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.

The (Other) Windy City

Last you left me, I had just finished riding around the East Cape. I was in Gisborne, which is supposed to have some nice parts, but which, in my (brief) experience, was rather blah. Two days of high wind and rain were forecast, so, as my route down to Wellington from there was supposed to be a) busy with traffic b) not spectacular and c) expensive, I hopped on a bus and fast-forwarded down to Wellington, capital of this nation.

As you may or may not know, Alex, my younger brother, has been living and working in Wellington for a bit over a year now. I dropped in on him, to spend a little down time and hang out. It was good to see the dude, and Wellington is a lovely little city. (As Lonely Planet puts it, it "punches well above its weight".)

We didn't truly take in all the sights, as neither of us was/is particularly flush with monies, but we still poked around for a week, seeing what the city had to offer. Variously, the Te Papa museum was good, though a very touristy museum, the zoo was small but charming (Red pandas are still the best), the Deerhoof concert was great, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is fantastic, there are a ton of lovely restaurants around the city, and I'm quite enamored of the affogato, a scoop of gelato with a shot of espresso in it.

I should point out here, as I haven't yet, that this whole country seems to drink instant coffee at home and a lot of espresso anywhere else. I have yet to even see drip coffee offered anywhere. The instant coffee part is a mystery to me, but the espresso on demand is a wonderful thing to have around.

In any event, Wellington's hillsides and culture was lovely, and made me jealous of Alex's year there. I don't know that I'll be moving, but it's certainly a place well worth spending the time.

As for me, I'm now on a break. As I've covered a good bit of the North Island and Alex won't be available for the two of us to tour the South Island for a couple weeks, I'm WWOOFing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) at a yoga retreat center a bit North of Wellington for a bit. I work around four hours a day, gardening in the organic garden and doing whatever, in exchange for free room and board and all the yoga and tai chi I decide to do. This will be lovely and relaxing, and also very cheap, which is nice because New Zealand, for all its charms, is more expensive than Mexico would have been. I'll post about the Centre soonish, but things will probably be pretty quiet beyond that for a couple weeks, as momentous things will likely not really be happening.