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Published: January 10th 2004
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Pukenui
View from a bench somewhere in Pukenui, probably the only bench in town, it WAS that small!:o) Hey peepz, how's the lovely English winter treating you all? Had any snow? ... if you have then just think of us in our shorts 'n' tshirts basking in 28+ sun walking across sun bleached white sand, kayaking(for free!) across cyan blue sea's, aaaaah, what a life!:o)
Well, Christmas went by without much notice from most of us at the backpackers, me and dina had a few drinks and chatted most of the night, well I had a few too many and spent most of New Years day spewing into the twalette, i didn't get out of bed until 7pm that evening!:o)
We decided to go up to pretty much the top of NZ, in the Northland, a place called Pukenui, to do some Mandarin thinning.
Off we went on Jan 4th and spent the best part of 12 hours travelling up north through gorges covered with copious amounts of greenery and past lovely white sandy beaches, heaven we thought, if Pukenui was going to be like this then we're in for a treat!!
Well, sods law, when we got to Pukenui we realised we were in the middle of nowhere, quite literally! Only 1 shop for
Our tent...
Me and 2 girlz I can't remember the names of who we sold the tent to, see what the beer is doing to me already!!;o) the town, we even had the last(most northerly!) gas station in New Zealand in the same town(something alot of tourist's seem to photograph, silly buggers!;o) ... and no beaches at all! ... yep all that way, over 700km's, 12 hours past all those lovely beaches and we arrive somewhere where there isn't any! ... NOOOOOOO
There is a wharf, where everyone who lives in the town went to fish, and this is the only form of entertainment for over 1 hours drive or god knows how long walking!!
Anyway, the holiday camp is kool enough, we are staying in our tent, which we thought would be nice enough, however to our severe annoyance we are the stopping ground for hundreds of bloody mossy's! They seem to like something our tent is made from and come in during the evening, stay for the night and then are gone by mid morning, it's like an obstacle course trying to get out of the tent without getting bitten!
We are 2 amongst 14 other backpackers who have come up here for the work/holiday, and everyone else was lied to by the company who has hired us all about the amount
Look at me ma!
I'm somewhere off the coast of Pukenui ... whats that dark shadow in the water!?! of money we can earn whilst thinning the mandarins!!
We were all told that we could earn about $70NZ+ per day after tax, which is good money for this kind of work, however most people are only just managing to earn $45 per day. For the first week we set ourselves a target of $60 for 8 hours thinning and if we got close to it we were going to be really happy, well the first few days went well, we were earning $70+ per day, but after the 4th day it all went pear shaped, we were given bigger tress than most of the full time workers and we were on different pay rates too, but to cut a long story short, we are still only making about $40-50 per day and we're having to work our nuts off! So because of this we've decided to leave in about 2 weeks time instead of staying the full 2 months and head off somewhere else.
The job itself needs to come with a danger warning as alot of the trees are full of wasps nest's and we have both been stung a number of times. Some people are stoopid enough to open up the branches and shove there faces straight into the trees to see if there is any fruit to take of in the middle of the trees, well, you can probably guess what the wasps think of that! Needless to say some people's faces now look like a seasoned drunks .. red blotches and boils everywhere hee hee!! ... by the way, these wasps are called paper wasps and are bigger than UK one's, sometimes they can be dumber too by allowing you to whack them off the tree and they just fly off, but some seem to make it there mission to sting you no matter how far or fast you run away, trust me on this I’ve tried!:o)
Most day's we're finished by 5pm and home by 6. We're supposed to be working Saturdays but the local Maoris are lazy buggers and ask for the day off, so because they out number us backpackers by about 6 to 1 we don't get much say in it! … shame really, more time to drink beer, not much else to do round here … have you noticed how much beer I am drinking in NZ, so much for continuing my fitness a mum?!;o)
So we have our weekends free at the moment, which is kinda kool as we have walked 10km to the local beach, which turned out to be packed with pretty much the whole town ... all 50 of them!;o) ... and we have managed to borrow the camp site owners kayaks for free(as she is feeling sorry for us not being able to earn more money!) and gone kayaking around the coast ... we we're a bit anxious at first as we had never done it, but once we got going it was really kool, just gliding along the clear blue water, sun streaming down on us, beautiful, really beautiful. Dina did get a bit strung up at first as she was worried we might cap size or get attacked but some big fish, but I picked her up and threw her into the water and kept her head under until she agreed to go! ... hee hee ... NOT, she was a tad scared but went for it and was well on her way after a while!
The local shop is proving to be a challenge as due to it being the only shop for kilometres most things are pretty close to double to price of the rest of NZ, something to do with the delivery agents not being able to get out here easily enough, yeah great excuse!;o)
Anyway, thats all for now, we've got a day off today as the next orchard is being sprayed so we can't work on it till tomorrow, so we're off to the beach, 90 mile beach that is, it's actually about 86km or something like that but the name sounds kool! Going to hitch to it, should be fun!
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