10-2-2014
What
to say? It feels like all we’ve done is work. All our adventures feel far behind me, as if it’s been a
month since we went to Milford Sound. As if it’s been many months since we went
caving at Waitomo Caves. I can barely even remember how to spell that. But we
were just at Milford Sound four days ago, and Waitomo Caves two weeks ago. It’s
just that work has consumed us.
We’re managing the blueberry farm in Southland, only not quite. The old
manager is still here, so we’re not fully in charge, and there’s a constant
tension between what clearly needs to be done and what we’re allowed to do.
It’s so frustrating, and irritating. I think for me it might be even worse
because I’m a girl, and the manager here won’t listen to a lot of things I say
simply because I’m a girl. God forbid I actually take responsibility for something or
handle anything on my own. But another challenge is that he refuses to change
anything, even if it’s not working. He’ll just say “no, no…” (I’m so sick of him
saying it I’m about ready to smack him) and insist that if everyone just did
what they were supposed to do, the way he told them to do it, nothing would go
wrong. I say we should build redundancies into the system, so that everything works well no matter
what.
He’s also extremely unorganized, and stuff goes wrong all the time. I spend the majority of my time just organizing things, and fixing mistakes that were born from the inorganization. And I’m trying to make it so that when mistakes are fixed, they’re fixed legally. Right now his way of dealing with paycheck discrepencies is to hide solutions in the current payroll. So if a picker is missing thirty dollars, he’ll figure out how much fruit is worth thirty dollar and just add that number into their total amount of fruit picked on some random day of the week so it gets included in the next paycheck. He doesn’t bother telling payroll in Ohaupo (the main branch actually in charge of paying people) that there was a problem, he just fixes it sneakily and illegally. He’ll change time sheet information and round people down to the nearest quarter of an hour so that he can do the math easier, rather than figure out time worked to the minute. It’s just so sketchy, and I’ve had enough of it. Even if someone rightfully has a discrepancy with payroll, this is not the way to fix it. So what I’ve done is tell the owners and head manager from the main branch in Ohaupo that our payroll is a lot to handle since we have so little infrastructure (I’ll get to that later) and we’ve decided together that we’ll just send the raw data (the time sheets and picker’s sheets) to the office up there and they can do all the work totaling up hours and numbers of blueberries picked. That means numbers have to be explainable. It means that if there’s a discrepancy, all I have to do is email the main office, tell them what it is, and they handle it. I have weaseled accountability into the system.
About our lack of infrastructure. Well, we work at a farm that consists of nothing but blueberry fields and a mechanic’s shed. There’s no electricity and the running water is gravity fed from a container on the hill. There are no bathrooms except the port-a-lous. The “office” is also the breakroom, the mechanic’s shop, a work room where they sticker plastic containers for blueberries, the storage room for blueberries overnight, and the meeting room where I do all of my inductions of up to twenty people at a time. It’s totally disorganized, the counters are covered in crap, and it’s dirty. It’s the kind of place where if you set anything down it’s instantly lost. I hate it. So, to use an office I have to go to the manager’s house. I have to work on his personal computer, to which he’s hooked up the printer/scanner/copier that the business bought, and I have to deal with the disorganization and lack of desk space there and try to get things done. At least there it’s quiet, unlike the shed at the farm.
I constantly need the office, but I can’t just go whenever I feel like it. I have to get permission, and I’m usually accompanied by the manager himself, and I usually don’t get to take my own car. It’s extremely frustrating to be dependent on his schedule for me to get anything done. If he had the time, he wouldn’t need me to do it. And yet I do. Usually while he watches TV.
Why do I stick around, you ask? Well, because I have a lot of respect for the owners of this place, and I care about how their newest farm here in Southland fares. And I care about the people that work here. I’d like them to be paid on time and accurately. I’d like to make changes that will last long enough for someone who can get a good handle on the chaos to be placed down here permanently. Even so, I’m ready to quit, but I said I would stay for three weeks so I have an obligation to stay that long. And since I’ll be here, I’m going to do the best that I can.
We certainly don’t need the money. We have already doubled the money we came over here with, and we still have another week to go. And keep in mind, these aren’t forty hour weeks. I’m talking a week of ninety to one hundred hours, that we’ll probably only get paid for eighty five to ninety of because they automatically take out for lunches that we never even had time to take. But the main office already has a fit that we’re working so much, so trying to get paid for our (non existent) lunches is almost impossible. At least we find time to eat, it’s just always while driving a car, tractor, or four wheeler.
I will say, though, that I’ve learned a lot of things that I’m really glad I learned. I’ve learned how to drive a tractor, a four wheeler of any kind, manual cars in general, manual trucks that don’t run well, and manual trucks that don’t have working brakes or power steering. I can now say I’ve had supervisory experience, maybe even management experience. I hesitate to say management, but I’m pretty confident that if either Luke or I wanted to run a blueberry farm we could. No problem.
I’m not sure I would do this all again, at least not for this long, but I do appreciate the knowledge I’ve gained, the experiences we’ve had, and the people we’ve met. And it doesn’t hurt that our gas and ferry ticket down here were paid for. Especially since we would have come this far south anyways. That ferry ticket is expensive: $220 per vehicle. We’ll probably need to buy another one to get back to Auckland, so having one paid for is pretty nice. Plus the owners gave us enough time to arrive in Southland that we had time for some adventures in between leaving Ohaupo and arriving in Otautau. Like Waitomo Caves.
Man, that was awesome. It started with gearing up in wetsuits and rappelling equipment, then kicked off by abseiling (think rappelling) into a downward pit in the earth. A big, cavernous pit shaped like an hourglass, so from the top it looks like you’re lowering yourself into this small hole twenty feet down, but once you get through the hole it opens up into a big, dark cave. I actually think I might have preferred something narrower so that I would have something to put my feet against while rappelling down. I’ve never rappelled down anything but a rock wall before.
At the bottom, when my feet touched solid, flat ground, I followed a large tunnel to where the rest of the group was waiting, in the dark. I could tell the tunnel was large because there were glowworms on the walls and ceiling, giving me a good visual for how far away they were.
Once everyone was down in the cave, we walked further through the tunnel until we came upon a very large drop-off. Very, very large. Or so it seemed. I could hear water running somewhere far below, and I couldn’t see any glowworms ahead. That’s where we were hooked up, one at a time, to a line in front of us. One by one we jumped, flying through the air in the dark, until all the sudden my smooth motion changed and I was swinging backwards, and slightly to the side. It felt as if something had hooked to a catch above my head and stretched forward with me, slowing me down, until it couldn’t go any further and then, relatively gently, it pulled me backwards until I came to rest. It was all in the dark, so it was very hard to tell, but when the guide turned her headlamp on to help me get down, I could see a rock wall about four feet off to my right, and one about thirty feet in front of me. I could also still see the light of the headlamp from the guide at the top of the zipline, and figured out that the distance really wasn’t nearly as far as it had seemed from the top. It was only a couple hundred feet long, and about a forty foot drop. Maybe less. I wished it was longer, because that was one of the most fun parts.
When everyone was down to the same spot, we took a break and had hot chocolate and some sort of honeyed oatmeal cookie bar that the guides had packed in. It was delicious. I think it would have been even more appreciated, too, if we had been cold but we weren’t yet. We probably should have been at some point, but I guess we got lucky and didn’t get stuck with a wetsuit that had holes in it, like some people did. Because it only got colder.
Next, we jumped into the river. And do you know how warm water is that never sees the sunlight? Frickin' cold. Lake Superior cold, actually. If you’ve ever been there, you know that is a real measurement.
But we didn’t just jump into this river. Nope. We jumped from where we had been snacking, just minutes before, about twelve feet up from the water. And we didn’t just jump feet first. Nope. We jumped butt first, holding our intertubes in place, hoping we landed right so we didn’t totally capsize and have to swim around in the dark searching for our intertubes.
Okay, okay, so it wasn’t that dark. Some people had their headlamps on (lame!) and there were still glowworms all over so you could always tell where the sides were. It was on one of those sides that we found a guide rope hooked up, which we grabbed onto and pulled ourselves along, upstream, to discover more glowworms. After a lot of hilarious spinning around and bouncing off the walls, because there were twenty of us all pulling ourselves along on the same rope, we arrived at another big cavernous area, this one even more spectacularly filled with glowworms. We learned all about glowworms there, including the fact that what’s glowing is actually the worm’s poop.
After learning more than we probably wanted to know, we floated back downstream. When we got the spot where we had jumped in, we ditched the intertubes, threw them back up the rock wall we’d jumped down from, and walked/swam further downstream. I used the rope on the side to laterally walk downstream, rather than swim in possibly eel infested waters. It got deeper and deeper, according to our guide, until all the sudden we were at a lip on top of a waterfall. It was a man-made fall, the lip was the top of the small dam, and there was a slide down the left side. It looked fun to me. I went head first, penguin sliding down the five foot drop. Not thrilling, exactly, but fun nonetheless.
We wound down, around, and through the tunnel, following the river. Some spots were so narrow we crawled on hands and knees to get through. Some spots were shallow, some spots were deep. Most spots were some awkward combination of both, so that when we walked through we looked drunk, the footing was so uneven. All of it was fun.
At some point we turned and started walking up an offshoot of the river, now traveling upstream. We passed some eels, so they really were down there. We also passed another tour group, floating downstream; part of a tour that only includes floating around on intertubes to see the caves. Fun, but not quite as adventuresome as what we had signed up for. The abseiling was pretty fun. The zip line was really fun. The waterfalls we climbed next were the best part of the whole thing; super fun.
The river split again, and the guide pointed down the nice, wide part and said, “If anyone wants to opt out of this next part, that route will take you out.”
Then she pointed to the other part, a small, and I mean small, section where water sort of gushed out to join the main branch of the stream we were standing in. She said, “If you’re up for climbing a few waterfalls, and going through that, then we can do that too. It’s up to you guys.”
“I want to climb waterfalls!” I said. Everyone else agreed with me. I looked at the passage we’d have to get through to get there. I was pretty sure every one of us there could contort ourselves to fit through there. After all, we weren’t the first ones to try this. It had been done many times before.
I wanted to be the first one through, so that I could experience what was beyond as if I weren’t in a group of twenty or so people, half of whom had their headlamps on at all times. But someone else beat me to it, and I ended up going through second to last. Luke was last.
As I had predicted, we made it through just fine. It was a bit challenging. We had to watch our heads on the first part, and then we popped out right behind the first fall. But just in case of falling rocks being carried in the water, we didn’t want to go under the water, so we skirted around it in the narrow space available, until we stood facing the front of it. We climbed up, using the side walls and back wall equally, until the last little bit where we had to just jump a little to land on top of the fall. It was only about ten feet high, and not so strong that we couldn’t stand in the current and not get swept away. We walked further upstream to the second waterfall, which wasn’t very far away at all. That waterfall was about like the same, where we had to climb up the outer tunnel the water had carved out then jump to the top of the fall (only about a three foot jump).
I made it to the top just in time to see the person ahead of me disappear around the next corner. I sat and waited for Luke. Once he was up, we crawled through the next bit of tunnel, winding around corners, left and right then left again. Then we rounded the next right turn and bam! Sunlight. I was looking up over a two foot waterfall into thick vegetation surrounding a pool of water, a ten foot fall at the other side. To the right hand side was a rock wall and thick vines and flowers, to the left was a path. Luke and I crawled out of the cave together and rejoined the group. Everyone was standing in the water. We posed for a group picture in front of the waterfall and then we headed up the trail, back to the bus.
We bussed back to our main base, stripped off our wetsuits and booties, rinsed everything, then headed for the hot showers. After that we wandered back into the café area and enjoyed a free cup of hot soup and hot bagel. Pretty good.
We looked through the pictures, chatted for a little while, and then we said our goodbyes and left. Our goal was to make it to Lake Taupo that night. It was a four hour drive, and it was already about dinner time. We’d be arriving late, and we were afraid that would be too rude since we were staying with some family of Luke’s.
But we made it by 9:00, just in time to talk for a little while before going to bed, and agreed we’d do something together the following day. Thomas had to work all day and wouldn’t be free until after 4:00, but we had time to stay another night and that would be just fine.
In the meantime we explored around Lake Taupo a little. We followed signs for a big waterfall area, and found some really cool viewing areas of massively powerful rapids and falls. Each fall was about thirty feet across, twenty feet tall (at least) and apparently ran so heavy that you could fill two Olympic pools per second. It roared and rushed and bounced between the canyon walls like it had just been let loose from a broken dam, only this was every second of every day. It was pretty incredible.
Just down the road from the rapids and falls was the Honey House. They had honeys from all over New Zealand, and they had all sorts of honey products. They had honey mead, honey peanut butter, honey candy, honey ice cream, honey lotions, honey lip balms…honey everything. We got to taste test all kinds of honey, and some honey liquors and honey meads. I bought a small amount of Manuka honey, which is apparently world famous for being so good, and also known for being white. I also bought some Kimahi honey, which was my personal favorite.
There’s another honey place just around down the road from the farm here, so I’ll have to go and see what they have. The Honey Hive was delicious but expensive, and I’m curious to see if the smaller operation down the road is better.
Anyhow, the honey at Lake Taupo was pretty good. By the time we left the Honey House, Thomas was out of work. I guess I should mention that we slept in pretty darn late, since we were still used to night shifts and we were up until, technically, really early. We didn’t spend all day at the Honey House.
Nonetheless, by the time we got our plans arranged and everything together, we had only an hour and a half until dark. We spent it well. We borrowed intertubes from Thomas and Carrie, and they suited up to swim. We went back to the very same river where the waterfalls were (downstream, but quite a ways downstream), put in, and floated down. It was beautiful. There were canyons so steep that there was even a bungee jump set up in one spot, and one spot that was more reasonable where people cliff jumped all the time. There were cool rocky outcrops and cool rocky islands in the middle. The water was so clear we could see all the way to the bottom, which was quite deep in a lot of spots.
It was pretty but cold. Really cold. The sun had gone down below the trees so everything was in shade, and the water was warmer than I had expected, but still not what I’d call warm. I was cold enough that I was thinking about ways to hurry it up to the end, wondering just how far off it might be, when Thomas and Carrie announced that we were nearly there. Just another few (very long) minutes of cold, and then we paddled and scooted ourselves over to the Western bank on the right hand side.
Being cold was worth it for what was around the corner. A little stream steamed and dropped about a meter down over a shelf into the river. Past visitors had piled up rocks and formed a shallow circular wall around the ledge, forming a large border that the water gurgled through. Inside the border the water was hot, probably 104’ Fahrenheit. Outside the rock border the water was still pretty hot, but it mixed with the river and the further into the river you went the colder it got.
When we paddled in from the middle of the river we could feel the water getting warmer. By the time we were twenty meters away the water felt like bathwater. When we walked into the stream directly it was almost too hot to sit down in, but we did anyways. It felt sooooo good.
By the time we left the spring, the water even five feet away from the make-shift wall seemed like ice water. We hurried up back to where we had parked the car, about a kilometer away because the gate for the parking area closed at 7:00. Then we went for pizza.
We didn’t make too late a night of it because we planned on leaving between 5am and 6am the next morning. Plus Thomas had to work again, and it was Carrie’s first day back to school (she’s a teacher) so we all wanted a good night’s sleep.
5am came too fast, so we silenced the alarms and slept until 5:45, but we were still gone by 6. We hurried ourselves down to Wellington, because our ferry to the South Island left from Wellington, and we wanted to spend a decent amount of time there because we kept hearing good things. We’d heard the museum there was free and really worth going to. It was also the epicenter for a lot of clothing companies, and I was hoping to find another long sleeve shirt or two before heading down to the colder Southern part of New Zealand.
Turns out I did find a few shirts. And a dress, which (believe it or not) I’d been sorely missing on the North Island. I didn’t have anything but hiking clothes and we’d been to enough social gatherings, especially on hot days, that I kept finding myself wishing I had a dress. Of course, now that I have one I haven’t found a need for one, but isn’t that just the way it goes sometimes? I have worn the long sleeve shirts I found almost every day, so I’m really glad I found those. And for only NZ$5 a piece. Same with the dress. Maybe they were NZ$10, but either way, compared to the NZ$200 that every other shirt I’ve looked at has been, my buys were a rockin’ good deal.
It’s occurring to me that I probably shouldn’t say how much clothing costs because now if I get any of you reading this a gift of clothing, you’re going to know I either paid way too little, or way too much. Ha. Ah well, whatever.
Now where was I? Oh yes, in Wellington. Well, the museum was pretty neat too, but we had to pick and choose what displays to see, and we missed the top two floors anyways, because there was just too much cool stuff to see and read about before we had to leave to catch our ferry. It was mandatory to arrive an hour early for the ferry, so it was one of those hurry-up-and-wait situations, but it didn’t end up being so bad. While we waited to be loaded on, we had a chance to clean and reorganize the van, which we really need to do every few days when we’re living in it.
When it came time to load, it really felt like we were cargo. We didn’t get lifted in by a crane or anything, but we did drive up lanes that looked suspiciously marked for forklifts, and we didn’t get loaded into any old normal ferry. The normal ferry broke down so they borrowed the old freighter that we were driving onto now. There were cabins for the crew, complete with nameplates, a crew mess hall, guest quarters, smoking decks (still no smoking allowed, however), and everything else a freighter usually has. There were rows of chairs all over the place, and they looked old enough to have been on that ship for a long time. But I looked closer and saw that the nuts and bolts were all very shiny and hardly scratched; obviously new. Nothing is that shiny on a ship for very long, and especially not with outdoor seats on a ferry traveling through salt water. I wonder what they’ll do about all the holes once the normal ferry is back in working order, or if they’ll just leave the chairs there.
I’d like to say the ferry was really cool and the view was spectacular, but truth be told I figured I’d see it again on the way back, and I slept pretty much the whole time. We weren’t allowed back to our cars until it was time to unload, and there wasn’t much else to do. Plus, I was tired. Luke must have been too because he was asleep before I was, and after I woke him up. I poked him awake when I woke up just before the channel through some outer islands just outside of Picton. I was surprised at how similar it looked to the San Juan Islands, only there were even fewer houses.
Picton was a pretty uneventful town as far as I could tell. I thought we were driving through the outskirts of town until we passed right through into nothingness again, and I realized that what I’d just seen must have been all of it. Maybe there was different main street I didn’t notice, but then again, probably not.
That’s kind of how a lot of the South Island passed by as we made our way down to Otautau. A few towns were memorable, like K…, where we saw seals all over the place and tried to find this infamous place that supposedly has really good crayfish. (When you read “crayfish” think “lobster”. That’s how big they are down here, and they’re basically the same thing). The place was recommended to us by everyone, even the guidebooks, but we couldn’t find it. After driving up and down a few times we eventually stopped and asked, only to find that they worked out of a trailer and they weren’t there that day. Rats.
Queenstown was pretty memorable too. It’s my favorite city or town that we’ve been to so far. We spent just enough time there for me to realize that there’s a whole lot to do there that we had absolutely no time for. We barely had time to stop for lunch. But I know we’ll be back that way, and I can’t wait. There’s a really cool restaurant on the top of a mountain that you can take a steep gondola ride up to. There are bungy jumping places all over the place. The Remarkables mountain range is right there too, and I drool when I see those mountains. I think it’s best that you just google/image it, because there’s no way I can describe how incredible they are. They reminded me of the Tetons, but better. There are some ‘ski fields’ there and I hope that someday I can come back to ski them. Sometimes, like now, it just kills me that I’m missing winter. Especially the cold and snowy Epic that I’m missing in the states. Nuts!
Now I’m daydreaming about skiing and I’ve completely forgotten where I am in what I’m writing about. I think I’ve said enough about Queenstown so I’ll just skip to Otautau. Not a very impressive town. In fact, I hesitate to call it a town. There are two “supermarkets”, but I only call them so because that’s actually the name of the stores. They’re tiny little small-town markets. You know the kind, with the three aisles and one check out lane. Yeah, and that’s the bigger of the two. There is a Chinese restaurant who does excellent ‘take-out’ and a fish-and-chips place that I’m boycotting. There’s a thrift shop, a few homes, a barber shop that I have yet to see open, and a public library. That too is tiny, but they have free wireless internet, and it’s unlimited, which is the first time I’ve seen that in New Zealand. Apparently they’re actually quite happy that all of us blueberry farm workers are around town all the time because we’ve boosted their stats. They are now the most used wireless server in all of Southland, possibly of the whole South Island. I think that’s hilarious. But there are sixty to seventy of us out and about. The campground in town is overloaded with people, and there are only about twenty people there. Most of the townspeople seem glad to have our business, but the fish-and-chips guy publicly complains about all of us out-of-towners, which is why I’m boycotting him. But I don’t think that most of them really know what to think of all the camper vans and young foreign travelers all over their small town all the time now.
I do think that it’s crucial to put living quarters in when they build their facilities this fall. Otherwise this town will be even more overloaded, because next year there will be at least 200 pickers, not just 50 like now. (The rest are non-pickers, aka shed workers, aka packing-house employees, and they’re mostly full-timers and locals from Invercargil, which is the next closest town about forty five minutes away.)
I get a bit sick of being here sometimes. I think I’ve written enough (probably too much) on how I feel about work. I can’t wait until we can start traveling again. I want to see more places like Milford Sound. That place was awesome. It was what I’d been picturing when I thought about New Zealand before we came over here.
Milford Sound is not actually a Sound; it’s a Fjord. The difference is that a Fjord is carved out by glaciers, and a Sound is carved out by water. It was named incorrectly by the first sailors who accidentally found there way into it.
I can imagine how blessed they must have felt, having found there way out of an imminent storm and into the beauty of the Fjord that just keeps going and going. The mountains drop down into the water, ending far below in the deep, and they soar up so far you have to crane your neck. Trying to get a good picture of it is really difficult, since it’s hard to get an accurate perspective with something as small and limited as a digital camera.
We were incredibly lucky to be there on a very rare calm, sunny day. Milford Sound is in the middle of Fjordland National Park, which is the rainiest place in the world. They get over 200 inches of rain per year. They get more rain than the Pacific Northwest, and I know for sure they get a lot of rain there.
On the few days that it is sunny, the heat usually creates a thermal wind, and it gusts between the mountains into the Fjord at 50 to 100 kilometers per hour, sometimes more. (Think about 60 miles per hour for you non-metric thinking folk). It can topple kayakers and push boats backwards.
On the day we were there, it was sunny, relatively warm, and calm all day. It was a perfect day for exploring and the water was clear. Usually there’s about a foot of freshwater murk on the top from all the rain filtering through the dirt and roots down the mountains into the water, but not that day.
We signed up for a boat tour that went all the way out to the Tasman Sea and back. It was so cool. We got up and close to some huge waterfalls- within 5 feet. We passed a colony of seals and the captain slowed the boat down and idled there for a little bit while we all took pictures and watched them laze about in the sunshine. Our captain was so awesome he even noticed a group of dolphins over by another boat, so he went over towards that boat (another tour boat) and we watched the dolphins play in the bow waves as it moved along. Tourists leaned precariously over the bow rails, trying to get a good picture of the dolphins not 4 feet below them. I’ve only ever seen dolphins before from up on a pier in North Carolina. They were playing in the waves, but they weren’t nearly as playful and friendly as these dolphins. I wish I could have gotten a good video, but my camera couldn’t quite capture it. They were so close to the boats that they were touching the bow. Some played in the waves along the side of the boats, and some just swam and jumped between the two. It was incredible.
At the end of our boat tour we were dropped off at a floating building out by itself in the fjord. Luke and I were the only ones to get off. Everyone else went back to the ferry dock with the boat. I guess we were the only ones who had signed up to do more than just ride on a ferry.
We were met at the door by a few staff members and shuffled right along to the floating docks out the other end of the building. We donned baggy, water resistant sweat pants, neoprene jackets, life jackets, and hats, put on some sun-block, and then made our way to the kayaks. We were given color coded paddles, yellow blade on the right, red blade on the left (although I may be remembering that backwards), along with some safety instructions about kayaking. I just bit my tongue and let the guide talk, because it would be over faster that way. Finally we were told we could get in our kayaks, but they were sitting on the grated floor, about four feet above the water. I hopped right in mine and waited for everyone else to get in theirs. Once we were all in (Luke, me, our kayak guide lady, and a new intern), the platform was lowered down by a hydraulic pump until we were deep enough to float. We pushed off and bumped around until we had enough room to paddle without hitting each other, and then we regrouped. We were warned that we could only go so far safely, and we had a whole hour to do it, so don’t paddle too fast. That news was a little bit of a downer, but the water was so clear that I soon found I was perfectly content with just paddling about and looking down into the water. I could see fish swimming about, and starfish with way more than 5 arms. I could see gigantic trees thirty meters down and more.
If it gets too dry on the mountains in Milford Sound, trees fall the entire length of the mountainside and take huge, long strips of vegetation with them. The earth is only a half a foot thick, since it’s mostly made up of mosses, grasses, and trees, whose roots are all intertwined because there’s nothing on the rocky slopes for support but other plants.
Where we were paddling, we could see the remains of past tree slides in the water below. It looked like a really cool area to scuba dive.
I was also hoping to see penguins on our kayaking trip, since they are endemic to Fjordland National Park, but I had no such luck. I could hear them all over the shoreline, but apparently they’re molting this time of the year. And when they’re molting they’re apparently embarrassed, because they hide in the bushes. I paddled slowly and strained to catch a glimpse, but it just wasn’t working. Our guide squawked back (which made me extremely happy because now I know I’m not the only one who does weird stuff like this) in hopes that they’d come say hello. Apparently it works fairly often, but not this time. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to go back. There was certainly way more to do than what we managed to do in a day and a half.
We kayaked on, and ended up drifting in pairs, about thirty meters apart. Us girls were in the lead, the boys lagging behind. I was up with the guide, who was telling me all sorts of cool information about the starfish, the penguins, the water and rain, and the ecosystem as a whole. It was awesome.
Then we started talking about careers in the outdoor industry, and what kind of life it led to. Seasonal work, mostly, maybe some traveling to some really cool places. So of course we then talked about some really cool places. I learned that she was born and raised in Canada, in the middle of British Colombia, around Sun Peak Mountain. Apparently it’s better than Whistler, because the powder is always good there, and it doesn’t get wet and heavy when it gets sunny, like it does in Whistler. So if we have time (and money), on the way home, I think I’ve determined where I could go skiing. I just can’t go a whole entire winter without skiing!
By the end of our kayaking trip, both Luke and I got offered jobs as kayaking guides. It was a very tempting offer, especially because the offer stands for next year as well. I think we’ve both determined we’re going to be ski bums next year, but who knows.
We also got an offer to stay and join the next kayaking group for free. We’d have to stay in the same area, but we wouldn’t have to stay with the guides. It was extremely nice of her to give us the offer, but we had so many other things we wanted to see before we left, we decided not to spend time doing anything twice.
Next we went down this long set of spiral stairs, at least four stories down, into a cylindrical room of what I assume was plexiglass. There were window boxes on the outside full of choral, and fish were everywhere. We saw some really cool stuff. There were all kinds of starfish, including a snake starfish that was wrapped around some black choral (which wasn’t black at all but completely white). I learned that snake starfish never move more than a little bit their entire life; they stick to the same choral plant and only move up or down a little bit during the night in order to eat.
Once we had circled around the whole room, we went back up to the top and caught the next ferry out. After all, we had more exploring to do!
The kayak guide had told us about a cool day hike to the Chasm, but we had done that the day before. It was a very neat loop, with bridges over the upper and lower sections of a huge crevice in the ground that a river rushed through. One the top end there was a huge waterfall, and at the lower end there was another waterfall. Just around the corner from that I caught glimpses of a deep pool of water, but I wasn’t satisfied with my partial view, so I looked for a way down. Not far down the trail I found one. I called Luke over and together we followed this trail. It was clearly well used, since it was a full meter wide in some spots, and parts of it had even been flagged with something that looked suspiciously like toilet paper. The view from the ledge that it led to was incredible. I was so glad we followed that trail! And it continued even further! The slope steepened quite a bit, to the point where someone had actually put up a rope for assistance. We rappelled down using the rope, hopped across a narrow strip of flat rock along the steeper rock face by the shore, and then walked along the big rocks along the riverbank. We hopped along rocks in the middle of the river too, since it had widened out and calmed down a bit, and the rocks were all very large and spread out just enough to make for a perfect jump. It was really fun.
On the way back up, Luke commented about how awesome of a cliff jumping spot the ledge at the top of the rope was. Then it clicked. No wonder the rope seemed to work a lot better for getting up rather than going down! And no wonder the path was so well used! We’d stumbled upon a local cliff jumping spot! It was a beautiful spot. It was about fifteen feet high, and twenty feet deep or more. The pool of water was below the lowest waterfall, and it was so wide and deep that it was almost still it was so calm. And it was crystal clear. It was just beautiful. If the sun hadn’t been below the trees, we definitely would have cliff jumped. But we hadn’t come prepared with towels, the water was very cold, and the air temperature was beginning to match the cold water, so it didn’t seem like such a good idea. Even so, I think the only real reason we actually didn’t do it was because of all the stupid sand flies. They were so bad; smaller than mosquitoes and three times as bad, even compared to a mosquito’s worst. I’m pretty sure every picture of us in Milford Sound will have little black spots all over. Those are the sand flies.
But anyhow, since we told the guide we had already walked around at the Chasm, she recommended a place called Lake Marion. It was another really pretty spot, and a favorite of the locals.
We headed out to Lake Marion, finding it no problem. It was only 2:00 in the afternoon, and the hike was only estimated to be a few hours long. No problem. But then we were hit by a wave of exhaustion. I mean, I was fighting to keep my eyelids open. I crawled into the back and mumbled, “I’m just gonna lie down for a quick nap.” Luke did the same. He was tired too.
Four hours later we woke up. The parking lot, which had been full when we arrived, now only had two other cars in it. Perfect. We still had time to hike up and down before dark, although if we were slow we’d be racing the sun.
Turns out we weren’t slow. The hike was an estimated 3 hours, according to the sign. We were at the top in one hour. We passed the few remaining hikers on their way down, stopping to chat with an American from Wisconsin and her dad, just before we reached the lake. Once we were there we had the whole place to ourselves. We mostly just sat around and enjoyed the view. I tried to take pictures but the sun was in just the right position that it ruined all the shots I tried to take in that direction, which was of course where I wanted to take the most pictures. The mountains were really steep and impressive, and they had more waterfalls than Enchanted Valley (nicknamed “the Valley of a Thousand Falls). To fix that problem, we hung around for about 40 minutes until the sun went down below the mountains. I took a ton of pictures. I hope at least some of them turn out. Then we ended up racing the sun back out anyways. We won by a longshot, though. It only took us a half an hour to hike back down.
After that we had to leave for Otautau again. We had to be back at work the next day, and work days start early for us. Luke gets up between 5:00 and 5:30 every day. I don’t get up before the sun does. Ever. So, I get up at 7:00 and start at 8:00.
I could go on for another ten pages about work, but I really don’t want to. I think I will just end here. Until next time.
He’s also extremely unorganized, and stuff goes wrong all the time. I spend the majority of my time just organizing things, and fixing mistakes that were born from the inorganization. And I’m trying to make it so that when mistakes are fixed, they’re fixed legally. Right now his way of dealing with paycheck discrepencies is to hide solutions in the current payroll. So if a picker is missing thirty dollars, he’ll figure out how much fruit is worth thirty dollar and just add that number into their total amount of fruit picked on some random day of the week so it gets included in the next paycheck. He doesn’t bother telling payroll in Ohaupo (the main branch actually in charge of paying people) that there was a problem, he just fixes it sneakily and illegally. He’ll change time sheet information and round people down to the nearest quarter of an hour so that he can do the math easier, rather than figure out time worked to the minute. It’s just so sketchy, and I’ve had enough of it. Even if someone rightfully has a discrepancy with payroll, this is not the way to fix it. So what I’ve done is tell the owners and head manager from the main branch in Ohaupo that our payroll is a lot to handle since we have so little infrastructure (I’ll get to that later) and we’ve decided together that we’ll just send the raw data (the time sheets and picker’s sheets) to the office up there and they can do all the work totaling up hours and numbers of blueberries picked. That means numbers have to be explainable. It means that if there’s a discrepancy, all I have to do is email the main office, tell them what it is, and they handle it. I have weaseled accountability into the system.
About our lack of infrastructure. Well, we work at a farm that consists of nothing but blueberry fields and a mechanic’s shed. There’s no electricity and the running water is gravity fed from a container on the hill. There are no bathrooms except the port-a-lous. The “office” is also the breakroom, the mechanic’s shop, a work room where they sticker plastic containers for blueberries, the storage room for blueberries overnight, and the meeting room where I do all of my inductions of up to twenty people at a time. It’s totally disorganized, the counters are covered in crap, and it’s dirty. It’s the kind of place where if you set anything down it’s instantly lost. I hate it. So, to use an office I have to go to the manager’s house. I have to work on his personal computer, to which he’s hooked up the printer/scanner/copier that the business bought, and I have to deal with the disorganization and lack of desk space there and try to get things done. At least there it’s quiet, unlike the shed at the farm.
I constantly need the office, but I can’t just go whenever I feel like it. I have to get permission, and I’m usually accompanied by the manager himself, and I usually don’t get to take my own car. It’s extremely frustrating to be dependent on his schedule for me to get anything done. If he had the time, he wouldn’t need me to do it. And yet I do. Usually while he watches TV.
Why do I stick around, you ask? Well, because I have a lot of respect for the owners of this place, and I care about how their newest farm here in Southland fares. And I care about the people that work here. I’d like them to be paid on time and accurately. I’d like to make changes that will last long enough for someone who can get a good handle on the chaos to be placed down here permanently. Even so, I’m ready to quit, but I said I would stay for three weeks so I have an obligation to stay that long. And since I’ll be here, I’m going to do the best that I can.
We certainly don’t need the money. We have already doubled the money we came over here with, and we still have another week to go. And keep in mind, these aren’t forty hour weeks. I’m talking a week of ninety to one hundred hours, that we’ll probably only get paid for eighty five to ninety of because they automatically take out for lunches that we never even had time to take. But the main office already has a fit that we’re working so much, so trying to get paid for our (non existent) lunches is almost impossible. At least we find time to eat, it’s just always while driving a car, tractor, or four wheeler.
I will say, though, that I’ve learned a lot of things that I’m really glad I learned. I’ve learned how to drive a tractor, a four wheeler of any kind, manual cars in general, manual trucks that don’t run well, and manual trucks that don’t have working brakes or power steering. I can now say I’ve had supervisory experience, maybe even management experience. I hesitate to say management, but I’m pretty confident that if either Luke or I wanted to run a blueberry farm we could. No problem.
I’m not sure I would do this all again, at least not for this long, but I do appreciate the knowledge I’ve gained, the experiences we’ve had, and the people we’ve met. And it doesn’t hurt that our gas and ferry ticket down here were paid for. Especially since we would have come this far south anyways. That ferry ticket is expensive: $220 per vehicle. We’ll probably need to buy another one to get back to Auckland, so having one paid for is pretty nice. Plus the owners gave us enough time to arrive in Southland that we had time for some adventures in between leaving Ohaupo and arriving in Otautau. Like Waitomo Caves.
Man, that was awesome. It started with gearing up in wetsuits and rappelling equipment, then kicked off by abseiling (think rappelling) into a downward pit in the earth. A big, cavernous pit shaped like an hourglass, so from the top it looks like you’re lowering yourself into this small hole twenty feet down, but once you get through the hole it opens up into a big, dark cave. I actually think I might have preferred something narrower so that I would have something to put my feet against while rappelling down. I’ve never rappelled down anything but a rock wall before.
At the bottom, when my feet touched solid, flat ground, I followed a large tunnel to where the rest of the group was waiting, in the dark. I could tell the tunnel was large because there were glowworms on the walls and ceiling, giving me a good visual for how far away they were.
Once everyone was down in the cave, we walked further through the tunnel until we came upon a very large drop-off. Very, very large. Or so it seemed. I could hear water running somewhere far below, and I couldn’t see any glowworms ahead. That’s where we were hooked up, one at a time, to a line in front of us. One by one we jumped, flying through the air in the dark, until all the sudden my smooth motion changed and I was swinging backwards, and slightly to the side. It felt as if something had hooked to a catch above my head and stretched forward with me, slowing me down, until it couldn’t go any further and then, relatively gently, it pulled me backwards until I came to rest. It was all in the dark, so it was very hard to tell, but when the guide turned her headlamp on to help me get down, I could see a rock wall about four feet off to my right, and one about thirty feet in front of me. I could also still see the light of the headlamp from the guide at the top of the zipline, and figured out that the distance really wasn’t nearly as far as it had seemed from the top. It was only a couple hundred feet long, and about a forty foot drop. Maybe less. I wished it was longer, because that was one of the most fun parts.
When everyone was down to the same spot, we took a break and had hot chocolate and some sort of honeyed oatmeal cookie bar that the guides had packed in. It was delicious. I think it would have been even more appreciated, too, if we had been cold but we weren’t yet. We probably should have been at some point, but I guess we got lucky and didn’t get stuck with a wetsuit that had holes in it, like some people did. Because it only got colder.
Next, we jumped into the river. And do you know how warm water is that never sees the sunlight? Frickin' cold. Lake Superior cold, actually. If you’ve ever been there, you know that is a real measurement.
But we didn’t just jump into this river. Nope. We jumped from where we had been snacking, just minutes before, about twelve feet up from the water. And we didn’t just jump feet first. Nope. We jumped butt first, holding our intertubes in place, hoping we landed right so we didn’t totally capsize and have to swim around in the dark searching for our intertubes.
Okay, okay, so it wasn’t that dark. Some people had their headlamps on (lame!) and there were still glowworms all over so you could always tell where the sides were. It was on one of those sides that we found a guide rope hooked up, which we grabbed onto and pulled ourselves along, upstream, to discover more glowworms. After a lot of hilarious spinning around and bouncing off the walls, because there were twenty of us all pulling ourselves along on the same rope, we arrived at another big cavernous area, this one even more spectacularly filled with glowworms. We learned all about glowworms there, including the fact that what’s glowing is actually the worm’s poop.
After learning more than we probably wanted to know, we floated back downstream. When we got the spot where we had jumped in, we ditched the intertubes, threw them back up the rock wall we’d jumped down from, and walked/swam further downstream. I used the rope on the side to laterally walk downstream, rather than swim in possibly eel infested waters. It got deeper and deeper, according to our guide, until all the sudden we were at a lip on top of a waterfall. It was a man-made fall, the lip was the top of the small dam, and there was a slide down the left side. It looked fun to me. I went head first, penguin sliding down the five foot drop. Not thrilling, exactly, but fun nonetheless.
We wound down, around, and through the tunnel, following the river. Some spots were so narrow we crawled on hands and knees to get through. Some spots were shallow, some spots were deep. Most spots were some awkward combination of both, so that when we walked through we looked drunk, the footing was so uneven. All of it was fun.
At some point we turned and started walking up an offshoot of the river, now traveling upstream. We passed some eels, so they really were down there. We also passed another tour group, floating downstream; part of a tour that only includes floating around on intertubes to see the caves. Fun, but not quite as adventuresome as what we had signed up for. The abseiling was pretty fun. The zip line was really fun. The waterfalls we climbed next were the best part of the whole thing; super fun.
The river split again, and the guide pointed down the nice, wide part and said, “If anyone wants to opt out of this next part, that route will take you out.”
Then she pointed to the other part, a small, and I mean small, section where water sort of gushed out to join the main branch of the stream we were standing in. She said, “If you’re up for climbing a few waterfalls, and going through that, then we can do that too. It’s up to you guys.”
“I want to climb waterfalls!” I said. Everyone else agreed with me. I looked at the passage we’d have to get through to get there. I was pretty sure every one of us there could contort ourselves to fit through there. After all, we weren’t the first ones to try this. It had been done many times before.
I wanted to be the first one through, so that I could experience what was beyond as if I weren’t in a group of twenty or so people, half of whom had their headlamps on at all times. But someone else beat me to it, and I ended up going through second to last. Luke was last.
As I had predicted, we made it through just fine. It was a bit challenging. We had to watch our heads on the first part, and then we popped out right behind the first fall. But just in case of falling rocks being carried in the water, we didn’t want to go under the water, so we skirted around it in the narrow space available, until we stood facing the front of it. We climbed up, using the side walls and back wall equally, until the last little bit where we had to just jump a little to land on top of the fall. It was only about ten feet high, and not so strong that we couldn’t stand in the current and not get swept away. We walked further upstream to the second waterfall, which wasn’t very far away at all. That waterfall was about like the same, where we had to climb up the outer tunnel the water had carved out then jump to the top of the fall (only about a three foot jump).
I made it to the top just in time to see the person ahead of me disappear around the next corner. I sat and waited for Luke. Once he was up, we crawled through the next bit of tunnel, winding around corners, left and right then left again. Then we rounded the next right turn and bam! Sunlight. I was looking up over a two foot waterfall into thick vegetation surrounding a pool of water, a ten foot fall at the other side. To the right hand side was a rock wall and thick vines and flowers, to the left was a path. Luke and I crawled out of the cave together and rejoined the group. Everyone was standing in the water. We posed for a group picture in front of the waterfall and then we headed up the trail, back to the bus.
We bussed back to our main base, stripped off our wetsuits and booties, rinsed everything, then headed for the hot showers. After that we wandered back into the café area and enjoyed a free cup of hot soup and hot bagel. Pretty good.
We looked through the pictures, chatted for a little while, and then we said our goodbyes and left. Our goal was to make it to Lake Taupo that night. It was a four hour drive, and it was already about dinner time. We’d be arriving late, and we were afraid that would be too rude since we were staying with some family of Luke’s.
But we made it by 9:00, just in time to talk for a little while before going to bed, and agreed we’d do something together the following day. Thomas had to work all day and wouldn’t be free until after 4:00, but we had time to stay another night and that would be just fine.
In the meantime we explored around Lake Taupo a little. We followed signs for a big waterfall area, and found some really cool viewing areas of massively powerful rapids and falls. Each fall was about thirty feet across, twenty feet tall (at least) and apparently ran so heavy that you could fill two Olympic pools per second. It roared and rushed and bounced between the canyon walls like it had just been let loose from a broken dam, only this was every second of every day. It was pretty incredible.
Just down the road from the rapids and falls was the Honey House. They had honeys from all over New Zealand, and they had all sorts of honey products. They had honey mead, honey peanut butter, honey candy, honey ice cream, honey lotions, honey lip balms…honey everything. We got to taste test all kinds of honey, and some honey liquors and honey meads. I bought a small amount of Manuka honey, which is apparently world famous for being so good, and also known for being white. I also bought some Kimahi honey, which was my personal favorite.
There’s another honey place just around down the road from the farm here, so I’ll have to go and see what they have. The Honey Hive was delicious but expensive, and I’m curious to see if the smaller operation down the road is better.
Anyhow, the honey at Lake Taupo was pretty good. By the time we left the Honey House, Thomas was out of work. I guess I should mention that we slept in pretty darn late, since we were still used to night shifts and we were up until, technically, really early. We didn’t spend all day at the Honey House.
Nonetheless, by the time we got our plans arranged and everything together, we had only an hour and a half until dark. We spent it well. We borrowed intertubes from Thomas and Carrie, and they suited up to swim. We went back to the very same river where the waterfalls were (downstream, but quite a ways downstream), put in, and floated down. It was beautiful. There were canyons so steep that there was even a bungee jump set up in one spot, and one spot that was more reasonable where people cliff jumped all the time. There were cool rocky outcrops and cool rocky islands in the middle. The water was so clear we could see all the way to the bottom, which was quite deep in a lot of spots.
It was pretty but cold. Really cold. The sun had gone down below the trees so everything was in shade, and the water was warmer than I had expected, but still not what I’d call warm. I was cold enough that I was thinking about ways to hurry it up to the end, wondering just how far off it might be, when Thomas and Carrie announced that we were nearly there. Just another few (very long) minutes of cold, and then we paddled and scooted ourselves over to the Western bank on the right hand side.
Being cold was worth it for what was around the corner. A little stream steamed and dropped about a meter down over a shelf into the river. Past visitors had piled up rocks and formed a shallow circular wall around the ledge, forming a large border that the water gurgled through. Inside the border the water was hot, probably 104’ Fahrenheit. Outside the rock border the water was still pretty hot, but it mixed with the river and the further into the river you went the colder it got.
When we paddled in from the middle of the river we could feel the water getting warmer. By the time we were twenty meters away the water felt like bathwater. When we walked into the stream directly it was almost too hot to sit down in, but we did anyways. It felt sooooo good.
By the time we left the spring, the water even five feet away from the make-shift wall seemed like ice water. We hurried up back to where we had parked the car, about a kilometer away because the gate for the parking area closed at 7:00. Then we went for pizza.
We didn’t make too late a night of it because we planned on leaving between 5am and 6am the next morning. Plus Thomas had to work again, and it was Carrie’s first day back to school (she’s a teacher) so we all wanted a good night’s sleep.
5am came too fast, so we silenced the alarms and slept until 5:45, but we were still gone by 6. We hurried ourselves down to Wellington, because our ferry to the South Island left from Wellington, and we wanted to spend a decent amount of time there because we kept hearing good things. We’d heard the museum there was free and really worth going to. It was also the epicenter for a lot of clothing companies, and I was hoping to find another long sleeve shirt or two before heading down to the colder Southern part of New Zealand.
Turns out I did find a few shirts. And a dress, which (believe it or not) I’d been sorely missing on the North Island. I didn’t have anything but hiking clothes and we’d been to enough social gatherings, especially on hot days, that I kept finding myself wishing I had a dress. Of course, now that I have one I haven’t found a need for one, but isn’t that just the way it goes sometimes? I have worn the long sleeve shirts I found almost every day, so I’m really glad I found those. And for only NZ$5 a piece. Same with the dress. Maybe they were NZ$10, but either way, compared to the NZ$200 that every other shirt I’ve looked at has been, my buys were a rockin’ good deal.
It’s occurring to me that I probably shouldn’t say how much clothing costs because now if I get any of you reading this a gift of clothing, you’re going to know I either paid way too little, or way too much. Ha. Ah well, whatever.
Now where was I? Oh yes, in Wellington. Well, the museum was pretty neat too, but we had to pick and choose what displays to see, and we missed the top two floors anyways, because there was just too much cool stuff to see and read about before we had to leave to catch our ferry. It was mandatory to arrive an hour early for the ferry, so it was one of those hurry-up-and-wait situations, but it didn’t end up being so bad. While we waited to be loaded on, we had a chance to clean and reorganize the van, which we really need to do every few days when we’re living in it.
When it came time to load, it really felt like we were cargo. We didn’t get lifted in by a crane or anything, but we did drive up lanes that looked suspiciously marked for forklifts, and we didn’t get loaded into any old normal ferry. The normal ferry broke down so they borrowed the old freighter that we were driving onto now. There were cabins for the crew, complete with nameplates, a crew mess hall, guest quarters, smoking decks (still no smoking allowed, however), and everything else a freighter usually has. There were rows of chairs all over the place, and they looked old enough to have been on that ship for a long time. But I looked closer and saw that the nuts and bolts were all very shiny and hardly scratched; obviously new. Nothing is that shiny on a ship for very long, and especially not with outdoor seats on a ferry traveling through salt water. I wonder what they’ll do about all the holes once the normal ferry is back in working order, or if they’ll just leave the chairs there.
I’d like to say the ferry was really cool and the view was spectacular, but truth be told I figured I’d see it again on the way back, and I slept pretty much the whole time. We weren’t allowed back to our cars until it was time to unload, and there wasn’t much else to do. Plus, I was tired. Luke must have been too because he was asleep before I was, and after I woke him up. I poked him awake when I woke up just before the channel through some outer islands just outside of Picton. I was surprised at how similar it looked to the San Juan Islands, only there were even fewer houses.
Picton was a pretty uneventful town as far as I could tell. I thought we were driving through the outskirts of town until we passed right through into nothingness again, and I realized that what I’d just seen must have been all of it. Maybe there was different main street I didn’t notice, but then again, probably not.
That’s kind of how a lot of the South Island passed by as we made our way down to Otautau. A few towns were memorable, like K…, where we saw seals all over the place and tried to find this infamous place that supposedly has really good crayfish. (When you read “crayfish” think “lobster”. That’s how big they are down here, and they’re basically the same thing). The place was recommended to us by everyone, even the guidebooks, but we couldn’t find it. After driving up and down a few times we eventually stopped and asked, only to find that they worked out of a trailer and they weren’t there that day. Rats.
Queenstown was pretty memorable too. It’s my favorite city or town that we’ve been to so far. We spent just enough time there for me to realize that there’s a whole lot to do there that we had absolutely no time for. We barely had time to stop for lunch. But I know we’ll be back that way, and I can’t wait. There’s a really cool restaurant on the top of a mountain that you can take a steep gondola ride up to. There are bungy jumping places all over the place. The Remarkables mountain range is right there too, and I drool when I see those mountains. I think it’s best that you just google/image it, because there’s no way I can describe how incredible they are. They reminded me of the Tetons, but better. There are some ‘ski fields’ there and I hope that someday I can come back to ski them. Sometimes, like now, it just kills me that I’m missing winter. Especially the cold and snowy Epic that I’m missing in the states. Nuts!
Now I’m daydreaming about skiing and I’ve completely forgotten where I am in what I’m writing about. I think I’ve said enough about Queenstown so I’ll just skip to Otautau. Not a very impressive town. In fact, I hesitate to call it a town. There are two “supermarkets”, but I only call them so because that’s actually the name of the stores. They’re tiny little small-town markets. You know the kind, with the three aisles and one check out lane. Yeah, and that’s the bigger of the two. There is a Chinese restaurant who does excellent ‘take-out’ and a fish-and-chips place that I’m boycotting. There’s a thrift shop, a few homes, a barber shop that I have yet to see open, and a public library. That too is tiny, but they have free wireless internet, and it’s unlimited, which is the first time I’ve seen that in New Zealand. Apparently they’re actually quite happy that all of us blueberry farm workers are around town all the time because we’ve boosted their stats. They are now the most used wireless server in all of Southland, possibly of the whole South Island. I think that’s hilarious. But there are sixty to seventy of us out and about. The campground in town is overloaded with people, and there are only about twenty people there. Most of the townspeople seem glad to have our business, but the fish-and-chips guy publicly complains about all of us out-of-towners, which is why I’m boycotting him. But I don’t think that most of them really know what to think of all the camper vans and young foreign travelers all over their small town all the time now.
I do think that it’s crucial to put living quarters in when they build their facilities this fall. Otherwise this town will be even more overloaded, because next year there will be at least 200 pickers, not just 50 like now. (The rest are non-pickers, aka shed workers, aka packing-house employees, and they’re mostly full-timers and locals from Invercargil, which is the next closest town about forty five minutes away.)
I get a bit sick of being here sometimes. I think I’ve written enough (probably too much) on how I feel about work. I can’t wait until we can start traveling again. I want to see more places like Milford Sound. That place was awesome. It was what I’d been picturing when I thought about New Zealand before we came over here.
Milford Sound is not actually a Sound; it’s a Fjord. The difference is that a Fjord is carved out by glaciers, and a Sound is carved out by water. It was named incorrectly by the first sailors who accidentally found there way into it.
I can imagine how blessed they must have felt, having found there way out of an imminent storm and into the beauty of the Fjord that just keeps going and going. The mountains drop down into the water, ending far below in the deep, and they soar up so far you have to crane your neck. Trying to get a good picture of it is really difficult, since it’s hard to get an accurate perspective with something as small and limited as a digital camera.
We were incredibly lucky to be there on a very rare calm, sunny day. Milford Sound is in the middle of Fjordland National Park, which is the rainiest place in the world. They get over 200 inches of rain per year. They get more rain than the Pacific Northwest, and I know for sure they get a lot of rain there.
On the few days that it is sunny, the heat usually creates a thermal wind, and it gusts between the mountains into the Fjord at 50 to 100 kilometers per hour, sometimes more. (Think about 60 miles per hour for you non-metric thinking folk). It can topple kayakers and push boats backwards.
On the day we were there, it was sunny, relatively warm, and calm all day. It was a perfect day for exploring and the water was clear. Usually there’s about a foot of freshwater murk on the top from all the rain filtering through the dirt and roots down the mountains into the water, but not that day.
We signed up for a boat tour that went all the way out to the Tasman Sea and back. It was so cool. We got up and close to some huge waterfalls- within 5 feet. We passed a colony of seals and the captain slowed the boat down and idled there for a little bit while we all took pictures and watched them laze about in the sunshine. Our captain was so awesome he even noticed a group of dolphins over by another boat, so he went over towards that boat (another tour boat) and we watched the dolphins play in the bow waves as it moved along. Tourists leaned precariously over the bow rails, trying to get a good picture of the dolphins not 4 feet below them. I’ve only ever seen dolphins before from up on a pier in North Carolina. They were playing in the waves, but they weren’t nearly as playful and friendly as these dolphins. I wish I could have gotten a good video, but my camera couldn’t quite capture it. They were so close to the boats that they were touching the bow. Some played in the waves along the side of the boats, and some just swam and jumped between the two. It was incredible.
At the end of our boat tour we were dropped off at a floating building out by itself in the fjord. Luke and I were the only ones to get off. Everyone else went back to the ferry dock with the boat. I guess we were the only ones who had signed up to do more than just ride on a ferry.
We were met at the door by a few staff members and shuffled right along to the floating docks out the other end of the building. We donned baggy, water resistant sweat pants, neoprene jackets, life jackets, and hats, put on some sun-block, and then made our way to the kayaks. We were given color coded paddles, yellow blade on the right, red blade on the left (although I may be remembering that backwards), along with some safety instructions about kayaking. I just bit my tongue and let the guide talk, because it would be over faster that way. Finally we were told we could get in our kayaks, but they were sitting on the grated floor, about four feet above the water. I hopped right in mine and waited for everyone else to get in theirs. Once we were all in (Luke, me, our kayak guide lady, and a new intern), the platform was lowered down by a hydraulic pump until we were deep enough to float. We pushed off and bumped around until we had enough room to paddle without hitting each other, and then we regrouped. We were warned that we could only go so far safely, and we had a whole hour to do it, so don’t paddle too fast. That news was a little bit of a downer, but the water was so clear that I soon found I was perfectly content with just paddling about and looking down into the water. I could see fish swimming about, and starfish with way more than 5 arms. I could see gigantic trees thirty meters down and more.
If it gets too dry on the mountains in Milford Sound, trees fall the entire length of the mountainside and take huge, long strips of vegetation with them. The earth is only a half a foot thick, since it’s mostly made up of mosses, grasses, and trees, whose roots are all intertwined because there’s nothing on the rocky slopes for support but other plants.
Where we were paddling, we could see the remains of past tree slides in the water below. It looked like a really cool area to scuba dive.
I was also hoping to see penguins on our kayaking trip, since they are endemic to Fjordland National Park, but I had no such luck. I could hear them all over the shoreline, but apparently they’re molting this time of the year. And when they’re molting they’re apparently embarrassed, because they hide in the bushes. I paddled slowly and strained to catch a glimpse, but it just wasn’t working. Our guide squawked back (which made me extremely happy because now I know I’m not the only one who does weird stuff like this) in hopes that they’d come say hello. Apparently it works fairly often, but not this time. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to go back. There was certainly way more to do than what we managed to do in a day and a half.
We kayaked on, and ended up drifting in pairs, about thirty meters apart. Us girls were in the lead, the boys lagging behind. I was up with the guide, who was telling me all sorts of cool information about the starfish, the penguins, the water and rain, and the ecosystem as a whole. It was awesome.
Then we started talking about careers in the outdoor industry, and what kind of life it led to. Seasonal work, mostly, maybe some traveling to some really cool places. So of course we then talked about some really cool places. I learned that she was born and raised in Canada, in the middle of British Colombia, around Sun Peak Mountain. Apparently it’s better than Whistler, because the powder is always good there, and it doesn’t get wet and heavy when it gets sunny, like it does in Whistler. So if we have time (and money), on the way home, I think I’ve determined where I could go skiing. I just can’t go a whole entire winter without skiing!
By the end of our kayaking trip, both Luke and I got offered jobs as kayaking guides. It was a very tempting offer, especially because the offer stands for next year as well. I think we’ve both determined we’re going to be ski bums next year, but who knows.
We also got an offer to stay and join the next kayaking group for free. We’d have to stay in the same area, but we wouldn’t have to stay with the guides. It was extremely nice of her to give us the offer, but we had so many other things we wanted to see before we left, we decided not to spend time doing anything twice.
Next we went down this long set of spiral stairs, at least four stories down, into a cylindrical room of what I assume was plexiglass. There were window boxes on the outside full of choral, and fish were everywhere. We saw some really cool stuff. There were all kinds of starfish, including a snake starfish that was wrapped around some black choral (which wasn’t black at all but completely white). I learned that snake starfish never move more than a little bit their entire life; they stick to the same choral plant and only move up or down a little bit during the night in order to eat.
Once we had circled around the whole room, we went back up to the top and caught the next ferry out. After all, we had more exploring to do!
The kayak guide had told us about a cool day hike to the Chasm, but we had done that the day before. It was a very neat loop, with bridges over the upper and lower sections of a huge crevice in the ground that a river rushed through. One the top end there was a huge waterfall, and at the lower end there was another waterfall. Just around the corner from that I caught glimpses of a deep pool of water, but I wasn’t satisfied with my partial view, so I looked for a way down. Not far down the trail I found one. I called Luke over and together we followed this trail. It was clearly well used, since it was a full meter wide in some spots, and parts of it had even been flagged with something that looked suspiciously like toilet paper. The view from the ledge that it led to was incredible. I was so glad we followed that trail! And it continued even further! The slope steepened quite a bit, to the point where someone had actually put up a rope for assistance. We rappelled down using the rope, hopped across a narrow strip of flat rock along the steeper rock face by the shore, and then walked along the big rocks along the riverbank. We hopped along rocks in the middle of the river too, since it had widened out and calmed down a bit, and the rocks were all very large and spread out just enough to make for a perfect jump. It was really fun.
On the way back up, Luke commented about how awesome of a cliff jumping spot the ledge at the top of the rope was. Then it clicked. No wonder the rope seemed to work a lot better for getting up rather than going down! And no wonder the path was so well used! We’d stumbled upon a local cliff jumping spot! It was a beautiful spot. It was about fifteen feet high, and twenty feet deep or more. The pool of water was below the lowest waterfall, and it was so wide and deep that it was almost still it was so calm. And it was crystal clear. It was just beautiful. If the sun hadn’t been below the trees, we definitely would have cliff jumped. But we hadn’t come prepared with towels, the water was very cold, and the air temperature was beginning to match the cold water, so it didn’t seem like such a good idea. Even so, I think the only real reason we actually didn’t do it was because of all the stupid sand flies. They were so bad; smaller than mosquitoes and three times as bad, even compared to a mosquito’s worst. I’m pretty sure every picture of us in Milford Sound will have little black spots all over. Those are the sand flies.
But anyhow, since we told the guide we had already walked around at the Chasm, she recommended a place called Lake Marion. It was another really pretty spot, and a favorite of the locals.
We headed out to Lake Marion, finding it no problem. It was only 2:00 in the afternoon, and the hike was only estimated to be a few hours long. No problem. But then we were hit by a wave of exhaustion. I mean, I was fighting to keep my eyelids open. I crawled into the back and mumbled, “I’m just gonna lie down for a quick nap.” Luke did the same. He was tired too.
Four hours later we woke up. The parking lot, which had been full when we arrived, now only had two other cars in it. Perfect. We still had time to hike up and down before dark, although if we were slow we’d be racing the sun.
Turns out we weren’t slow. The hike was an estimated 3 hours, according to the sign. We were at the top in one hour. We passed the few remaining hikers on their way down, stopping to chat with an American from Wisconsin and her dad, just before we reached the lake. Once we were there we had the whole place to ourselves. We mostly just sat around and enjoyed the view. I tried to take pictures but the sun was in just the right position that it ruined all the shots I tried to take in that direction, which was of course where I wanted to take the most pictures. The mountains were really steep and impressive, and they had more waterfalls than Enchanted Valley (nicknamed “the Valley of a Thousand Falls). To fix that problem, we hung around for about 40 minutes until the sun went down below the mountains. I took a ton of pictures. I hope at least some of them turn out. Then we ended up racing the sun back out anyways. We won by a longshot, though. It only took us a half an hour to hike back down.
After that we had to leave for Otautau again. We had to be back at work the next day, and work days start early for us. Luke gets up between 5:00 and 5:30 every day. I don’t get up before the sun does. Ever. So, I get up at 7:00 and start at 8:00.
I could go on for another ten pages about work, but I really don’t want to. I think I will just end here. Until next time.
-Carolyn
Holy cow......had to read this in short bursts as I kept holding my breath as you described all the adventures! You are definitely your Daddies girl......you are so brave and up for anything. I am having adrenaline rushes just from reading......you do such a nice job of getting all those details in (I am feeling quite claustrophobic at the moment.....)Lovely to know more about the glow worms.....ha ha.
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