traveling again

every time i move i am reminded overwhelmingly how turtle-like i am, and it doesn't help that my backpack is green. i am in nelson right now 'sunniest spot in new zealand' according to my bus driver yesterday who was full of useful and interesting trivia. on tuesday josh and kirby, the other wwoofers at windsong orchard (the blueberry farm) gave me a ride out to linkwater, a little tiny town (not even a town but more like a collection of farms surrounding a gas station called challenge! and a pub with fish and chips takeaways) where bob and jennie had friends who needed some help with there lemons and so i was shuttled out to help them. not as cushy as my previous farm, though i was again in a caravan of my own, it was a half mile down the hill from the site where the family was building their unfinished house which they had already moved into. therefore there was no shower and an outdoor toilet at the top of the hill. it will be a beautiful house when it is completed with a compelling sweeping veiw of mountains and inlets surrounding it, but right now it's a job site (which i proceeded to clean, organize and fully sweep out). chris and ann were a sweet young couple with a strawberry farm that they hired a local girl to look after while they are preoccupied by their housebuilding efforts. they needed me to help with their lemon trees, a new orchard of two foot tall trees with adorable miniature lemons, which i had to weed and fertilize, all on a very steep uphill slope and next to a neighbors electric fence (which i did bump into. twice. it was not comfortable but more, well, shocking than anything). and they had the funniest little dog ever named molly, an unbelievable handful sized mongrel who looked like a cross between an ewok and a gremlin all covered in curly blond fur. but somehow totally loveable. and after two days of what equaled camping indoors, i caught a ride with the postman 'adam' to havelock, and he gave me a panoramic new zealand postcard and a kiwipost pen and told me where the best cafe was to wait for my bus. today i wandered around nelson, went to the market, which was full of craft vendors, and visited the studio of jens hansen, the jeweler who created the 'one ring' and there it was on display, but wait there's another at a different size? what? turns out that there is more than one, one ring, more like fifty plus but that's not too disapointing. just amusing. and i spent the remainder of my afternoon propped agianst a pine tree in the park, reading a book and eating icecream that melted with astounding speed, but i guess it's really hot today. something like 30 degrees. not sure what that equals....

post script

this is what the sky looked like last night. it inspired me and i added blueberry juice to the crepes i was making, turning them purple and pink.

lists

above you will see the caravan that is my home here-directly next to a sign that says 'blueberries and plums' and 'honk for service' (which people most definatly do). now that i have been here for a week and am looking at the prospect of moving to my next place, the following is some of what i've discovered here at windsong orchards.
worst sounds while picking blueberries:
a. the 'plunk' of a perfectly ripe berry you accidentally brushed dropping from it's perch to the ground and rolling out of sight.
b. the various 'plunk' and 'plink' noises of a whole handful of carefully picked blueberries (which you had to climb into the bush to acquire) missing your bucket entirely and plummeting to the ground.
best sounds while picking blueberries:
best sounds while picking blueberries:
a. the moment when the ka-plink's of berries hitting the bottom of your pail cease and due to the now muffled 'whump' you know the bucket is no longer empty.
b. the sonorous cacophony of three kilo's of blueberries being poured into the grader.
worst things about picking blueberries:
a. being showered with water (because the irrigation was left on the night before) as you look up at a particularly lovely bunch of berries.
b. walking bent over along the rows of younger plants and gaining an average of seven berries per.
c.the sun. it's relentlessly hot.
best things about picking blueberries:
a.taste testing
things i've learned from picking blueberries:
a.the reason you never see gigantic (i mean collosal) blueberries in stores or markets is that the people picking them eat them before they can make it to you. i know cause there were lots and i felt a distict need to uphold the tradition and therefore i ate them all.
b.there is no end to the way blueberries can be prepared and eaten. they can be put on salads and crackers and cereal, they can be baked in pies, tarts, muffins, pankakes, cupcakes, they can be made into sauce, jam, juice, soup, salad dressing. and they can be put on anything spread with peanut butter, but the best way to eat them is a large handful (even two) transfered directly into your mouth. nothing beats that...

wine tasting by bicycle

we all went wine tasting again and i have come to the conclusion that if you pay a small fee for tasting ($5 new zealand) they will treat you much better, give you larger pours and be alot happier to answer questions. out of all the wineries we visited (by bicycle in the hot hot sun i might add) forrest vineyards charged for a tasting but you got to pick six wines and they threw in a seventh, most likely something new that they were trying to promote. but the pours were almost a quarter glass full, and very well done on a tray with numbered insets for the bottom of each glass and tasting notes to corospond to each. every other winery looked at us and seemed to assess that we were young and riding bikes and most likely weren't going to spend a great deal for money, and sort of paid minimal attention to us. though we did try some amazingly potent grape liquor similar to grappa which was like a kick in the head compounded by the heat. thank goodness the swimming hole was just down the road and wonderful. you could swim up the river a ways and then just drift back on the current. peaceful. plus we met ian, an aussie who is managing cloud bay vineyards and now we have another place to visit on monday. more winerys than could be got to in a week. i now see the benifit of a bus tour, it's easier to got to five or six places if you climb onto an air-condiditioned bus after getting sloshed, instead of trying to swing your leg over the seat of a bicycle while staggering slightly. but sooooo much fun. it's hardly work here really...
last night we made a crazy meal together, trying to use all the odd things in the 'crisper' and we ended up with shredded beetroot, zuccini and potato pancakes with mustard and hotsauce, quinoa and homemade coleslaw. accompanied by last years sauvignon blanc we picked up at a vineyard earlier and i carried home in my purse. on the bike. thank goodness it was only nine bucks cause there was a chance of me falling over, and i've never been that graceful a rider!
and then dinner was followed by blueberry pancakes which filled the little cottage with smoke but tasted divine with just a little bit of melty butter. we ate ourselves into a stupor.
and got up at quarter past seven to go to the market in neighboring blehnim where i sold plums and blueberries till we basically ran out at noon. i can now eyeball a kilo of plums and hand weigh a quarter kilo of blueberries with a fair amount of accuracy for which i am very proud.
i think we are going to make some sort of fritatta tonight with micro green salad (we're gonna attempt to make blueberry vinigrette) and lemon blueberry cheesecake bars. pretty much blueberries go in everything here, they are just so abundant and no one can find a good reason not to use masses of them. my cereal is really more berry than cereal in the morning...

gooey melt-y mess!

--this was the sky last night, it was ridiculously lovely. i took a billion pictures (while being mocked by my picking compatriots) cause it was just too awesome.

last night we had a huge dinner with multiple courses and two kinds of pudding (dessert) and then we went to the local pub and had a drink we created (the summer shnappy = vodka, peach shnapps and current juice) which tasted a little too much like just juice but really wasn't and then we played some elaborate card game i had never heard which was sort of like calvinball cards, and the winner of each round was 'president' and was allowed to make decrees to the lower peoples and it was just so hard to keep track of it all. oh and then we had a dance party to the unlikely mix of queen and fleetwood mac and we palyed dance-off which is like 'horse' but with dance moves and was utterly ridiculous but great. the other three girls (jesse and robin from the bay area, and emma from washington) took off this afternoon, along with richard, who has been wwoofing for years (YEARS) and keeps coming back here.
so it's kind of quiet, the new couple just showed up and it's not quite dinner time yet. too hot to really do much of anything actually. i did make a tart though. i figured why not bake, it's already scaldingly hot the oven won't make an ounce of difference right? we have all been trying to use blueberries as much as humanly possible. in everything really. blueberry soup, blueberry tart, pie, sauce, pancakes, in salad and on cereal. the first night i just had a giant bowl of blueberries and cream. and tonight i made a blueberry chocolate tart, with a peanut butter crust using cereal i crushed into flour using the bottem of an empty jar. it was so silly, and noisy but made a great crust. i am now just waiting for it to cool, cause it's all gooey and melt-y and would make an awful mess, but a good mess.

BLUEBERRIES!!!!

i spent the whole morning in the blueberries just overcome with delight! what a great thing to be doing. there are at least thirty long rows of berries and the plants are just heavy with fruit, it's almost frustrating to pick cause some are always falling off just as you touch them. but it's the perfect fruit to pick as they are mostly tall plants so you can stand up and pick some and then sit down and pick the ones lower and there's shade and sun and we were playing music and it's really a great way to spend a morning.
after lunch we took off on bikes to visit some vineyards (it's wine country majorly here, all vines) as they all have free tastings, though the people pouring were not entirely happy with the fact that we tasted all the wines and didn't buy any of them. after two wineries with at least fifteen wines between them we were a little wobbly on the bikes out in the hot sun (thank goodness it's all relatively flat) so we decided to detour to the river, which was great as far as as it was cool, but swift moving and not good for swimming, just wedging a foot between some rocks to dunk all the way under without being swept away downriver. but then we got to ride back soaking wet and that was fun! oh and just a goodbye note, i know there haven't been any pictures really but i've been able to get some off my camera here, and i'm going back and adding them so they go with their original story, so check them out, the bird is crazy, i can't believe i got that picture of him thinking about eating my tomato...

the neverending journey

well i have finally made the trip and switched islands. after twenty-odd travel hours by bus (coach) and ferry i am not officially on the south island, and i made it to the berry farm in renwick (i can eat all the blueberries i want here! is this heaven?!). before i go on let me apolagize for any terrible spelling in the course of this blog, i know it has occured previously but now it's far more apt to happen as the keyboard i'm using has all the letters worn off the keys and therefore whenever i look down i become seriously confused.
the bus i have concluded is definatly not a glamorous way to travel, nor the most timely. i have a friend who is flying from auckland to queenstown for $20 less than i paid for two busses and the ferry! and the starlight (overnight) auckland to wellington bus, while a good idea in theory, is just a big headache. i think i slept for two hours maximum among all the readjusting of seats, shuffling, getting on and off, and loudspeaker anouncments to say nothing of the man seated in front of me who had the most absurd sounding cough ever (impossible to describe really) which cut through my headphones turned up to the loudest volume i could stand, and felt like a smack to the head every time. also i have discovered after a good week of research, that new zealand transportation while extensive, is very much not on time! every timetable was off by atleast 20 minues, causing me to be constantly running from one platform to another carting my bags and elbowing people out of the way (if you are going to move painfully slow, must you block the entire flow of traffic and force them to comply with your snails pace speed? what for company?!) and jumping over old ladies left and right. i just barely made each connection and i scheduled them with an hour of wait time minimum. i dislike untimely things. i dislike it very much.