The "Family"
Trip Start
Apr 15, 2009
1
7
14
Trip End
Jul 14, 2009
National Park Village, North Island, New Zealand
Friday, May 22, 2009
We were working at the Crossing Backpackers, a stop off for all the snow bunnies who will swarm to Mount Ruahepu (next to Tongariro) for the winter season in a couple weeks. Bryan and Miriam are the owners of the lodge and were quite hilarious. We also got to meet Seabass, the resident German helpxer.(his name is really Sebastien, but he claims he hates to hear ppl massacre his name, which they inevitably do, so he shortened it- I didn't find out that Seabass wasn't actually his name until the day before we left!) Seabass was a lumberjack who also cooked most of the food at the lodge. We mostly did housekeeping type work as the lodge was having several school groups in. Seabass was given fair warning that he wasn't allowed to wear his "dressing gown" in public while the kids were around at least. A day or so later, two Czech girls and a Polish couple came around to help out. Our little family had increased to nine helpxers once the English Josie came back down the mountain. To write everyone's names here would be pointless as we were generally just addressed by our country name. (that and we couldn't pronounce the Czech and Polish names for the life of us!) We made great friends with all the countries and kept each other warm at night when we were banished to the heatless "staff" quarters. It was terribly cold and we could see the alpine peaks from our windows.
After a week of staying here, running from the random sheep and goat, and peering through Miriam's windows to make sure she was still alive, we decided to move on. TheTongariro was not going to be a possibility because of the early snow and no shuttles would take us up there for the eight hour tramp. I was so disappointed because that was one of the things I was looking forward to most here in New Zealand.
