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Matarangi
sunset view from the road to Coromandel This is a stationary travel blog to let everyone on both sides of the Tasman know what we’ve been up to since we came back from Oz at the end of last year, but mostly it’s to show off wedding photos from Torin’s marriage to Andrea here in Matarangi.
The blog was a monthly addiction for two and half years while we were in Oz. Now settled back in the Shaky Isles I’m amazed that half a year has gone so quickly while busy doing amazingly little.
After visiting family & friends and checking they’d been behaving themselves while we were away, we found it disconcertingly easy to find work in the tiny (around 250 permanent residents) beach settlement of Matarangi. The golf club desperately needed cleaners over the Christmas holidays.
Only when we turned up to our first day (which we thought was only a hastily arranged interview...”you are breathing?? – you’re hired!”) did we realise the extent of their desperation - we were the sum total of cleaning staff for 14 villas, a restaurant and golf club complex. Suffice it to say we flogged our guts out cleaning loos, doing laundry and making beds for the
Harbour view
across the harbour to the Coromandel hills first part of the glorious summer, a slightly different reality to what I had imagined would be our beach retirement lifestyle.
We extricated ourselves from what looked worryingly like continuing careers in the laundry and cleaning industry by getting jobs with the Statistics Department Census. This was a dream job for us as it involved walking round lovely beach homes and talking to people – two of our favourite occupations anyway. We were nearly finished our areas when the February Christchurch earthquake and its countrywide consequences halted the process.
In the brilliant beachy sunshine of the height of a Coromandel summer, the devastation in that genteel South Island city was difficult to comprehend. But by then we were focussing on our Big Event – Torin and Andrea’s wedding on March 12.
The venue was the said golf course which had provided us with delightful employment, (for those who don’t know Matarangi, it consists of around a thousand holiday homes, general store, grog shop, hardware, the statutory two land agents and one of the most beautiful golf courses you will find in NZ). But having those jobs made wedding preparations scarier rather than easier.
The company which
Kiwi Christmas
with Moya & Bill at New Chum - another stunning Coromandel beach owns the golf course is in receivership and for those on the inside it was apparent things were much worse than the general punters were being told. No official cleaners (they didn’t replace us when we left) a chef who sometimes didn’t turn up, gas for the kitchen and loo paper running out as the receivers controlled the ordering and a manager who seemed on the brink of mental collapse with stress...we of course didn’t let Torin & Andrea, safely out of range in Sydney, know this...but had contingency plans in place.
There are also special things to worry about with a beach wedding – the weather, what shoes to wear...but in the last week of wedding preparations it all seemed to be coming together. The receivers hadn’t pulled the plug on the club (T&A’s wedding was the last function in the restaurant before it closed!) kitchen and wait staff seemed to be holding it together, the manager’s supply of valium hadn’t run out and the weather forecast was brilliant. The bride and groom had made it safely to NZ with rings, dress etc, I had denuded Matarangi beach of every pink shell for table decorations and we had
Happy hour
the tradition lives on! Mary & Dave with a couple of pre-christmas drinks 200 fluffy toi toi stacked up in the utility to decorate the venue.
HOWEVER. One contingency we hadn’t planned for was restless Pacific tectonic plates. While enjoying the pre-wedding beach side BBQ we started to get news via people’s iphones that there had been an earthquake in Japan and a tsunami was on the way!!
Beach wedding + tsunami = panic for mother of the groom. But as you can see from the photos it all turned out absolutely perfectly and was the most beautiful wedding you could wish for. Even though the groom and best man went swimming in the tsunami on the morning of the wedding – great surf they said!
Torin & Andrea are now happily back in Sydney with a new addition to the family (only a kitten!) so our ties to Oz are still strong.
The NZ summer continued in spectacular fashion and we managed to find ourselves another employment opportunity with maximum potential for physical trauma combined with minimum financial reward – packing kiwifruit.
At $13 an hour with 40 minutes travel each way it was only marginally worth doing, but the experience was valuable. I have always said
Castle Rock
the 'wedding view' looking down the second fairway of Matarangi golf course I would love a boring job – one where you just turn up at a specified time and do something repetitive so your mind can wander until it’s time to go home.
I guessed grading kiwifruit (watching a relentless conveyor belt of furry fruit tumble past and snatching out those with blemishes or defects) would be boring, but I wasn’t prepared for hour after hour of mind-numbing tedium with only the grinding and crashing of ancient machinery for company. It ranks up there with working in the Darwin laundry – although with that there was some variety such as working on the terrifying bundle strapping machine as opposed to the terrifying towel folding machine.
This only involved staring at thousands of kiwifruit tumbling past your vision in hallucinogenic repetition, waiting for the chance to pluck some poor unsuspecting, otherwise perfectly edible fruit out of the line for the merest mark on its furry skin and hurl it triumphantly down the shute to an unknown fate (ours was not to question why). We weren’t even allowed to rescue any borderline specimens and take them home to grace a fruit salad – the PSA virus that had decimated orchards in
Matarangi sunset
on the last day of daylight saving the Bay of Plenty meant there was a policy of no fruit leaving the pack house unless in traceable official boxes.
Other than being shouted at by supervisors who obviously had an intimate relationship with fruit but no idea how to handle human beings, the worst part was the standing in one place for up to 9 hours with one half hour and two ten minute breaks before the dreaded call of “GRADERS...!” had us racing to put back on our glamorous hair nets and gloves and hope for the brief excitement of finding a mutant kiwifruit grown into the shape of male genitalia.
We stuck at that for a month till the end of the season. Now our feet and backs have recovered, winter has finally come to Matarangi and we’re hunkering down to see how we survive in an 80sqm beach bach on a sandspit on the north Coromandel. Apparently it’s what sorts out those who think they’d like to live here, from those who actually do.
The thing is – we have no option. Real Estate is not exactly a growth industry at the moment and the chance of us selling this place and
Kiwifruit grading
I don't know which looks scarier, me or the kiwifruit... moving to a ‘real’ house gets dimmer with the winter sun. But are we complaining? Too busy to complain – I’m off for a walk down the beach after lunch...
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Andrea
non-member comment
You lucky buggars.......
....except I can read how exceedingly hard you have worked to gain this seemingly idylic lifestyle, both here and in Oz. I must say your photographs have an amazing quality - perhaps another ad-hoc career option? cheers Andrea