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Published: October 29th 2007
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Boche Ball action
We sat and ate our PB&J sandwiches as we watched these people play. It is an incredibly slow paced game. Hello all! It has been a few days because the last hostel we stayed at had dial up internet and charged $2 for 15min, so to save myself a day's worth of food I decided not to update 😊
We are continuing to have a spectacular time here and really enjoyed the last town we were in. After we left Rotorua we drove further east along the coast and arrived in Whakatane. Which is pronounced fa-ka-ta-ne. I know. I would never have guessed either. We got in pretty early, so we drove a little farther east to relax on a beach and read a while.
Finally we got authentic New Zealand food! Fish and Chips! I'm getting hungry just thinking about them. As you have read we have been eating PB&J, A LOT, and have not really had any authentic food. So this was our shinning moment, and it was delicious!
After coating our stomach's in grease we headed back to the hostel and went up to the local astronomical observatory with a couple people we met at the hostel. A German and an Irish lass. The observatory we went to was not something you would have
Cool trees
I really like these trees. I think they are silver ferns. pictured. It consisted of 2 rooms, roughly the size of a living room, and a telescope mounted to the concrete floor in the center. We were not sure how we were supposed to see anything through the telescope, considering there was a roof, but soon we were shown that by using a crank the whole roof moved off, by way of tracks. Awesome!
The telescope was 14'' for any of you astronomy buffs out there, and they were trying to raise money to get a 34'', which is in the neighborhood of $40,000. Each of us gave the elderly man running the place $10 and for the next 2 1/2 hours he talked to us and showed us Jupiter, a globular clusters, the Tarantula nebulla, the moon of course, and a satellite that reflected light back to earth for about 2 seconds. I had never seen satellites do that. Apparently there is a website that tells you when a satellite will be passing over you and if it will be reflecting sunlight or not, and how bright. I believe it is something like www.heavens-above.com or org or net, some combination of 3 letters. It was a very cool night
and very inspiring to listen to this 70+ year old man get so excited and passionate about space. There are many more things he talked about, but I would be writing for a while so i'll leave that till I get home.
The next day we headed up the coast another hour, arriving in Opotiki for the day. It is a very small town that was mainly a hub for us to stop in and find out what there was to do around the town. We were told of a cool 3 hour hike up a gorge so we checked it out, and yes it was cool. We had to wade through a river twice along the trek and almost didn't even find the trail because it was so poorly marked, but obviously we made it.
On our way back to our hostel we stopped off at a rare New Zealand plant reserve which featured some 1500 species of plant. I don't think I saw that many, but that is what it claimed. One of the coolest things though was a 2000 year old tree that was used by the Maori, where they would keep great warrior's bones
when they died in battle for a period of time before burying them some place else. I'll add a picture so you can see, but I wasn't able to get a great shot because the tree was ridiculously big. Oh yeah and before getting back to the hostel we also stopped at a secluded cove and read some. Pretty sweet day in all.
After some good times in Whakatane, and getting to know some of our fellow hostel stayers, we headed out on a 5 hour drive along the East Cape region of New Zealand. It was a beautiful drive almost the whole way. For a good 2 1/2 hours we took in gorgeous views of the ocean on a clear blue day. We stopped at a lighthouse along the way. Climbing 749 steps to get to it, to be exact and then continued south to Tokomaru Bay where our WWOOF hosts waited for our arrival.
WWOOF = World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
The live in a two story house right along the bay. Absolutely beautiful views from the house. They have been incredibly hospitable to us so far. We ate a delicious dinner of meat
A bay
The bay we walked to where we read for a while. stew with carrot, mashed potatoes, and some wine from the south island to wash it down. And since it was almost literally freezing outside they started a fire in the lounge as we got to know each other. The fire was in a woodstove just to clarify. Gordon is a crayfisherman for a few months out of the year and his wife Julia is a basket weaver.
Today we got up at 7:30! It wasn't actually that bad because we were exhausted from the drive the day before. But we got up, had breakfast with coffee, (they have the same coffee pot you have dad), and headed out for a days work of manual labor. For almost 3 hours straight we cleared weeds from a fence and from the yard. This may sound relatively easy, but you have never seen weeds like these. On the surface they look like a normal weed just sitting there waiting to be pulled, but once you start pulling you find that the weed is actually connected to a thick root, roughly an 1 1/2'' in diameter, which likes to weave a network of roots underground. So to get these things up we used
spades and pitch forks continuously for a good hour.
After picking many of these weeds we then found ourselves clearing dense, vine like, brush, that was a good 4-5 feet thick, from a fence that had not seen the light of day in ages. I included a picture of the area that we cleared, which took us a good 2 hours to clear.
We took a break, had some lunch, and then cleared some lilacs, (that doesn't look right), from another area of their property. All in all it was a good day, but I am exhausted from the work. We worked enough today though, so that we have tomorrow off.
Alrighty. Now I am caught back up with the blog. I'll try to continue to keep up with it as much as possible. Thanks for the comments everyone. I wish I could have been at Brendan's roast. I bet he got it good 😊
Daniel
P.S. Unfortunately it is taking forever to even load 1 photo on this 56k connection, but I will add photos to this post as soon as I can.
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Mom
non-member comment
Your words are pictures
Dearest Danny, Your words paint the pictures. I've already seen where you are and what you are doing. Don't take too much time or money worrying about downloading photos. My concern: lilacs are weeds in NZ? They happen to be one of my favorite flowers. When you said "that doesn't look right" perhaps you meant the spelling didn't look correct, so perhaps the weed is actually not a "lilac." Find out, would ya! I smiled while reading how hard you both worked. That is so healthy for you. Your journey sounds fulfilling. I can't wait to hear from you again. Love, Mom