What I've been up to...

I've already been back in Wanaka two months, and time has flown.  Amazing how the passage of days, weeks, months, can move so much quicker when you're not miserable.

Since being here, I've been mostly in a state of limbo waiting for another work visa to be approved.  Luckily, the long-awaited message was delivered two weeks ago and I am now officially employed, and working, at Tangos café on Wanaka's waterfront.



This waterfront...ah

So far, it's been good.  Obviously the view is amazing, I like the girls I work with, my bosses are nice, and I actually get breaks (imagine that!).
But there is one snag; Wanaka becomes rather ghost-townish during May and June.  There's not much to do over the coming seven weeks, so I guess I best come home for a visit.

Did I slip that in too subtly? 

I'm headed to Canada in less than three days.  By late Thursday night, I'll be back on Canuck soil for the first time in a year and a half. 

I haven't told many people yet, since it was rather last minute planning, and I have some vague idea of surprising some people (nobody tell Bumpa, OK?).

I'll be home until late June, and hope to see as many people as I can, and hopefully the weather will cooperate and I'll get at least a few beach trips in before heading back here for winter (brrrrrrrr).

Yay!

Why I don't polar bear dip

I went for a swim today.  First thing in the morning. In the middle of fall.  In a river.  A river that's fed by a glacier. 

As you can imagine, it was cold.  Extremely cold.  And unpleasant. It was so cold and unpleasant that my ability to write long sentences has apparently been affected (as long as you ignore the current one, apparently).

As such, I'll just direct you to someone more verbose who already wrote about it : http://wanakalakeswimmers.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/matukituki-river-whats-next/ 

There's even a picture of me.  I'm the one in the wetsuit with white stripes on the arms.

Exodus!

I am happy, nay excited -- scratch that -- EXTATIC to announce that I am out of Middlemarch and back to civilization and sanity.

I am back in Wanaka where I'll be working at a café as a Barista (stay in school kids!).  Luckily I found a place willing to sponsor my work Visa thus allowing me to say Sayonara to the terrible existence I was living down in rural Central Otago.

Not to say it was all bad (it was mostly bad).  I managed to save a fair bit of money, I got to go to Dunedin and actually be in a real (albeit small) city every once in a while (Wanaka is a good 3 hours from anything resembling a real city).  It was nice being somewhat part of a community again. And most of all, many of people there were great and I’ll miss them:

My former co-worker Christine and her boys were extremely generous, welcoming and a riot to be around.  My neighbour Shannon was always great for a visit and was a hoot to talk with. A few of the shop’s “regulars” were good fun and seemed genuinely sad to see me go.  Lynette, Holly and Hilary were fun to work with. And in my last 10 days in the village I got to start to get to know Norma, who was funny, charming, and pretty much all-round awesome (former journalist from South Africa, married to one of the country’s most respected brewers), and her two cute dogs.

But as great as those people are, I’m happy to be out of Middlemarch – being there was killing me from the inside out.

So here I am back in Wanaka, back where I can walk to a grocery store, or an Indian restaurant, or a pharmacy.  Back where there’s a bank, and a shoe store, and a lake. 

And best of all, I’m back where Scruff is!

Scruffles!

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. 

Published in NZ!

As you may know, I have a degree in journalism and spent quite a few years working as a writer/communicator.  The last year and half, however, basically the only writing I've done has been for this blog. 

I've been wanting to get back into writing, so a few weeks ago I wrote an article for the local newspaper, The Wanaka Sun.

I had met Ellen Delis by chance back in August while I was hitchhiking up to Treble Cone (tons of people do it here).  She kindly offered me a ride and during the half-hour trip up to the mountain, she told me about the trip she and her husband Andy are going to take this coming May. I thought it was really interesting, and decided to contact the Sun about it.

The results are below:

Kiwis may not fly, but a Wanaka couple is proving that they sure can ride.

This coming May, Andi and Ellen Delis will pack a few belongings, strap on helmets and embark on the journey of a lifetime. 

Over the course of 18 months, the pair will ride motorcycles from Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska to Ushuaia in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego region. The journey will bring them through more than 25,000 km, three continents, some 15 countries, and countless adventures. 

“There will be some character-building moments,” says Ellen.  “Definitely.”

A long-haul trip has long been an ambition of motorcycle enthusiast Andi’s – he’s the president of the Wanaka Motorcycle Club – but as Ellen was a reluctant rider, it seemed unlikely he’d get to live his dream.

That all changed a few months ago when, to Andi’s great surprise, Ellen decided to get her full motorcycle licence.  Her test is scheduled for November 1^st.

“What was my dream has now become our dream,” says Andi.

To help offset costs, they’ll camp most of the way, and Beijing-born Ellen has been in contact with Chinese-language magazines about writing of their adventures.

They’ve also secured sponsorship from companies including Sargent Seats and Icebreaker, and hope to attract more leading up to their trip.

Their exploits and preparation are being documented on their blog at www.twomotokiwis.com, and they will continue to update it during their travels.

“We’ve never had a blog before.  We started and it’s really quite fun,” says Ellen. “We’re meeting new people. It’s opening a whole new world for us.  It’s already fantastic, and we haven’t even started [travelling] yet.”

As with any travels, there are some concerns, but not the ones you’d expect.

“To be honest, I’m afraid I won’t want to come home,” says Andi, with a laugh.

http://www.issuu.com/thewanakasun/docs/wanaka_sun_527 (go to page 5)

Follow Ellen and And's adventures at http://www.twomotokiwis.com/