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Published: December 17th 2007
Our family for a month
With Jim, Julie, Nathaniel, and fellow WWOOFers Jessica and Stephen in the garden.New Zealand. Our next destination lies some two thousand kilometres away across the Tasman Sea. Australia seems far enough from home already, but this three hour flight emphasises quite how isolated New Zealand is from the rest of the world. It really is a long, long way away.
We arrive in Auckland - New Zealand's biggest city by far, and home to a quarter of the entire country's population - in the mid afternoon, and once again first impressions are not entirely overwhelming. Many, if not most, of New Zealand's visitors come here for the country's extraordinary landscapes. Having watched Peter Jackson's masterpieces (not in a nerdy way, mind) goggle-eyed many a time, we are no different. At first sight, however, Auckland seems pretty unprepossessing, a mixture of nondescript buildings, bad traffic and a slightly dodgy copy of the CN Tower. We arrived in Auckland International Airport just in time for the evening rush-hour, and the bus trip into town was a bit depressing, although crawling along the M4 out of Heathrow doesn't exactly showcase the best of the United Kingdom...
We don't have much time in Auckland, as we are expected elsewhere tomorrow. For the last few weeks
Jim, Julie and Nathaniel
Our hosts in Opotiki. Nathaniel is as michievous as he looks in this photo! (the original email was sent from Miri in Sarawak, if you can remember that far back) we have been making arrangements to spend a month working on a farm through an organisation catchily known as WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). WWOOF allows organic producers in New Zealand (or elsewhere) to make contact with volunteers willing to spend five hours or so a day working in exchange for bed, board and, most importantly, the chance to experience a different way of life and hopefully meet some interesting new people. In exchange for a modest subscription fee, the nice people at WWOOF send you a directory of all the places in New Zealand in need of some help - it was thus that we contacted Te Aranga Organic Gardens, a small producer of organic fruit and vegetables located on the Bay of Plenty, the wide arc of land that constitutes much of the northern coast of New Zealand's North Island. It was important for us to find hosts who would be willing to have us over Christmas and New Year, which restricts the number of places you can work in, but in finding Te Aranga, as you will appreciate in this
Chooks in the garden
It was Nathaniel's job to go hunting every morning for freshly laid eggs - the chickens roosted pretty much anywhere they liked! and the next few entries, Alex and I really hit the jackpot.
After a tasty dinner at a Korean restaurant in Auckland - where I was able to indulge in some kimchi after seven months of privation - and a quick wander around the city centre to pick up some books, we spent the night in a small and friendly hostel run by a Japanese expatriate (a very East Asian start to our time in New Zealand!). The following morning we hoiked our packs onto our backs once again and made our way to the bus station, where we caught an Intercity service towards Gisborne, some 500km away on North Island's east coast. The bus journey was an amusing introduction not to New Zealand's scenery, but to its people. Or one person in particular, the bus driver. A cheery Maori man in his forties, he wore short short shorts with socks pulled up above the knees, and regaled us for the entire duration of the trip - some seven hours - with a running commentary about agriculture, climate, politics and privatisation, his childhood and everything else in between. We had the honour of hearing a lot of in triplicate
Our room in Opotiki
Four backpackers means lots and lots of stuff... or more, as he began his monologue anew after each stop. It reminded me of trips on the bullet train in Japan, with its infuriating and unending squeaky-voiced announcements regarding the contents of the snack trolley. We weren't going all the way to Gisborne though, but getting off in Opotiki - still about 350km from Auckland. The bus didn't follow the coast, passing instead through Hamilton (a large industrial city) and the distinctly more famous Rotorua, only joining the coast at Whakatane.
The bus trip was also our first - very partial - introduction to the Maori language. I say this because as the names of our scheduled stops rolled of the wagging tongue of our talkative driver, it became immediately obvious that New Zealanders, whether of European descent or Maori, take the pronunciation of their place-names
very seriously indeed. As we were to discover on several occasions during our weeks in New Zealand, woe betide he should say
Rotorua incorrectly. Our destination, Opotiki, was such a place - let me make it entirely clearly that
Opotiki is
a-POE-ter-KEE and most definitely not
o-po-TEE-kee, which is enough to get you kicked out of town. Practically. And should you have
Wellington Street, Opotiki
Jim and Julie's house is off the road to the right. A typical view in countless small New Zealand towns. the misfortune of calling Whakatane
Wa-ka-ta-ne instead of
Fa-ka-ta-ne...well, that doesn't even bear thinking about. Jokes aside, New Zealand's vibrant Maori culture is immediately in evidence on the drive from Auckland to Opotiki, with seemingly most place names deriving from Maori - Tauranga, Rotorua, Whakatane, Ohope, Opotiki. Amazingly, Maori is from the same family of languages as Indonesian, Hawai'ian and even Malagasy (spoken almost twelve thousand kilometres away on another completely isolated island - Madagascar). Mind-boggling.
After more than six hours we were growing rather tired of the soundtrack, so we were mighty relieved as we pulled up in Opotiki. A small town of four thousand or so inhabitants, Opotiki lies at the eastern end of the Bay of Plenty and is the last settlement of any size on the road towards the East Cape. The Bay of Plenty - visited in 1769 by Captain Cook who found lots of supplies there and named it accordingly - is a heavily agricultural region of New Zealand and has thus seen its fair share of hard times in recent years. Today it is dominated by dairy farming and fruit-growing, with kiwi fruit a principal export that has helped revive the local
Organic veggies aplenty
Beans and courgettes in the main hothouse. Jim and Julie would spend hours a day here, picking kilo upon kilo of beans to ship out. economy. It is an area with a particularly strong Maori heritage: indeed, well over half Opotiki's population is Maori. As we got off the bus we noticed a number of intricately carved, red-painted wooden columns, a little reminiscent of North American totem poles and the work of local craftsmen.
Our hosts in Opotiki are Jim and Julie, a couple in their forties or fifties, who live in a quiet street in town with their young son Nathaniel, a dog, some cats and plenty of chickens. Their house is a sprawling bungalow set in from the road and surrounded by a large garden. Jim and Julie set up Te Aranga a number of years ago and are in the process of gaining full organic certification for their produce - a complex and lengthy process. Jim had previously worked as a college lecturer in agricultural science, and the couple had settled in Opotiki and devoted all their time and resources to creating Te Aranga. Their customers are mainly restaurants, cafés and organic greengrocers, principally in Wellington, although they occasionally sell some of their produce at local farmers' markets. The bulk of Jim and Julie's production - and therefore the source of
Organic goodness
Putting up wires and training the cucumber plants up them was one of my jobs at Te Aranga. Amazingly one weedy little plant could seemingly support half a dozen fat cucumbers... most of their income - comes from fruit and vegetables: beans, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a few more we'd never heard of - tangelos, feijoas and tamarillos. All this is grown on two separate pieces of land: the first is the site of a now defunct flower-growing farm, which Jim purchased together with a number of large hothouses some years ago. The plot is located just across the road from the house and is about the size of two tennis courts. Much of it is badly overgrown and at the time of our arrival there is only one usable hothouse out of four or so, currently given over mainly to beans - the highest value crop Te Aranga produces - as well as smaller amounts of cherry tomatoes and cucumbers. One of our tasks here over the next four weeks, we learn, will be to clear some of the overgrown hothouses - which look like jungles - and begin to make them plantable. There is a small packing-house on the site with a large walk-in fridge to store picked vegetables before they are collected and transported around North Island.
The other site is a couple of kilometres away, south-west of
Work in progress
One of the previously overgrown hothouses we were charged with making cultivable. the town centre, and referred to by Jim as "Dip Road" after the road that runs along it. It's a much larger plot that Te Aranga leases from the town: it's broadly divided into three, with one part occupied by a grove of tangelo trees, the second serving as pasture for some livestock - namely a dozen sheep and three or four cows - and the last given over to potatoes.
One thing is immediately obvious - there is a hell of a lot of work to do here. Jim and Julie devote their every waking hour, and more, to keeping their fledgling business afloat. Often to the detriment of their health, it transpires: Jim suffered a serious heart attack some months before our visit, and is only back at work after heart-bypass surgery. They are not yet able to employ any workers other than themselves, and the WWOOF programme thus allows them to obtain the help they need in developing their business. They have been WWOOF hosts for quite a while, and have had volunteers from all over the world stay with them: we are certainly not the first!
Alex and I are lodged in our very
The private supply
Julie's own vegetable patch in the garden, whose tasty produce we feasted on every day for dinner. The household is virtually self-sufficient in vegetables, eggs and meat - no handing over every last penny to Tesco here... own spacious room at the back of the house, which has a double bed and two bunk-beds. On our third or fourth day in Opotiki, we are joined by two other volunteers, Jessica from Wisconsin - who is cycling around New Zealand on a custom-made bicycle with trailer! - and Lea from Germany. Although Alex and I had originally hoped we would have the room to ourselves, we quickly changed our tune as we settled in to the friendly atmosphere with our fellow pseudo-
kibbutzniks. A little while later two further WWOOFers turned up- Stephen, also from Wisconsin would you believe, and Jessica from Washington State. For a couple of weeks there were no less than six volunteers at Te Aranga, which in addition to Jim, Julie and Nathaniel, put a certain amount of pressure on the limited bathroom resources available! Somehow though, as these things always seem to do, it worked out quite admirably.
There is apparently much variation between WWOOFing hosts as to how much volunteers receive in return for their four or five hours' work a day: some offer a some floor, others a bed, some offer a knife and fork, some kitchen facilities, and others full
Moo cows on the Dip Road plot
Including the lucky calf who managed to escape castration while we were there... board. There is little way of knowing in advance what conditions are going to be like with a host. Te Aranga, it turns out, is as close as you can get to hotel service while WWOOFing. For our small contributions, Jim and Julie rewarded us not only with luxurious living quarters, but with free run of the house and garden, three meals a day (and what meals, what meals!), cakes and other goodies baked daily to nibble on all day long, weekend outings and even the odd camping trip. This is without even mentioning the pleasure of sitting down to dinner, as a surrogate family, every day and learning about organic farming, the trials and tribulations of starting your own business from scratch, and about New Zealand's history and society. This was perhaps the most rewarding aspect of our stay - after months on the road, in a different bed of campsite every night, we basked in the delight of settling down for a while. As I said, we hit the jackpot!
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