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Published: February 18th 2008
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Otara River
I was sorely tempted to have a swim, until I dipped my foot in and realised quite how cold the water was. Christmas was the last thing we were expecting - our boreal brains had some difficulty reconciling the month with the weather. But Christmas it was, before we knew it. We were fortunate enough to have been isolated from the consumerist hype that has come to typify Christmas at home: no jingles in shops from September onwards, no television adverts exhorting us to buybuybuy and spendspendspend. Quite a bizarre experience. Beans and weeds don't stop growing for Christmas, even in New Zealand, and work continued as normal until the day before.
The day itself was spent in true Kiwi style, namely outdoors and barefoot. By that time four WWOOFers remained at Te Aranga, and with Jim, Julie, Nathaniel, foster son Blair, his wife and two children and neighbours Bernard and Daphne, the thirteen of us (no doubt Kiwis would scoff at our inane superstitions) feasted on some rather delicious New Zealand roast hogget - a sheep up to the age of one year, according to my dictionary - and a bewildering array of salads we had spent all morning in the kitchen beavering away at. Sitting outside in the garden in the warm sunshine, eating pavlova and quaffing local wine, it
Nathaniel and his Scalextric
Even in New Zealand, some things are always the same! was quite unlike any Christmas either of us had ever experienced before, while the warmth of our hosts' welcome made up for the distance from home.
During the week between Christmas and New Year, work began on the clearing of a third hothouse which had not been touched since Jim and Julie acquired the plot of land where they now grew most of their produce. Indeed, less than ten per cent of the total area of the plot was being used for vegetable growing at the time of our visit, and sheer lack of time and manpower had prevented Jim and Julie from doing anything about this. Now, with a miniature army of enthusiastic, hoe-wielding volunteers, this situation could begin to change...The methods we employed to do up the hothouse made us all honorary Kiwis. The entire, rather rickety, structure was covered in torn and tatty polythene sheeting completely overgrown with lichen. The whole lot had to be removed, and in the absence of a ladder I used a piece of wire - well it was string actually, but it still counts as number 8 - to tie a sharp kitchen knife to a broom handle and proceeded to
hack away at the sheeting from the ground. It was remarkably effective, and within a couple of hours the structure was open to the sky in preparation, presumably, for some new roofing material...sooner or later. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang got started on the weeding, a truly mammoth task. We were assisted in our task by Bernard, a local Opotiki resident and friend of Jim and Julie's.
An account of our time at Te Aranga could not possibly be complete without a mention of Bernard. Now in his fifties, Bernard had been a JCB driver in his youth, until one day he drove his digger into a ditch and injured himself so seriously that he was never able to hold down another job. He now lived around the corner from Jim and Julie, in a house shared with his wife Daphne. The house was furnished top to bottom with junk Bernard had retrieved from the local dump, his favourite stomping ground: one of his passion was to collect battered pieces of obscure and antiquated farm machinery which he lovingly restored to working order. We quickly found Bernard to be a most extraordinary person, outwardly a shambolic and batty
Christmas Morning
Daphne, Jim, Bernard and Julie enjoying a sit down before the festivities begin. cross between Trigger from Only Fools and Horses and Albert Steptoe, with a dash of Worzel Gummidge thrown in for good measure. Like many New Zealanders Bernard was a complete stranger to shoes and would happily wield fork, pickaxe and even rotavate barefoot, as we winced in anticipation of a messy accident that never came.
Within a couple of days' work the third hothouse had been cleared of its jungle of weeds, the soil - which had not been touched in many months - ploughed, and the light let back in. Raring as we were to get the house planted up, the end of our stay in Opotiki was almost upon us. A few weeks earlier we'd booked tickets to fly from nearby Rotorua to Christchurch on South Island, the starting point for our upcoming six-week tour of the rest of the country.
In the closing days of the year we were treated by Jim and Julie to a little camping expedition to the Otara River, a few tens of miles inland of Opotiki. New Zealand's Department of Conservation runs a small campsite there, by a lazy bend in the shallow river strewn with large, smooth boulders. With
Christmas Buffet
We're outdoors! And it's warm! nothing to hear but the sound of birds singing and the river, nothing to do but wade up the verdant valley, skim stones on the water or get lost in a book, I can think of no better place to have seen in the New Year. Jim and Julie were in already in possession of a lovely spacious tent, but our comfort for those two nights was further enhanced by the fact that we brought almost the entire contents of the house with us to the campsite in the back of the old van: mattresses, blankets, pillows, everything but the kitchen sink. "Camping" in style. Jessica and Stephen introduced us to that most American of campfire treats, the s'more - a toasted marshmallow sandwiched with a square of chocolate between two biscuits. Delicious. And quite probably the only possible way to make marshmallows edible, as far as I was concerned. Nathaniel was particularly enamoured in spite of the fact that most of the s'more invariably ended up smeared all over his face. Dinners were an even more complicated affair - we'd carted most of the kitchen with us as well, and neighbouring campers looked on in amusement as we brought
Christmas Day 2006
I can't believe it's already December... out chopping boards, kitchen knives, woks and saucepans out of the tent. Given the occasion, together with Jessica and Stephen we'd also purchased a healthy supply of beer and bubbly from the local New World - New Zealand's answer to Sainsbury's and, by the end of our time in the country, our favourite two words. In the absence of a fridge (which we would no doubt have brought with us if there had been a little more room in the back of the van) we placed the bottles, corralled with large stones, in the river to cool down in the fast-flowing water. How very Mother Earth of us.
We saw in the New Year lying around our nice big campfire, quaffing champagne, listening to the night-time calls of strange birds - including the wonderfully named morepork, a small owl native to New Zealand that really does cry "more pork!" - and waxing lyrical about what an amazing country New Zealand is. And we've only just scratched the surface!
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