New Year, camping and beyond!
Trip Start
Oct 29, 2007
1
9
32
Trip End
??? ??, 2009
Levin, New Zealand
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
She owned a smallholding in Levin with loads of chickens, rabbits, ducks and a few sheep. She is planning on building an Earthship house in the near future but is waiting for planning permission at the moment. We stayed in her caravan, which was a bit too close to the chickens as we got rudely woken every morning at about 5am! Did some thistle grubbing, cut down some massive weeds that had basically become trees, fed the chooks, mended and painted a little table and chairs for her grandchildren, i planted lots of corn and peas in the vege patch (which have grown pretty big in only a couple of weeks) and various other jobs. Also spent the first few days (when it was chucking it down with rain)opening hundreds of packets of out of date crisps which she soaks and feeds to her chooks. We went along on one of her veg runs, where she picks up all the thrown out veg from local grocers to feed to her animals after first sorting out the good stuff for chutneys, sauces, crumble etc. She a little eccentric but we really loved spending time there.
We said goodbye to Fay after a week and went off to the Organic River Festival where we quickly established ourselves as the resident artists and took over making big bamboo structures to decorate the festival site. Was great fun and so nice to meet lots of other wwoofers from around the country, there were loads of different nationalities represented there which was particularly nice. We made lots of friends and have already bumped into a couple of them agfter the festival. The festival itself was quite small and didnt seem that focussed on the 'organic' side of things but there were a couple of interesting speakers and some great bands in particular the ones on the little cabaret stage. People kept comparing it to Glastonbury which i found quite funny, but with a bit more development i think it could turn out to be a really nice little festival.
The only downside to our time there was that we got put on toilet duty!!! I had horrible visions of past festival toilets and was quite scared, but actually the toilets were fine, we only had to sweep the floors, replace toilet paper and spray a bit of disinfectant most of the time, and we got so many thank yous from the festival goers for the clean toilets it made it all worthwhile. We also got the Sunday off which was great cos this was the hottest day and we went back to Fay's to have a shower! It has been so so so hot here recently, about 30 degrees every day for the last 2 weeks! After the festival we stayed one more night with a group of new festival friends (strangely all the English people were left after everyone else had gone!) and had a bonfire down by the river.
We had a few days to kill before starting house sitting for a guy called Robert, who is Fay's son in law, so went down south a bit more to 'Battle Hill Reserve' for some more camping. this was probably my favourite campsite yet, we spent some time chilling out and went for a walk up one of the surrounding hills, we also went to see some of the Lord of the Rings sites nearby including Helms Deep and Rivendell.
So now we're back near Otaki house sitting on a small farm. We have to look after 2 dogs, chickens, goats, sheep, pigs and cows. It's going well so far, no escaped animals, but it has only been 2 days! Its so nice staying in a house for a while, being able to sit on the sofa and have a shower whenever i want. I also have unlimited internet for a while so expect some more updates and emails.
