South Canterbury

Hey folks,

we've been staying for a couple weeks on Aroha Organic Farm, outside the small town of St. Andrews on the central eastern coast of the South Island. We are most graciously hosted by Nathan, the manager, and his two adorable jack russell's Noelly and Zoe. we work on the farm doing the day and enjoy delicious meals and Nathan's homebrews in the evenings. It's a good sized farm, small and manageable but plenty productive, and there's heaps for us to do, from weeding to transplanting to irrigation and our favorite - picking strawberries.



we had a couple days off and went down the coast to oamaru and moeraki and spent a night in the van out on this remote stretch of land where a river meets the sea. No buildings visible in any direction, just sheep and pasture and the beautiful blue ocean.

this was our breakfast nook:



we also had the pleasure of seeing the rare yellow-eyed penguins as they came in from the sea to bring food back to their chicks. they come flopping up to shore, and the walk across the beach and climb up these steep steep slopes to where their little nests are hidden. adorable critters.





We also went to the beach at Moeraki that is home to the famous Moeraki boulders, a collection of large, almost perfectly spherical concretions of mudstone and limestone that are eroding out of the cliff base. Strewn about the beach, they look as if washed up on shore. They are formed as a concretion of limestone buried in ocean floor mud, and were uplifted onto the land by tectonic processes in New Zealand's recent past. (still trying to get a less-vague explanation than that - hang in there my fellow geo-enthusiasts) Any-hoo, they were buried and heated and they fractured and the limestone went into solution and then precipitated into the cracks and they look just wild:



we dined on lovely 'chips' as they call them here and stopped in at Nathan's property down in the town of Hampden, where we were fortunate enough to discover a whole bucket of chicks that had been hatched not two days before. Nathan's parents had taken them from their mum who was stomping them about and stashed them safely in a five-gallon pail. We became their adopted parents for the ride back to Aroha.



we're off to tramp in the lake ohau national forest now, and will return to do some more wwoofing in the town of pleasant point. more strawberries, mmmmmm.

we'll post more photos and whatnot soon.

hope you all are well :)

cheers,
conor

Banks Peninsula

Here are some photos from our little trip out to Banks Peninsula. We camped in the van most of the time, and explored all of these little bays. The peninsula has really interesting geology, it was originally a couple of volcanic islands off the east coast of NZ, but steady erosion of the southern alps extended the coast of the land out into the ocean until ultimately the two landmasses were connected.



So you've got young volcanic rocks nestled right up against a broad alluvial plain.



All of the bays are a gorgeous aquamarine blue, surrounded by endless hills of sheep and cows. We stayed on the beach in a couple of places and took this great walk out pigeon bay, through pastures of sheep and cows, along the edge of the bay the whole way. Lovely...



Our next direction is south along the east coast down to Timaru to work on some farms. We'll try and post up now and then, but who knows how many farms will have internet. Well, enjoy the pictures for now...

made it.... the hard way

hey folks,

sorry for the long delay in a blog posting. we had quite an ordeal getting over here, missing many of our flights, getting roughed up (emotionally) by the airlines, who then lost our luggage and charged us fees for their mistakes. At the end of it all, four separate flights, countless airport meals, a missed-yet-paid-for hostel reservation and two groggy travellers made it safely to Christchurch, delivered (without luggage) into the hands of a charming cabdriver from kenya who was most gracious in finding us a suitable lodging with vacancies.

so we've been bouncing about in Christchurch (pronounced "Croistchirrch") seeing the museum, botanical gardens and parks, drinking tea, and de-jetlagging. we found ourselves a most suitable form of conveyance - a 1986 Mazda Bongo camper-van - who will soon be featured in our photo album once we've given her a good scrub down and tricked her out with the big 21" rims, spinners, and some fat, wide racing tires. :)

we're headed out of christchurch tomorrow (monday 13th - this date line thing will be mischevious i think) to explore the Bank's Peninsula to our southeast. The weather is lovely, the people are dears, and we're excited to get out of the city and feel the wind in our hair.

we'll post up again in a week or so probably, hopefully with some pics of our meanderings...

-conor