WWOOFing Part Deux

So yesterday I eased back into touring by biking the almost 30 km from the ferry down to Blenheim. Today I got back into things for real by biking 130 km from Blenheim down to Kaikoura. The ride was pretty flat after a hilly first 20 km, but it more than made up for that by slamming me with a headwind the whole way (headwinds are like biking uphill, but without the payoff of the downhill afterwards) and then raining for the last 40 km, while 50 degrees the whole damn way. So far, the North Island wins in the contest for my affections. Still, the magic formula holds: take some mountains, run them down into the sea, put a road along the coast, and I will love it. The formula's batting 1.000, people.

So, WWOOFing stay number two: I moseyed (if one can mosey on a loaded bike...) south from Paraparaumu to Porirua to a goat cheese farm on a road named Moonshine. I was staying with a middle-aged couple, Mike and Christine, who had two kids off at college. I say it was a farm because it is, but the farm is a hobby/source of food, not income. Christine works and Mike does consulting work occasionally, and farms the rest of the time. They have six goats which he milks and makes cheese from, seven pigs that eat the whey, trim the grass in the orchard (various fruit trees, not just/primarily apples) and occasionally get spitroasted and whole mess of sheep and a few cows up on the ridge above the farm in a big pasture. My responsibilities were largely carpentry, as Mike accurately described himself as a "bush carpenter". First I made the pigs a luxurious pigpen (I mean, it was insulated. Those pigs, they don't know how good they have it. After that, I installed some tongue and groove paneling in their son's bedroom where his bed's corner had punched through the plaster, and did a few other sundry things.

In terms of personality fits, this was much better than the yoga centre. They saw their role as sort of in between bosses and host family, which was perfect. The food was wonderful, I did some good baking with Christine, got a tour of the bush on the farm from Mike, and spent all of last Monday and half of Tuesday out on the yacht they share with two other families fishing with Mike and my brother Alex, who Mike saw fit to invite with us. We caught a whole mess of snapper and some Kahawai, as well as a small shark (we released it when Mike caught it, but it found my hook quite literally two minutes later, so Mike killed it as a danger to our bait, and fed it to the pigs) and a gurnerd. We had a hoot, and I ate a lot of fish the next couple days.

Mike is also a man enamored of eating everything. He introduced me to eating fish heads (or at least the edible parts thereof), which is delicious, and we had a nice dinner of pig hearts, liver and testes one night when Christine wasn't home. I got to help milk goats, which was easier than I feared, and also with the cheesemaking, which turns out to be one of those things that isn't as hard as you think, but which requires a good bit of precision to turn out correct. It is now my position that my mother should get a small herd of goats for cheese and wool. (Goat milk is good for arthritis, dad!)

They had a good deal of macrocarpa lumber that had been milled from a tree on the property, so I made Mike a wooden feta mold to replace his plastic one that had been made from a jug. If you know about such things, I decided to hand-cut dovetails for the joints, which is a nice idea, but I did it on a plank that I had planed to thickness using a power planer and belt sander and cut the dovetails using a coping saw and a large push saw, which are not remotely the correct tools for the job. It turned out fine structurally, but I didn't take a picture of it because I was so embarassed at how ugly the dovetails were.

In any event, I had a lovely time at the farm. I am now over being freaked out by the pupils goats have (Have you ever seen them? THEY'RE RECTANGULAR!) and think that pigs make maybe the funniest noises of any animal. Being wired the way I am, I also now want to make cheese. I don't think I'll get any dairy animals anytime soon, but I may well experiment with the rest of the process next time I have access to a kitchen of my own. It was a wonderful spell, although I'm glad to be back cycle touring again. (So long as it isn't 50 and raining all the time.)

Back in the saddle...

Sorry things have been quiet around here. I'll try to be updating more frequently again. Last I left things, I was setting off on a bout of WWOOFing before biking. I spent three weeks doing so, first at a yoga centre, and then at a goat milk farm. As of today, I've started biking again, after taking the ferry down to the South Island. The plan was for Alex to be with me starting today, but he has to fly up to Auckland to get a replacement passport for the one that he lost/had stolen, so he'll catch up to me in a few days.

I'll update you on things in parts. First, the WWOOFing at the yoga centre. I had a notion that I could learn some about organic gardening while helping my hamstrings etc through yoga. I achieved half of that. The Centre was run by a couple, Eric and Cathryn. Eric was a Dutchman who had emigrated to New Zealand in the late 60s, spent the next 2 1/2 years walking around the country with a packhorse, and then run a vegatarian restaurant in Wellington before opening the yoga centre in the late 70s. In the mid-80s it moved from Wellington to Paraparaumu, roughly 20 km North, where I found it. (Paraparaumu is prounounced with the "para" like paraplegic or paratrouper, which threw me for a bit, but if you're a resident, you just say "Parparam".) Cathryn was a good bit younger, having met Eric in the mid-90s on a plane flight to Bolivia, and decided to quit her overly stressful job in mainframe repair and relocate to the centre. They also have an 11 year-old son, Ananda, who loved unicycles.

The centre was kind of ramshackle, in a charming way. You could tell it used to be a place where a lot happened, but, my theory is, as Eric got old and the two of them spent more time childraising, the place itself got less vibrant and became more just a home that also had two yoga classes a day. My role was to work four hours a day, do all the yoga I liked, and have free time the rest of the day. As it turned out, my work was simply to chop wood for eight days straight. I have no problem chopping wood, but eight days is a bit much, and it was all stupid little wood, so I didn't even get the satisfaction of splitting big, manly hunks of firewood. (I learned everything I need to know about how mild the winter is here from how small the firewood is...)

The yoga was nice, although less challenging than the yoga I've done in the states, and did my hamstrings wonders. The area was beautiful, and I took a nice long bike ride every day, but beyond that there was basically nothing to do. I spent a lot of time reading, which is fine, but was kind of bored otherwise. The diet, however, gave me some trouble. I had oatmeal for breakfast, which was just fine, but then lunch and dinner involved a salad that was always lettuce, beets and raw carrot with no dressing, and an entree (I'm using that word the American way; over here it means appetizer.) of steamed broccoli, beans from the garden, brown rice and quinoa or chickpeas. Every day. Sometimes there Cathryn made rice and tofu cakes that were good and crunchy, but bland as. I have no problem with any part of that food, but added up, it was only sort of satisfying, and the repetition was killing me. So I decided to jump ship for a goat farm, which turned out to be a great choice. More on that next time.