Hello Northland! (and my new job!)

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Lie Wei and I travelled 165km north of Auckland to accept a job at Apata, a packhouse that packs kiwis and avocados for export. Kiwi season had ended so we are now avocado packers.

Whangarei (pronounced Fangarei) is a pretty small town and when we first arrived we stayed at this really homey backpackers place called Bunkdown Lodge with hosts, Noell and Peter and their pets, Sage the dog and Tally the cat. The backpackers place is really cool and I love it! It is basically a very large house converted into a backpackers place so it's got a very homey feel. Our hosts are great and we made a lot of new friends here.

After 1.5 weeks we have almost ran/walked/explored the entire Whangarei town area. It is so small that we can't even map out a proper 10km route! We would need to run to another part of town or something. Next weekend they have a marathon here and they do have to run out to the airport area.
http://www.runwalkseries.co.nz/default.asp?PageID=18750

The avocado packhouse job gets really busy but it is monotonous and dull and sometimes the hours do seem to go on forever. There are many positions in the packhouse and I have worked all of them. The people are rotated and I think the idea of rotation is so that you do not get too bored doing just the same thing all the time. I have worked in grading avocadoes (only the best get exported and the local market get the leftovers!), tray/box prepping as well as avocado packing. Packing is the busiest but it only involves your hands. Grading is as busy as packing but it requires some thought as you need to decide if the avocadoes are good enough to be exported or need to be discarded.

One thing about NZ is that it isn't very convenient to get around if you do not own a car, so since we currently do not own a car, we walk everywhere! We walk a total of 4.4km to/fro walk. We walk a total of 5km to the grocery store. Everything closes pretty early here so there isn't very much to do at night, so people sleep really early here, at 10.30pm! On some days, when we get tired of walking, we strap on a backpack and run to/fro the grocery store. I am convince our hosts think we are quite crazy.

In Whangarei, we met up with Lie Wei's ex-coworker, Kin Cheng and we work and travel together with her. We have visited almost all trails in Whangarei. We hiked them almost all in just 2 days. I don't know how much longer we will be here but we just moved into a homestay which comes with free broadband and much cheaper rent. The backpackers was charging us NZ$1 for 15minutes!

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Photos

A.H. Reed Memorial Park
It has huge Kauri trees, second largest to the Sequioa.

Running back from groceries
The backpack I had on was carrying 3-4kgs worth of groceries.

Comments

[beehong]

COOL!!! Look like a secret agent! haha... :)

[starbuck1979]

No car..
No choice when you have no car and surprisingly even though it is winter, the sun is really bright and strong (but not hot).