NZ Part 3: Dargaville

Howdy, howdy.  As I said in one of the last posts, I get behind and post things out of order and then fit some stuff in here and there post facto.  So even if you're caught up on the story, you may not be caught up on photos because they were added later.  Go back and take a look if you get the chance.  And good luck on this one.  It's a bit long, but it's been pretty freaking fun.  I'm all caught up, so it may be a little bit before I get to write again.  Love and happy thoughts to everyone.  Feel free to say hello any time by comment or by email.

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The morning after the barbecue at Dave's, we decided to make leaving less stressful by not requiring ourselves to complete the task by a certain time. Which, of course, is also a good way to stress yourself out because 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon comes quite soon.

So there we were, remembering one thing after another until it was well into the afternoon. We said goodbye to Dave and the other couchsurfers and headed off to pick up the Italians. Our pack job of the car was actually pretty good. I was proud of us for having as much room left as we did.

That pride crumbled when we arrived at the Italians' current home and saw the suitcases they had. They were huge. Actually, they were gargantuan (remember that size, ma?). One look at them and we both cussed just a little. How would we get those into the car?

We DID get them in, surprisingly. It took some rearranging and basically the Italians had to ride with something in between them and piled up around them a bit. I had very little foot space since I brought a bag up from the back to make more room. We were carrying around frozen chicken that we hoped we would get to use, but it lay at my feet next to my bags as well (and incidentally we never at it, so having cold feet the whole drive was all for naught). Joe couldn't really see out the back, but if there had been a semi-truck following him, I think he would have been able to at least see a little of it. Maybe enough to know we shouldn't be that close to a semi.

Sardines

Our plan was to go through the Lake Taupo area, up past Rotorua, and then to the Wentworth campground on the Coromandel Peninsula. We did pretty well, but having left the Hawke's Bay area so late in the day, we were searching for the Wentworth campground at around 11:00 or 12:00 at night. And of course, we couldn't find the campground, which was frustrating because we needed the sleep and it was the second or third Department of Conservation campground that we couldn't find.

Eventually we gave up on finding the DOC campsite and picked a grassy area off a little dirt road to pitch tents. The Italians had no tent and no sleeping bag in their huge suitcases, but thankfully for everyone's sake, they were willing to make do with what we had. Our car had come with a tent, pillows, a blanket and some thin foam pads, and between Joe and I we had our rad-tastical tent, sleeping pads, blow-up pillows (complete with beautiful pillowcases!), two sleeping bags, and a blanket that I "borrowed" from Fiji airways.

So we split stuff up and made do with what we had. Derek is very tall, so they got the other tent, which seemed to be longer, the foam pads, the regular pillows, Joe's sleeping bag (it's a little longer than mine), and the bigger blanket. Joe and I took our tent, sleeping pads, blow-up pillows, my sleeping bag, and the Fiji blanket. Surprisingly we stayed mostly warm.

And since I'm on the subject of cool gear, I should talk about what we are equipped with. In the last ten years or so, my family has been slowly giving me cool gear that they find good deals on or handing stuff down to me, for Christmas or birthday. Four years or so ago (maybe longer), my dad bought all of us kids our own backpacking tent--a Kelty Teton 2, I think. I didn't get to use it much the first few years, just because I was finishing school, working, and just generally not having much time. Now that I use it very often, I realize how amazing it is. As a backpacking tent, it is very light, but very simple. The poles are aluminum and space agey, high-tech. Some of the older tents we've had have sleeves for the poles, but this Kelty has 12 little snaps or hooks and 2 big ones. All you do is put the pole in one corner, put the other end in the opposite corner and start clipping. You don't have to thread anything through anything else, the poles are super simple and it takes a total of about 90 seconds to go from bag to complete tent. Every time we put it up, Joe says to me or I say to him, "Have we talked about how freaking awesome this tent is?" And of course the answer is yes. We marvel at it every time we put it up.

Next is the Jet Boil, which I have already talked about before. Dave got this for me a couple of years ago. And actually, he got it for me and my boyfriend at the time, but when we broke up, I told the recently ex-ed (rather than asked him) that the stove would be staying with me. And how glad I am that I did. The thing is so simple and so awesome. Everything has a use. The sleeve that the "pot" comes in has a temperature sensor that changes colors when it gets near boiling temperature, a little loop to hold a spoon or something in, provides insulation to be able to hold the pot even when it is boiling, as well as a handle to slip your hand into for extra grab-ability. The lid goes on and off easily and has a pour spout on one side to drain water and a small hole in the center that allows steam to escape while boiling. The wavy aluminum coils (I don't know what else to call them except coils) are the big sell of the thing because when the flame is going in the center, all of these coils are distributing the heat very efficiently. The actual stove part allows the pot to be fitted on for stability (just put it in and twist) or there is another attachment if you need to use a pot that is not the one that came with it. The base screws right onto the gas canister and there is a little spark maker (super effing useful--we don't need matches or lighters to cook a meal) that lights the gas when you turn it on. All of the pieces (except for the gas canister) fit into pot for storage and the bottom of the pot where the coils are is covered by a plastic cover that doubles as both a mug and a measuring cup, as it has lines marking the measurements. So cool.

Next are the blow-up pillows with their handmade pillowcases. The pillows came from Amazon.com I think (thanks mom and dad and Bruce and Debbie for the giftcards this Christmas--you helped us afford some of our coolest gear) and they were something like $5 because we caught them on clearance and a huge sale. They're maybe not the highest end we could get, but they're neat because they're versatile. They are maybe 2 or 2 1/2 feet long so that they can be used as seating on bleachers and can be folded to be used as pillows for your head. They blow up very easily and when we were getting everything prepped in California to leave, my mom saw the pillows and thought, hmmm... I could make this great. So she set about designing a pillowcase that would help the pillows hold their shape when we used them in the tent. The pillow cases are made with leftover quilting fabric, so they are very pretty and it makes all the difference in the world to have a nice fabric to lay our heads on. It was soooo sweet. Plus, then she used some more of the fabric to make us little ties to tie things together with, which have come in ridiculously handy.

I should probably be a sales rep for all this stuff, eh?

I say, thanks for the pillowcase, ma!

Joe says, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.  Which means thanks for the pillowcase.

It's funny to see people's priorities. Joe and I are similar in priorities, so we thought how interesting it was that the Italians drove an hour away to go on a date the other night and spent quite a bit of money on wine while they were at dinner.  It's very cute and romantic and I really think it is good to splurge every once in a while and treat yourself, so it was a great idea for them  It's funny because everyone is so different. I don't think Joe and I would spend a lot of money on wine, but one thing that we did make a sizeable investing in is gear. But even there, Joe and I are a little bit different. He was searching for sleeping bags and backpacks in off-brands, but I'm a stupid gear-head, so I look for the best known names. It's funny because I won't buy brand name clothes, but my priority for gear is in the best of the best. Who knows if the best known gear names are actually better products. I had just gotten to a point in my life where I didn't want to invest half as much money into gear that might have lasted less than half the time.

All this to say, Joe and I made investments into gear. We supplemeted stuff that we already had with stuff I "inherited" from my family (for instance, the thirty year old or more Thermarest sleeping pad my dad had bought new) and with new gear, like the down sleeping bags we conned ourselves into. But honestly, we made some great choices. These brand new travel bags, sleeping bags, blow-up pillows, and Joe's sleeping pad are going to last us for years. I'm thankful we have similar priorities because we have needed and used everything we brought with us, but the idea of missing out on one more cultural experience during our travels in order to have an expensive bottle of wine just doesn't compute for either of us. But hey, it made them happy and I'm very happy they got to splurge on what makes them happy. Whatever floats your proverbial boat, eh?

Oh, and one more thing (though I'm pretty sure I have probably not touched on ALL of the cool things we have) to mention: a Kindle giftcard from my baby brudder Calvin. That one has also been sitting around unused for a couple of years as well, but I freaking love having it now that I'm using my Kindle more while traveling. I take the words of the greats everywhere I go, and for someone who only buys books secondhand, it's soooo nice to have money already set aside for what I really want, regardless of price. My Kindle is a treasure-trove.

Da, da, dum I'm a happy and spoiled child indeed. :)

Back to it. So we spent the night roadside, which was actually not bad. I think the Italians slept just fine, and so did we. Not as well as we would have slept in a real bed, but we get by with what we've got quite nicely.

This was Sunday morning and we arrived at Colleen and Peter's house by early afternoon, I believe. Peter and Colleen were waiting for us and had big smiles on their faces when we got to the door. We hugged, introduced the Italians, and said how nice it was to be home again. :) Peter gets a kick out of me calling him dad, so he loved to hear me call it home.

Welcome home to Dargaville

Colleen called Grant, our new boss. We went out to the shed where the foreigners lived. They had just built it within the last year and it was very nice. They had converted the shed to a living space for backpackers. There were a couple of clean bathrooms, nice showers, a stove, a fridge, an eating area, a barbecue, a TV and DVD player, a game console, etc. So it really is nice. And Grant showed us where the Italians could stay if they needed to. We felt a little guilty later when we all decided to stay with Peter and Colleen, since Grant had set up a little bed area for them.

We would start work the next morning. Kumara time!

Kumaras, in case I haven't explained before, are sweet potatoes. We sort of know them as yams in the USA, or at least my family does. We always called the ones that were orange on the inside yams, and the ones that were yellow on the inside sweet potatoes, but they're actually all sweet potatoes.

Yams are something entirely different and I think they are more a root vegetable than a tuber, perhaps something like ginger. Though honestly I'm not even sure sweet potatoes are tubers either. They grow a little differently than potatoes, which are defintely tubers. Where you can cut potatoes into pieces and stick them in the ground and they grow, the sweet potato needs a little more babying, which is definitely why potatoes are cheaper.

Joe and I considered planting sweet potatoes in our kick-ass garden last summer (go ahead and admit how awesome it was), but when we read the process, we decided not to. You have to have a bit of forethought, and even commercial operations have to do it mostly by hand, as we have come to learn. The seed sweet potatoes start to sprout in the spring (they also sprout when they think they might die soon, I think, as we have seen that ones whose attachment to the vine has been compromised by insect or rot start to sprout) and the sprouts are pulled off of the potato, put in a growth solution--for how long I don't know--and then they are planted by hand every so often in mounds. I think the planters must ride on a trailer or something behind the tractor, but I think that might be as mechanized as they get. Then again, I may have misunderstood the process as explained.

Anyway, so here they call sweet potatoes kumaras. The orange ones we think of as yams are the beauxregards (though I'm not sure what the spelling is on that), which are the sweetest and the most finicky. They have to be handled very carefully (trust us on this one because as part of the group of foreigners, we got several speeches about their fragile state) because their skin marks up very easily, which makes them less valuable.

Then there are the golds, whose vines are really tough and they mark up pretty easily as well, but not as bad as the beauxs. I think these ones are used for chips, maybe, or maybe sweet potato fries. They're next to impossible to get off of the vines and thanks to a few days harvesting them, I'm now relegated to only the back of the harvester, since the front where we pull of vines has been waking me up in the middle of the night with carpal tunnel, which sorta feels like the knuckles where my fingers start are being ripped apart.

I think there is only one other type that Grant grows and those are the reds. These mark up the least, but they grow very big and very strange. They bulge in odd places and look a little grotesque. They are not quite as tasty, though last night we ate some that Colleen had fried in a pan with oil and they were AMAZING. Some of the ones that come by on the table look big enough to feed a family of four for a week.

All of the kumaras produce a milk or a sap, which ruins clothing. Colleen was sweet enough to buy us some clothing at a thrift store, but not before I had ruined a couple of shirts and some pants. I was sad my pink jeans (ahhhhhhh laundry accidents) had ripped, because they would have been perfect. In pants I am now down to leggings with a hole in the bum, long underwear bottoms, athletic shorts, a pair of parachute pants covered in kumara sap, and a skirt whose color has become quite odd (laundry accidents + sun bleaching on clotheslines + oil spills + actual bleach; I'm not nice to my clothes).

What our job is in the kumara harvest is opposite of what it is for regular potatoes--we pick out the GOOD ones and put them carefully into a huge bin behind us, while letting vines, rocks, and dirt clods go off the end of the belt. We work on a table with a belt in the center and two bins beside us on each side. This table trailer is pulled behind a tractor and at the front of the table the belt angles down and there is a "blade," though it's not really sharp, that digs under the kumara and takes them, the dirt, the rocks, and the vines up the belt to where we are.

It's super exciting work, let me tell ya.

The first person on each side is mostly just stripping them off the vines (which sometimes, such as the beginning and end of the rows, includes a lot of vines, but generally there is only a little bit of the vine left because a mower type thing has cut most of the stuff above ground off), which can be quite difficult work.

The golds are the hardest to get off the vine because, again, their vines are so thick and they mark semi-easily. The beaux are next in difficulty, just because they're so fragile and you have to gently twist and set each one down. The reds are a little easier because you can be a little rougher with them.

Sometimes the vines and kumaras come in waves, so suddenly you have a bazillion vines to strip, and other times you have nothing to do because they're already off their vines. The drivers, who are all Maori, like to complain to us that we're not doing enough at the front when it is going slow, saying if we don't have any vines to strip we ought to be putting them in the bins. This is silly for a couple of reasons. First, it is hard to go from stripping to loading bins to stripping again because switching like that is hard to do without falling behind. And secondly, really the only time that the front person can load bins is when there is no real need for him or her to do so. If there are a lot of kumaras passing, it means that you'll have to be doing a lot of stripping and everyone down the line will be working fast at loading. And if there are only a few kumaras going by and without many vines, loading bins is pointless for the front person because it means the people down the line have nothing to do.

I like the three person to a side best, because it means everybody is working hard and the driver has to go slow enough that we're not killing ourselves. Three people means that the front person is stripping, with maybe a bit of loading the front bin, the middle person is switching between loading the front and back bins as they need it, and the end person is putting any big ones that make it through in the back bin and the little ones and one with cuts go in the buckets behind them.

There's surprisingly a lot of little things that become important with kumara harvest. You learn how to spin the bins on their litte spinning table just the way you like it to load it easiest. You learn how to grab multiple kumaras at once, or grab fewer but faster. You learn just how bad it is to be on a team with people who are not cut out for the activity.

The last one is actually quite key. There are a couple of foreigners who are painfully slow. If they are in front of you, you can adjust to pick up what they are letting through, but put them on the back of the line and you have to pay attention to them with one eye to make sure they are slowly inspecting one, so that if you can't get all the ones in front of you, they miss it because they're so engrossed in their inspection, or they're looking off in the distance. It can get quite boring, so I understand it, but it really is tough to be on a table with someone who doesn't pull their own weight.

The spinning of bins is key as well. When we first started out, we were on the table with all foreigners, which was actually really fun. We laughed and bonded a little, which tends to happen with young backpackers. Backpacking puts people into stressful and new situations and perhaps the reason we all bond together so well is that we all see the stress in one another with compassion. Don't get me wrong, backpacking is great, but it is nice to be amongst people who experience the same ups and downs. Anyway, the bin spinning didn't really come into play when we were on the backpackers' harvester. We all switched every row and so we all had a part in the positioning of bins.

Once we got onto the other harvester (there are three, but I'll tell you about the third later), spinning became different. They didn't switch, which was a bit annoying, because I'd rather have a crack at all the spots on the table every once in a while. Instead I often ended up in the back (especially once I became sickly with a bum wrist and carpal tunnel), which then came with implied guilt from the others because it is the easiest position. I didn't WANT to be in the back all the time, but I felt like just a lazy American because I wasn't working the other positions very often.

And since we weren't rotating, possessive-ness of bins started to annoy me. I get annoyed when someone tells me how to spin my bin when I am loading it. I like to decide the spin myself.

One person on the team made it a point to share his or her opinion of how the bin should be spun, how I should stand, how we should empty buckets into the rejects bin, and how to level off the bin once it was loaded. There was one particular thing that this person would do that was precisely the wrong way to do it, if you thought about the physics, so I just learned that it was easier to wait until the person wasn't looking to fix what he or she had done and have it be functional again.

It was frustrating to be on this other harvester as well because we didn't feel like a part of the team. We felt like outsiders, and were treated as if we were stupid. I am really, really aware of my hyper-sensitivity, so I don't know that the people were really doing anything wrong and it might have just been me making mountains out of kumara mounds. We were almost excited at first to be with locals and Maoris that were on that harvester and while they were nice normally, it also didn't feel like a successful cultural exchange. Was that because they saw themselves as above us? Was it because they were intimidated by us? Is it because we weren't nice enough?

I'm really not very good at small talk, especially when I first meet someone. I think it might actually be a trait that is a turn-off about me for most people. I'm not so good at putting myself out there, except in very specific instances. I did try to have some conversation and make a few jokes, but mostly I got little response. I can understand why people would not react positively all the time to me.

I do know that Joe is very good at being warm and open from the beginning. Perhaps its what brought us together. I really, really appreciate his interest in me and his interest in other people. He's good at bringing people out of their shells. And I definitely heard him in good conversation with several people and there was even a little bit of response to him, and even some good and slightly deep subject matter. But after a while, he started to feel the same as I did, which was that we were having a hard time connecting with these Kiwis. It made us bummed, both that we couldn't figure out how to bond with them, as well as convince them that Americans can be good.

The first week of harvest went well. We were with the foreigners for most of it and we were proud of how hard we were working. We were staying at Peter and Colleen's and they had asked us if all four of us would like to stay with them. Colleen suggested we pay the same as we would pay at the shed, which was $10 per person per night. I was actually a little shocked by this. I wasn't expecting it to be so much.

Myself, Joe, Derek and Martina in our scrubs

On Thursday of that first week, we brought home money to pay them and when we were all sitting at the table, we were able to talk about the situation a little more. I'm not sure how we arrived at it, but somehow we got it out of her that she had meant we would stay for $10 per person per night INCLUDING food. Even the Italians, who had been considering living at the shed just for privacy's sake, jumped on it. We are so lucky to live in such an economically beneficial arrangement with such great people.

Every night we come home to a home-cooked meal (we cook one night per week and the Italians cook one night per week), warm showers, laundry facilities, beers or sodas, and two friendly faces. Peter just loves offering the men a beer in the evenings and when they saw me drinking a Coca-Cola from the drink fridge, they immediately went out and bought more Coca-Cola and Sprite because they had found something we liked. They call us "folks" and they have started learning a few words in Italian. It's a beautiful relationship.

We don't always make dinner, but when we do, it rooooooocks

Every once in a while it has been a little tense in the living quarters, such as a day early on in the arrangement when I think Colleen seemed to think Martina was not doing her share of dishes and such, but it got pointedly better. I think the only misunderstanding was due to the smoke break the Italians take between dinner and dishes. Now Peter and Colleen call them the "folks" too and we've watched the Italians and our adopted NZ mom and dad build a great little relationship.  Our little hearts get happy when Martina makes a cake for everyone just because, and Derek helps change tractor tires when Peter needs help.  A lot of the people in the world wouldn't do those kinds of things and we're happy that we're in this with such amazing people.

Martina looooves baking cakes and we loooooove eating cakes

Just like when we stayed with them one of the first times, Peter has taken an interest in the Italians' car. They bought a van off of TradeMe, which is like the New Zealand ebay and craigslist mixed into one. It was a steal of a deal and Joe and I were actually a bit jealous. They had such good luck, bidding on a car they had never seen or test-driven, and coming home to Dargaville happy as clams. We were very happy for them of course, but sometimes we got jealous comparing our car to theirs. We're over that now.

But anyway, Peter really enjoys having men around again to do manly things with, like fix and maintain cars. He takes a special interest in our cars. Last night they jacked up the Italians' car, pulled off the tires, and changed the brake-pads, which Peter had found and purchased for them. I think he enjoys the dad role.

And it's fun to be a part of the cultural bonding and sharing. We felt it in Fiji with Junior and his family, we felt it with Peter and Colleen on our first encounter, we felt it with the Italians and Argentinians during our labor strike, we felt it at the modge-podge get together we organized at Dave's house for the barbecue, and we've felt it with the growing bond of living with Peter and Colleen and the Italians. The people we've held onto the most in our memories are the ones with the deepest, warmest characters. I like to think that is good karma coming back to bite us in the ass, as it were, hopefully because we are true and genuine people and put out good energy into the universe, which attracts the best people to us.

One night in the first week or two we spent all evening playing Bocce Ball in the front yard. Martina was surprisingly good at it.

The next night we hit Peter's lawn bowling club, which was fun and actually a little difficult. If you've never played, the balls are weighted to one side, which makes all the difference in the world. The pitch is straight, but bowling at one speed in one direction will put your ball one place, but bowling at another speed in the same direction or at the same speed in a different direction changes everything. Peter is so funny because he's this sweet soul, but I got this sense that he felt glad he was better at it than us, because if he wasn't, he had wasted a lot of time in the past training.  I definitely can say that his training paid off, as he was way better than any of us.

Joe down on one knee! Wait, where was I?

Peter has it down

The evening had a dinner, which was a little bit expensive, but it was a nice change of pace.

A couple of weeks ago, we suddenly stopped working for a couple of extra days because the kumaras in upcoming fields weren't quite ready yet. Joe was feeling sort of adventurous, but he seemed to be bummed out for some reason, or at least not very ambitious. I looked at a map, proposed the plan, and we both got pumped.

We headed north through Kaikohe and up to the base of 90-mile beach. We stopped for an ice cream at a McDonald's—Joe got a cone and I got a McFlurry, which wasn't even a McFlurry at all, but just a larger cup of ice cream with Oreos dumped on top. Don't get me wrong, it was delightful, but it was no McFlurry.

We also stopped at a little place that had a staircase carved into a single piece of kauri tree! We got a couple of post cards. It was pretty neat. It made me think of the spiral-ish staircases in the Harry Potter movies. (Side note: I know this is stupid, but I had a few days where I really had a hard time liking Peter when he blatantly insulted Harry Potter. I'm not sure he understood that Harry Potter was sort of my childhood. I still am a little angry about it, but respect his opinion, I suppose)

Within no time (I'm always so surprised at how small this place really is) we were close to the very tip of the country. Our plan was to check out a lighthouse at the top and then make our way to a DoC campsite nearby. We had to keep stopping because the sunset just kept getting more and more amazing.

Finally we made it to (almost) the northernmost tip of New Zealand. We took a little hike down to the beautiful Cape Reinga lighthouse and took some photos. We had the Pacific to the right and the Tasman Sea to the left. It was so gorgeous! I always thought it was cheesey that all of the paintings of scenery by the sea had the same bleak and calm colors, until I really thought about what the horizon actually looks like when the sun sets on the sea. The pastel pinks and greens are true to those moments.

We went and found our first ever actually found DoC campsite. It was a little full, but we found a spot, cooked some dinner (super cheap and really delicious fish), and set up camp for the night.

I woke up first the next morning and was terrified to find that the inside of the rain fly was absolutely COVERED with mosquitos. You could see them probing for things with their sick spindly bodies, and even hear the faint whine. Thankfully, they were on the outside of the tent. It was so gross.

Take my word for it--they were icky

The showers that morning were chilly and very weird. The nozzles were mounted fixed, so they couldn't be tilted this way or that, making it so that you either got high-pressure horizontal cold water, or low-pressure cold water that you could just get to fall on your body. I didn't mind. I needed the shower and felt much better being clean.

Our campground had a stellar view

We had some fantastical eggs that morning (ala Chef Joe) and got our ducks in a row. Our plan was to hike to the Marie von Diamen lighthouse that was only accessible by “tracks,” or “treks,” which is to say hikes. We parked up at the first lighthouse, packed up our bags with only the necessities, and headed off.

The first stretch was a little intimidating. We had to walk down the regular path that goes to the first lighthouse for a bit to get to where our trail went off. All of the Asian tourists with their slacks and leather shoes and the middle-age women with miniature dogs and bangles on their wrists looked at us as if we were crazy. Their idea of enjoying the weekend was an air-conditioned bus, and you know what? Maybe they have it down and we're the crazies. That's entirely possible.

Joe showing off his first steps of decension

We had all of our cool gear on our backs though, and we had so much energy, starting off on this adventure together.

Once we got off the main little path to the big lighthouse, we started to feel a little better. The next part we faced was a steep but easy downhill switch-back style path. We only saw a couple of people on the way down, and they would be the last people we would see until late the next day.

Our next stretch was on a lovely little beach. And when I say little, what I really mean is quite long. We checked out some old fishermen's nets that had washed up and then we made the loooooooooong trip down the beach.

I started to see why mirages are so distressing. We had plenty of water with us, so the appearance of water across the sand was not what was distressing, it was the sheer length. We looked across the beach on the way down the hill and thought it would take us a small amount of time to cross. But when we were actually walking it, it never ended.

Finally we made it to the start of some different landscape. A small stream and then a rise of semi-green hill. I had sandals and Joe had shoes, so I offered to ferry him through the stream. He hesitated since the last time I had tried to port him over a stream, we fell in. :) Eventually he gave in like a sweet little dear and let me give him a piggy-back ride, and then cross once more with his pack. It was so much fun for me. And it was sweet that he let me do it because he knew how much fun it was for me.

I was lucky to have convinced Joe to walk along the beach. He thought for sure that the trail probably went up another mountain and along the ridge line, which probably would have doubled our distance. And the beach route was already really a long ways.

Once we hit the green hill and the stream, we went up and over the green and were struck by the landscape on the other side—it looked like Utah. It was desert and grasses and cool rock formations. The way was hot and dry, but little did we know we had a lot more to go.

Lines of grass on a desert landscape

My feet had already started to dislike me. I had originally planned on taking my hiking boots, but at the last minute decided on Chacos, since they were comfy, multi-purpose, and had good soles for hiking. But by about the end of the beach, my poor little feet were already blistering. I put on socks underneath the sandals, which helped a little, but not a lot.

On the other side of a big hill, the landscape changed again and we saw the split in the trail, going one direction towards the south and 90 Mile Beach and the other towards the Marie von Diamen lighthouse. We were headed to the lighthouse. There were no more grasses and not many rocks. It was just heaps of fine sand, sloping down, eventually ending in the ocean. There were trail markers every 50 feet, which was funny because we could have used them well before then, but then when there was no question which way to go, they were ubiquitous.

We walked down the dunes looking like extreme hikers in the extreme landscape. The last leg of our journey was up the final steep hill covered in tall grasses and succulent plants. It was so steep on the first 100 feet that we had to keep stopping to catch our breaths (and no, it wasn't high altitude because we could see the sea level and were only a few feet above it). And we definitely had to keep the positive self-talk going. We never would have made it without that key piece.

Halfway up, we got to a ridge and on the other side was a spot where the ocean churned and climbed up the rock in great, frothy, brilliant white fingers of waves. We stopped and enjoyed it. It looked like airy whipped cream and with each surge, it would just stretch farther and farther up the rock and then the water would slide back down re-joining the ocean with a thousand tiny pockets of air.

When we made it to the top, the view was worth it. We found the furthest place on top of this large rock formation where we could start cooking dinner and watch the sun sink out over an island just out from where we were. We ate hearty soups over rice, which filled us to the brim. We set up the tent while we had the light and returned to our spot to make chamomile tea and eat cookies with chamomile and watch the sun sink into the Tasman Sea. The moment was magical.

Oh, you know, just making dinner on a rock face in the light of the sunset

Hearty soup made this tired boy happy

The sun sinking lower

Have I mentioned how magical it was? No better time for chamomile.

Tasty cookies and chamomile

Our feetsies crossed in front of a lingering sunset in the Tasman Sea

We read for a little bit that night, but were tired enough that it didn't last long before we were both out.

The next morning we were up somewhat early (as happens when camping) and cooked a divine breakfast of oatmeal and brown sugar. We packed up and started the climb down from our spot to the place where the trail had split off the day before.

We were okay for water, but we were not sure how okay we would be if we camped another night. We could boil water to make it drinkable, but we didn't know if we actually could find fresh water (you know, the kind without salt in it). The stream we had hit the day before seemed like fresh water, but we could not tell and we weren't sure if we would hit the stream again if we continued south. We were wavering between whether to continue hiking or go back the way we came. The way we had come the day before was already a big distance, but without a map, we didn't know if it would be better to continue onward and then hike east towards the road, where we could hitchhike back to the car.

We were leaning towards going back the way we had come, since at least we knew how far that was, but once we got back to where the trail split and we had to decide between our two options, we had a wave of adventurousness hit us. We headed south.

Someone's tired

After maybe a half hour of hiking, we came across a couple from Auckland who were day hiking and only had a camera and water. We stopped and chatted, took their photo, and got some much-needed information. We were within 20 minutes of the beach we had been hoping to hit, which bolstered our will. Once we hit that, we could either head towards the Twilight DoC campground or head across the sand dunes toward the road. The couple said from their car across the dunes to where we met them had taken them only a couple of hours and they were doing a loop.

We thanked them for the information and said goodbye. When we got to just above the beach, there was a sign pointing out across the dunes, one towards the beach, and a third towards the Twilight campground. The sign was busted so it was hard to read, but the distance to the campground seemed to be a lot. We were still low on water and the idea of hiking several hours to a campground that we didn't know if they would have water or not seemed a little crazy. The campground description in our map said it only had water if it had rained recently. We still didn't know how far it was to the road from the campground.

So we decided to take the adventure over the dunes, which turned out to be long, hard, and pretty fun. We felt the desperation of the sand, which feels like all of the movies where everything seems so much closer than it really is. The signs were few and far between and much of the hike was wandering. But it was still really neat.

It took forever to get out of the dunes and by the time that we did, we wondered if we were pansies, or if the couple had been superheroes. They were a lot older than us and they had cruised through the dunes in no time. We consoled ourselves with the fact that we had 20-30 pound packs on our backs and that must have been the big difference. I don't know if that's true, but it sure makes me feel better.

The trail kept going and going and going. We past through a sage-brush type area (without the sage-brush), then a short little forest, then a long bridge among reeds in a swampy area, then another short forest, over a fence, through a field of cows that was soooooooo long, and then finally we met the road. I was exhausted and my feet were angry with me, so I went barefoot the last half mile or so.

That's my tired face in the marshy swamp

Joe tried to hitchhike, but with no luck. We even stashed me and the bags out of sight so that they would only think they needed to pick up one person, but still nothing. So we started hiking again. We made it to a little car park area a little ways up the road and there was a man waiting there. We wondered if he were waiting for us, so Joe went to talk to him. He was waiting for some friends of his, who were on bikes riding north. They had started at the southernmost point and were within a few miles of the northernmost. Joe asked politely if the man had room in his car, which is unlike him to ask strangers for help, but the man was fine with us riding with him. Thank goodness too, because the last stretch we had to get to the car was a good five miles maybe, and there is no way we would have lasted. I was surprised I was still upright.

He was a lifesaver, and props to Joe for going out of his comfort zone to ask for help. We might have never made it otherwise. He was very protective about the whole thing.

We made it back to the car, which was still there and in one piece. We loaded up and took off for our first campground, where we would have a little swim in the ocean (cold!) a little lunch of macaroni and cheese and beans, and a shower in the outdoor shower. Joe and I are not afraid to be cheapskates when we can get away with it, and we definitely needed that shower.

We said goodbye to that beautiful campground and set off southward to hit the silica deposits (where we passed a Maori gathering of some sort and a few freedom campers) and then spend the night at another DoC campground. The campground was boring and a little full, but it had a nice, simple spot to pitch the tent and we enjoyed a beer and went to bed. I'm not even sure I finished my beer before we both fell sound asleep.

The next morning we headed back to Dargaville, stopping to get a delicious meat pie (Kiwis love their meat pies—I would equate them to the convenience store hot pockets or burritos in the States) on the way to ease our hunger. We felt so accomplished for having knocked out the north of the North Island, but we were very tired. On the way north the day we left for our little trip, we realized how fun it was to be having a little adventure together again. Our lives had been a lot of wake, eat, work, eat, work, shower, eat, read, bed for so long, and all in the presence of other people, and we had forgotten how much fun it was to adventure together.

When we got home, the “folks” were happy to see us and we were glad to be back. We did laundry, had a lovely home-cooked meal, swapped stories with the Italians (they had spent a night or two out at a nearby lake in their recently equipped van and had a blast), and relaxed back into home and tried to recuperate for work the next day. The trip was a great way to bring us together again and we were happy little lovebirds by the time we got home.

The next night (last week at the beginning of the week), Peter took the boys and I out spear fishing. I wasn't doing any of the spearing because I'm a pansy, but I was there to take pictures and it really was pretty awesome. You go out at night when the sea is relatively calm. Peter has two wands with lights on the end that you take out in front of you under the water. You carry a spear and walk parallel with the beach until you see a fish (flounder or other fish) and you spear it! Simple and animalistic as that! It was actually really cool. If I wasn't such a pansy, I totally would have done it. I was sooo tired from our big weekend, but so glad I went to take photos.

The boys wrestle a fish

Joe was very excited because for like 6 years, he has been skunked on fishing trips. And not only that, but anyone he goes fishing with has bad luck when they go with him. But he caught all the fish the first night and all the fish the second! He was so pumped! The pictures turned out pretty cool and I had fun walking with them. I was a little closer to the beach, but I was carrying my camera, Derek's camera, and his phone, and yet I kept almost going out a little too deep. The skirt I was wearing was soaked by the end. But the whole Milky Way galaxy was out that night and I walked along with the boys as they fished and laughed.

Proudly holding his flounder in the bag

Anytime you need a slap in the face with a flounder, you let us know

Anyway, when we come home at night after harvest, there is dirt in and on everything. Peter and Colleen usually don't use much water between the two of them, so they have had to re-adjust their water situation since we have been here. Their water is in a tank above the house, which means that even in a power outage, they have access to it thanks to gravity. We try to do quick showers, but with six of us taking daily showers instead of just their regular two, we go through it much faster, especially since it takes a few minutes for the water to run clear off of our dirty faces and hair and skin. The area has had drought recently, so with us around they have been running out of water, but to their credit, they have adjusted nicely and not made us feel bad for using as much as we do. We still conserve as much as we can, but when we run out, Peter takes his truck and a big tank to get it filled at the end of the road for $5, which lasts us a couple of weeks or so. It is very nice.

The shower they have upstairs (all houses have a room for the toilet and a separate room for the bath/shower/sink, and don't ever ask for the bathroom when what you really need is a toilet!) is really cool. When they re-did their house a few years ago, they put in a floor that is all one piece and it goes up a few inches on the walls and the walls are all plastic. The shower is the whole bathroom! It's actually what I have always wanted, because then you can just hose stuff down and it runs out the drain in the floor.

One of the oddest parts of living here were the rats. When we first met Peter and Colleen, they had been staying at their beach house for a few weeks (the “bach”), which left their house mostly unused, which essentially invited the rats to move in. Colleen was mortified and Peter put out lots and lots of poison. I'm not afraid of rats and I don't even really think they're that gross, though I don't think I've actually seen one alive in a living space before. But holy cow the sound. We are staying in the basement and Peter and Colleen live upstairs, so the rats took the middle, our ceiling and "the folks's" floor. They sounded like substantial creatures, maybe like the size of your foot. They must have been big!

By the second or third week, they had started to die out. I'm not really a fan of killing things and it makes me a little sad, but not really that sad. Plus, the bait is pretty cool. I have always wondered why I never heard of people getting rat infestations and then resulting bad smells when the rats had been poisoned and died inside the walls. The reason that I've never heard of that is because the bait prevents that. It is designed to kill the rat, but also to dehydrate him so he has to leave the house to find a water source, at which point he dies outside of the house. I thought that was freaking clever. I have always wondered about that. And apparently it worked. The sounds quit very quickly. We found one dead in the driveway, which was good, but also a little sad. He reminded me of Rae.

Our home life is punctuated with Peter's overly conversational manner and Colleen's sharp wit. I get the feeling Peter has been super lonely ever since he was made redundant at his work. He seems to need people that he can talk to. And I feel bad because when I'm feeling quiet, I'm not really good at hiding it. I hope I'm not too impolite.  He's one of the sweetest men alive, so I hope that my introversion and need for alone time never insults him.  He's just generally a very pleasant person to be around and is really quite good at being conversational.

Colleen is one of the sharpest people I have ever met. Joe and I didn't really notice how funny we found her at first, but once we realized how funny and dry she was, we started to live for her next snarky comment. We've thought about writing a book full of all the funny and beautiful things she says.  She is like me in that she is an introvert and lives in her head.  I catch her all the time just hanging out with herself with a pleasant smile on her face.  Unfortunately my introversion doesn't put a smile on my face, but more on that later.

I've loved having a home during the kumara harvest. Sometimes I get so attached to the idea of living like the wind, with no home, and with no idea where I'll lay my head next. But only because I love having a diverse array of experiences, and since this experience has been so rich, if constant, I'm thankful that I have had it.

And now I get to add the experience to the collection that is about to get bigger! Now it's on to other work! We don't even know where yet. Kumara harvest ended yesterday, and it was definitely about time. I was seething inside from a few things, so it was good to have it end so that I can chill the eff out. It's just like me to take things too seriously, I suppose.

Two days ago, we finished off a little early, which seemed silly because there were only like 20 rows left on the field, which would have taken very little time to just trim right up. But they wanted to time it so that we could have the end of harvest party yesterday at lunch time. We finished at 11:30 and headed to the packhouse where there was a “chilly bin” full of beer and soda, and Grant was grilling up some sausages and there were french fries and cole slow and mussels. Grant didn't have plates or utensils, but wanted us to eat in the Kiwi way, which is to say, pile everything on top of a slice of white bread and roll it up in it like a burrito. Very strange. I definitely did not do that because it just sounded like a good way to add calories to an already not-so-good-for-you method.

Work parties make me laugh. Usually people you work with are not the sort of people you would regularly hang out with (with a few exceptions), so it is funny to me that people get together and have fun.  Sometimes it works and is great, but sometimes it really is trying to mix oil and water.  The people who worked for Grant were, for the most part, not even remotely like me.  Different ages, races, interests, etc.  I'm not even sure that an end goal was something we had in common.  Scientech parties were nice because I liked those guys.  Sure, they were older than me for the most part, but we had an end goal in common and they were easy to relate to. The party was alright, just not something I would normally sink 4 hours into.

And yet into it 4 hours I did sink (how's that for playing with sentence arrangement?). I was our designated driver, so I had one beer early on and then called it good. Everyone sorta just sat around like, okay, can we leave now? I was surprised it lasted as long as it did. I at least had fun making innuendos with Martina and playing with Debbie and Grant's puppy Missy, who is super cute, but sorta not super interested in people.

I was actually pretty impressed with the way that the Maoris handled the alcohol. People around here sort of think of the Maori like some people think about Native Americans back at home—that they are more vulnerable to alcoholism than other populations. I don't know if there is any science to this and it has always surprised me when people talk like that. In my experience, there are plenty of people in all populations who are predisposed to it, but not really any one culture especially. It just seems to be the deadbeats who have the problems, and deadbeats are not culturally or genetically homogeneous.

Anyway, the Maoris all drank reasonably. One of the guys had a couple of shots and was out like a light, though I think this had more to do with the fact that he was very tired. Otherwise, no one was stumbling or throwing up. There was one of the Kiwis who supposedly vomited, but he wasn't even a Maori (he got fed up with the crap people were giving him about being drunk and took off on his motorcycle mid-conversation with Grant, which was pretty damn irresponsible of him, but he is a different case entirely, I think). But once we were packing it in, a sober guy got behind the wheel of a big van and everybody else climbed in. I thought it was quite responsible.

We've applied for a couple of jobs, but we're still in the process of deciding. I sort of get the impression that we're both enjoying the days off. I think we have worked ourselves a little too hard recently. I mean, it's been 6 days a week for 5 or 6 weeks now and the one and only break of 4 days that we had off, we did a stupid thing and hiked for miles and miles and miles. So we're enjoying the relaxation. We're sad to probably be parting with the Italians already. They are good and wholesome people, if a little silly. We have really, really enjoyed them.

One beautiful moment was on our last day at Peter and Colleen's when the boys were away at a drifting race, Colleen pulled me aside and asked if I would take Martina into town for a while.  She joked, saying, sorry, that probably sounds mean.  But she explained that since it was Martina's birthday in two days, she wanted to make a cake for her as a surprise.  I was so, so touched and took Martina with me to get some shopping done.  It was especially touching because Colleen had come up with the idea for the cake without prompting by anyone, she just wanted her new family member Martina to feel loved.

Later that day when Colleen's daughters and grandkids came over (which was also touching because Colleen wanted her family to meet her new family), Colleen lit the candles and we started to sing and Martina, not knowing a lot of English, but knowing enough to slowly realize that we were singing to her, got watery eyes as she blew out the candles.  It was such a warm moment to see the contented look on Colleen's loving face and the surprised and delighted look on Martina's.  It was a magical moment.

I think the most beautiful thing about the Italians was once when we were asking about how they got together and Derek looked at Martina with all the love in his eyes that I see Joe looking at me with, and he said, “I followed my love to New Zealand and I am with her because she has such great character.” And the sweetest part of it was the look that Martina gave back to him, which told me that her feelings of love are as deep for him as mine are for Joe. And I can remember hearing about a conversation Joe had with a friend that went similar to this conversation with Derek. It was so sweet because it's an encouraging thought to think that other people in the world get to feel a love like this.

Okay, sappy is over.  Enough with that crap.  Anyway, they are really good people and hopefully we will meet again, though the saddest part about traveling is that many times you DON'T get to see the characters in your story again. It's an odd phenomena. Traveling makes you vulnerable constantly because you're so rarely in a comfort zone. So when you find good people, you have some of the deepest connections possible and they become the characters in your story of who you are, but because they can come from such distant places, it's rare that you get to see them again. It can actually be heart-breaking, like a mild heart-ache that will reside in you forever.

And I suppose that is why I think traveling is not sustainable. When Joe was away in India and we talked as often as possible, I remember him saying one day, “It's like I'm watching other people live their lives.” Don't get me wrong—I hope to travel for a while longer and as long as I have a chance or have wanderlust. But my wanderlust is tempered by knowing that one day I won't always have the constant heartache of letting people go and the sadness of never entirely feeling home. I'll have a life that is built around good people and good things. All in due time.