Taupo the Morning to Ya!

Furious and wincing with pain after another endlessly long day at the pack house we raced out of Te Puke into the twilight towards Taupo for a relaxing and much deserved break from the hell that has become our existence. We raced up windy roads through fog so thick at times the only thing I could make out was my own headlights reflecting back at me, we made it there in two complete pieces in under two hours. We approached the place where Paula and Ryan were staying, an elderly folks golf resort? Yes, my lovely friends, the blissfully married couple had really outdone themselves, thankfully it was all being paid for by the kind folks at the Dargaville Library, so we forgave them this horrendous choice in accommodation. We decided it was for the best if we found our own place to stay and chose the Base Camp in Taupo's quaint pub-lined downtown. They offered us bogo voucher's on booze and we bee-lined it to the bar. Eight days without drink is a very long time for me and I happily guzzled down the fizzy amber goodness post haste. Eight or was it ten beers later, we decided to retire, since Ryan had informed us we were climbing a mountain the next day. Huzzah!
The next morning we drove up towards the Tongariro Crossing and quickly learned that Whakapapa was as far as our car, Loretta, was going to go without four-wheel drive or chains, we decided against climbing up the snowy peaks and Ryan and Paula seemed happy enough to throw snowballs at each other at the base of the mountain. Our first snow in New Zealand! We drove back down the mountain towards Orekei Korako Geothermal Park. From there we took an exciting but brief two minute ferry ride across the water to the park. We were greeted by bubbling champagne geysers, steaming pools and algal flats colored with bright reds, pinks, greens and blues. The surrealness of the landscape coupled with the pungent aroma of sulpher made you feel as though you were waking on another planet. It didn't hurt that since it is the off-season we were four of the maybe fifteen visitors in the entire park. We took the path through boiling hot mud pools, a cave with sacred waters (where if you make a wish “it is guaranteed to come true!”), a forest with crazy speckled trees and stark white cliffs which were made over time by the flowing of mineral rich waters. It was a really remarkable place and one of the many geothermal sights in the area.
Afterwards we headed home, loaded up on yummy dinner and beer at the, and I cannot stress this enough, awesome Rainbow Lodge, I totally recommend it to anyone visiting Taupo.
On Sunday we ate a hearty breakfast and bid adieu to Ryan and Paula and despite the pouring rain headed out for more sightseeing. We stopped at the eerily blue Huka Falls, we ate some exquisite ginger honey and drank some heavenly honey mead at Taupo's Bee House and headed to Craters of the Moon an understated by no less impressive showing of the earth's array of steam vents. Funny enough, there wasn't a boardwalk until fairly recently and “many people left with burns” after stepping on what the hoped was solid ground. In case you didn't know, NZ's top priority is not safety, that's the individual's responsibility. Anyway, since the day was so cold, the steam was that much more visible and vents all over the ground released massive amounts into the air, as if there were tiny little factories buried underground, a mini subterranean New Jersey, if you will. It was really awesome although it in no way resembled the moon, (no spacemen walking on me face) it was thrilling to be walking above ground that felt so alive.

Freaky, Frightening Fruit

How's that for genetically modified?

It's a Small World After All

Sorry that the image of Disney's disturbingly cheerful, blank-eyed animatronic multi-cultural children are firmly rooted in your mind, but Walt was right. We met this lovely woman named Sue, who graciously offered to rent us a room in her house. She invited us over for wine and a chat. As we were walking up, sketchily checking for a house number, a large van pulled up and the people inside scowled at us. Like deer in headlights we froze, having been pegged for inept voyeurs or worse, malicious home invaders. We smiled and tried to act as cool as possible under the circumstances, when who emerged from the van but our fabulous German neighbors from the holiday park. They explained that last night while they were at the house, somebody broke into their van and stole a bunch of their stuff, hence the stink eyes we got moments earlier. So what, you think, it's a small town, you are bound to run into someone. Later, as Sue was talking about her lovely friends in Gisbourne, its began to ring some bells. We had been looking into Wwoofing there with a family that sounded remarkably like the one she was describing. Turns out, they are the same, and now we have a connection and pretty much a guarantee for a free and amazing place to stay on our next leg of the journey. Admit it, it's weird. Tonight's happenings serve as a paradigm for our collective experience here. People meet you, people offer you things and introduce you to other people who can help you and so on. It's like a brilliant little club, where everyone is invited and everyone helps out, it's a bright shiny spot on the often tarnished surface of human interaction.

Factory Girl

I started work in a kiwi pack house today. I grade the kiwi's. Basically, I am the front lines against the rotten and spoiled kiwi's, they get thrown down the trash shoot, the rest go on through the pack house maze to get stickered, bundled in boxes and put in cold storage, when they are mature they get packed on boats to travel around the world and fill people's mouths with happiness.
I am making this sound far too whimsical. I'm a bit delirious.
I stand on a platform, under harsh florescent lights, the conveyor belts start up at 8 am sharp, the fruit come thundering down from beyond my line of sight, I imagine an enormous kiwi avalanche. There is music blaring above me but the giant machinery that surrounding me on all other sides drowns out the melodies until all I can hear is pure skull-rattling cacophony. The frenzied noise alone makes me anxious. I stand braced, my gloved hands on the edge of the belt poised to snap up the unacceptable fruit. Shiny white PV cylinders travel down the line as they ecstatically spin one way nudging the kiwi fruit in the other direction. Your eyes want to follow the little bastards down the line but you can't, the best way to avoid becoming disoriented and dizzy is to keep your eyes moving up and down up and down up and down, never side to side. Within an hour, I feel nauseous, my head hurts and my eyes have trouble focusing. When the conveyor belt comes to a sudden stop my body immediately wants to lurch to the right and keep the movement going, I can't look back down until it starts again. I try to think of something else, but it's all I can do to stay focused on the endless deluge of imperfect fruit hurdling towards me. My eyes rapidly scan up and down, my hands quickly move from side to side, I reach for stems and leaves as I watch for all of the different types of rot and blemishes, I grab before I think, I make a decision based on the degree of damage and by the time I decide the fate of one there are more that I must judge.
Then, a few hours into it, everything seems to slow down. I can't look up from the fruit because I am scared that I will pass out, I stare at the fruit rolling down the concourse and I notice that my hands are moving slowly too. The woman next to me asks if I am ok, and I want to get off the platform and sit down, but I nod my head and breathe, afraid that any sudden movement will have me crashing to the ground. For a minute I am terrified. My brain is moving slowly, I cant decide to breathe deeper or not, I'm not even sure if I am breathing hard already, if I am really moving slowly, if everything is ok. I don't know how long this episode lasts but an alarm sounds, the belts crash to a stop and it is lunchtime. It gets easier and far less scary in the afternoon.
When I am done for the day, I remove my fashionable hairnet and take off my stained apron then I wash my hands. I still feel sick as I leave the place. My hips hurt, my back hurts, my wrists hurt and my neck hurts. My balance is off and I notice my drunken swagger as Katie and I walk through town, I feel lightheaded, I appreciate all the things in the world that aren't constantly moving.
I tried to write this when I first got home and I couldn't do it, I couldn't think of any of the right words and I had trouble forming coherent thoughts. That job is a complete and total mindfuck, thank god it's temporary.

Welcome to the Bay of Plenty, Suckas

Welcome to the Bay of Plenty you hordes of poor working holiday travelers. Work at our innumerable kiwi orchards where exploitation and poor wages are guaranteed. Stay in our overpriced hostels, or better yet, come rest your weary head at our insanely overpriced, overcrowded and unsanitary hostel, The Hairy Berry, here they will promise you a job if you stay and then never get you one. Have a passion for the extreme? Take your life into your own hands and have a ride through Te Puke where it seems that everyone is drunk and just learning how to drive. Want to keep that frown plastered on that foreign face of yours, why not call every one of the 20+ pack houses in the area and get an outright rejection from every single one? Have you had enough, do you want more? A freak hailstorm, why not?
So it's a little melodramatic, but that was our experience the first few days here. Every thing we tried turned out to be a complete failure. Then, as it always does, the sun came back out and things turned around. If you know me at all, you know that I embrace the trashy side of existence, I indulge in the cheap and poor quality, I revel in bad taste, I am smitten with the shameful and cringe worthy, I love it all. So trust me when I tell you that I love what we are doing right now.
We are living in a caravan in a trailer park. I shit you not, I live in a (cara)van down by the river (ocean) and it's fucking awesome!

Gettin' Grown

We drove to Whangarei disguised as grown-ups today with Paula. We were on our way to make a potentially enormous and most definitely adult purchase, on the one hand it would greatly expand our freedom and flexibility and on the other it would drastically lessen what meager savings we brought with us. We went to Whangarei to buy a car. I was calm and collected on the drive over, Ryan supplied us with a thorough checklist, we knew what we wanted to spend and all we had to do was make it happen. Katie was a nervous wreck, worrying over all the things I was trying not to think about. Once we walked up to the dealers my heart began to race. The car was sitting there, front and center, waiting for us. Perched on its little black wheels, its coat of paint gleaming through the rain, it reminded me of an eager puppy waiting to be taken home, ok, not really, but I felt like a potential new dog owner, making the walk up to the pound, suffering equal swells of excitement and terror. We greeted the dealer and checked out the car. I pretended to know what I was doing, asking carefully worded questions about the condition of the timing belt while concentrating on the messy tangle of tubes and bolts that make up the underside of a hood, nodding casually as though I not only understood but approved of what I was seeing. We took it for a test drive without the dealer. Katie noted that it looked pretty and that it was roomy and comfortable, we also wondered if the engine was “too noisy” and if it was what the hell that meant. Obviously, we had to get our game faces on before we got back and started the dreaded haggling. Paula kindly left us to it and we walked into the dealer's office. Nervously we sat down, Katie being the appointed haggler (purely based on her background in business) began her spiel about how we knew the price was $3000 but that we were on a budget, we were traveler's and then threw in the bit about needing a new timing belt for dramatic effect. He scoffed. (dammit we had been found out) Katie said firmly, “we will give you $2500” (super baddass). “Oh well”, he said, drawing it out slowly like a used car salesman (oh wait, shit), “It's really a bargain already, how about $2700”, this being followed by an awkward and painful silence. I chimed in, “well, how about $2600, then everyone is happy” immediately wishing that we had low-balled it from the get go, “well, sounds like a deal to me” he said. We had to pick up cash since he didn't take cards, we were giddy and anxious and shaking all the way to the ATM. Let me tell you, pulling out $2600 in cash at once is a horrible feeling, your stomach sinks and your face drops as the stupid machine keeps spitting 50's at you, you slump over as you casually try to stuff them all in your wallet, your hands tremble as you force it closed. On the walk back we still couldn't believe what we were doing, but we handed over the small mountain of money, signed the papers and walked out the proud and responsible new owners of a modest and economical Honda Integra (yeah, cars are named differently here). The dealer parted with this advice, “stay to the left girls, always to the left”.

Fill Empty Space By Making Lists

I have recently come to re-embrace my passion for making lists and I have Katie to thank for that. She makes lists for every conceivable thing that we do/plan to do/can never in a million years do...you get the idea. I used to make them compulsively when I was younger, I made them to separate the people or ideas that I liked from those I didn't, compile the things I wanted to do when I was older or the places I wanted to see, basically, I felt compelled to organize my world into well-ordered, prioritized columns. As I grew older I mostly felt that lists were too superficial because life would never be tidily arranged into singly worded columns, so excluding grocery shopping, I stopped making them altogether. I have now come around again to being pro-list (thanks in part to making a pro and con list highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of list making). In what I hope will become an ongoing series, I present my first list:


Awesome Things About New Zealand You May Have Never Heard About.


1. Toilets- most toilets in NZ come equipped with two buttons, the full and the half flush, that way you can be a more eco-friendly tinkler (also, public loos are clean and numerous)
2. Grown men in short shorts- once you overcome the desire to shriek and cover your eyes in shame it becomes unceasingly hilarious
3. L&P- Soda- “World Famous in New Zealand”
4. Feijoas- a tiny green fruit that came to NZ from either South America or heaven
5. Outrageous Fortune- a soap opera without the romance and boring shit (as well as its incredibly catchy theme song “Gutter Black”)
6. Sheep- so far I have seen day-glo pink sheep at Sheep World and I have seen a sheep drink out of a public toilet, but only after waiting until someone flushed it, because otherwise that's just unsanitary
7. Scrumpy's Cider- with a name like Scrumpy's it has to be good
8. Being Barefoot- shoes are completely and utterly optional
9. Mullets- bad bleach jobs accentuating either the business or party end optional (but avidly encouraged)
10. Cheap Car Insurance- and on top of that it's not legally required
11. Open Container A-Ok- just keep an eye out for the liquor ban signs prohibiting booze in relatively few areas
12. Lack of Dangerous Creatures- no animal will eat/maim you and there is only one spider that can hurt you
13. Flat Whites- the delicious offspring of a cappuccino and a latte
14. Fire Baths- they may not be exclusive to NZ, but they are frickin'amazing
15. The Guy Family- they keep on warmly welcoming us back and we don't understand why