ski instructor I’ve been seeing, I made it down the mountain without killing myself or even crying today! Huzzah!



Base building




Staff waiting for transport at the end of the day.





Dave by the lake.



Lake Wanaka at sunset

My main man, Scruff.

Finally! Snow on the mountains!

A full two and a half weeks after Treble Cone was set to open, we're still shut.

While at first the problem was a complete lack of snow, over the past few days we've been dumped on and there's a healthy 70cm of base on the mountain, 40cm of which fell in the past 24 hours.  This means that the road up the mountain was impassable this a.m. and there's an extreme risk of avalanche up there. 

So closed we remain.  Hopefully though, tomorrow will be better and we’ll be able to get up there and get working and skiing.

You'd think that having had so much time off would have inspired me to write tons.  Sadly, a lack of motivation and a surplus of lethargy kicked in and I've been woefully unproductive of late.

Here are a few pictures of some of the things I’ve been up to.

Snow as seen from town.

Went for a walk to a river by a sheep station near town.

Last week TC organized a walk to the Rob Roy Glacier which is an hour's drive and two hour hike from Wanaka.  There were 57 of us on the walk I believe.  Here's a suspended bridge along the track.

The Rob Roy Glacier -- at the bottom you can see an avalanche.  It was pretty cool.

This awesome fella is a kea, NZ's mountain parrot.  These guys are not shy and are super smart and curious.  They've been known to steal people's boots and bags and anything they can get their talons or beaks on.  There are even some that have learned how to open and close doors by watching people do it, and have locked trampers inside huts and outhouses for kicks. Cheeky buggers. 

My coworkers Aurora, Kirsten, Rick and me near the end of the track.

Pretty!

Sadly, I don't have any photos of my disastrous mountain biking expedition (Not only was I ridiculously slow, but I fell in some mud not 10 metres from the end of the track), the awesome banana cake I made last week, or of Scruff, the dog I've been taking on walks almost daily.

Vacationing on the North Island

On the early morning of May 25^th, Christchurch shook some of its residents awake.  I had already gotten out of bed – I had a 7:00 a.m. bus to catch and had woken up early – but I didn’t feel a thing. Not sure why. Oh well. 

In any case, catch my bus I did and I was off to Blenheim.  There were five reasons for me to return there, and all of them were conveniently living under one roof: Hannah, Laura, Ben, Nathan and Kim.  Still in town awaiting the start of pruning, they’ve moved out of Koanui and into a house that they’ve furnished quite nicely. Though it had only been a few weeks since I’d seen them (and only a week and a half since I’d seen Hannah), it felt like much more. I was great to be with the gang again.

Two movies, one trip to the library, a somewhat disastrous attempt at making pizza (hint: “tomato sauce” in NZ means “ketchup”), one short night, and a yoga session later, I had to take my leave. It was hard to say goodbye, but I had a good reason to head out – Leah was waiting for me in Wellington!

Yet another ex-Koanuite, Leah is a Canadian Christian-hippy-outdoorswoman, and she’s awesome.  She’d left Blenheim a month ago to travel around South-East-Asia, and was back in NZ.  She had been staying with her sister in Wellington but was itching to head North to Tauranga and the kiwi orchards.  When she suggested I meet up with her in the capital city and travel up together, I jumped at the chance.  

Wellington's harbourfront has a strangely placed hopscotch thingy.  We played.  Leah won. :(

Over the course of three days, we made our way from Wellington to Tauranga via Taihape (a tiny spot on the map), Taupo and Rotorua.  It was a fun journey; we saw someone warming up to attempt a world record bike jump (he did it too!  Triple back flip http://www.biketaupo.org.nz/content/view/606/1/), splashed around in a hot spring, met a helicopter pilot who’s coworker was flying Peter Jackson around the Tongariro area (lucky!) and even saw some trout trying to spawn up a waterfall (cool!)

One tiny section of Okere Falls.  That's where we saw the fish spawning. 

Leah in the mists of a steaming Rotorua pool in the park.

One of the foot baths in the park.

Some dude doing a crazy flip.

Leah in Taupo's hot spring

 But the best part of the journey was the destination: the new home of six other friends from Blenheim. Aline, Andrea, Sinead, Joe/Adrienne, Hiroshi and Rob have set themselves up in a nice apartment (though condo is a more apt description) in gorgeous, beachy Mount Manganui (which is basically a suburb of Tauranga).  It’s très sweet here. 

The others (including Leah now) are all working on the kiwi orchards, picking now, pruning later.  I’ve been enjoying their company while their around, and enjoying my solitude while they aren’t.

Over the past two days I’ve walked at least 25km while exploring the town and searching out the best deal for a ski jacket ($159, as it turns out). I’ve also hiked up Mount Manganui again, and even gone for a (very short) dip in the ocean – which is great, considering June 1^st marks the first official day of winter here.  Crazy! And how did I celebrate?  By sunbathing on the beach J

Leah on the beach.

The beach from the top of Mount Manganui.

Perched precariously on a rock on top of Mount Manganui.