Putaruru

We've been at our new WOOFing placement for two days now; our hosts are a nice couple called John and Karyen. Their property is a massive piece of land, part nature reserve and part dairy farm, the work that Lloyd and I have/will mainly doing is planting trees along a hill that runs alongside a river and also digging out a pathway so people can easily gain access to the riverside.  The farm is in the middle of nowhere and it’s really peaceful out here though in time I am sure that I will miss the city, to be honest I’m already looking forward to getting to Wellington so I can enjoy a bit of night life!

Middle of nowhere

At the moment we are working in the morning and having the afternoons off, we have breakfast at 8 then John takes us to the river on his quad, have a break at around 10:30 (lots of tea and biscuits), work until around 12:30/1:00 and then John takes us back for a big lunch that kareyn has prepared. The rest of the day is ours to enjoy so there’s no complaints from me! On their land is a massive hill with rocky outcrops, apparently it was once part of a Maori burial site. Lloyd and I walked up the hill, it was quite a hard walk after a mornings work, I took plenty of photos New Zealand is a great place to photograph totally different from South East Asia. 

It’s quite hard work but John is really easy going and doesn’t want us to overwork ourselves.  It’s nice to do manual labour rather than been sat behind a desk worrying about deadlines or having to chase a million and one things. It’s also really good to work with Lloyd again, we used to work at Habitat along with our other buddy James so it’s a bit like old times, there’s plenty of taking the piss out of each other and general messing about as we go about our work.