Tuesday 24 April 2012

An Aussie Adventure

G'day mate!

With only two short weeks to blitz through big brother Australia, there wasn't enough time to give it a fair chance. But the trip was great for reconnecting with family on dad's side and eating yum food. And at least I didn't encounter any poisonous spiders or rabid kangas, only super beautiful but incredibly annoying birds.

Curious parakeets at Aunty's house

When I landed in Aussie, Aunty picked me up from the airport and I stayed with her and Uncle for the next 10 days in Gordon, one of the many small suburbs in sprawling Sydney.
And I thought Auckland was big... I think Sydney would be a nice place to live if you're a city person. As a traveler there aren't that many typical tourist attractions to see besides the Opera House; rather, it's more about checking out the unique neighborhoods, eateries and events that dot the city.

The first night I was whisked away to dinner with all the family: aunty and uncle, cousin Karinn, her husband Jaan and toddler Aki, and cousin James from another aunt in T-dot. Oh it was so good to eat proper Chinese food (xiao long bao! xiao long bao!) and hang out with cousins - never done that before because of all the distance.

Aunty & Uncle, Karinn & Jaan & Aki, James, Moi

For the rest of the week I tried to help babysit Aki, went to dim sum with the fam (again, drool), had talks and dinner with aunty and took the train by myself to explore the city. One day I took a boat ride to Manly, which is a beachy suburb nearby, and another day aunty and uncle took me to Blue Mountain for some touristy sightseeing and lunch (some fighting and scratching ensued over the bill..somehow the older Chinese person always wins). There are some peaks called the Three Sisters, and we got to walk to one of them and check out the expansive view of the surrounding mountains. Very refreshing to see after missing all the ubiquitous nature of New Zealand.

 
 
Opera House, duh; Blue Mountains

That night I got dropped off in town to have a cousins' night out with Karinn and James. Karinn took us for drinks to 2 different places that looked like holes in the walls from the outside but were funky and packed inside. Good to have a local in the know! After a noodley dinner, she left me and James on one of the main streets to check out another bar. We found some live music but after awhile the place turned clubby and we felt tired, so we lamed out and went back to James' bachelor pad (filled with Canadian sports fanatics) for a movie and sleep.

 

The next day we checked out Darling Harbour before James ran off to catch the bus to Canberra. It turned out to be a happy surprise because there was a circus there for Easter weekend, and so the day after I went back to see street performers (including a Japanese guy with fangs who swallowed balloons and fire) and some acrobatics. Chinatown and the night market was also nearby, so I got a tasty egg tart out of it too.

 
 
Darling Harbour & circus

On Saturday after some vintage shopping in Surry Hills, I went back to the circus and caught a show in the big top (with hoola hooping Canadian barbie) and enjoyed the 10 minute fireworks display over Darling Harbour. A great way to spend Easter!

 
 

Monday I had a fun family outing to the zoo with me, Karinn, Jaan and Aki. The Sydney Zoo is awesome! It's got a gondola and tons of animals that I've never seen before, including Tasmanian Devils, a bajillion wallabys and kangas, and a HUGE condor vulture that swooped over people's heads during the cool bird show. Also some extremely lethargic (ie. half-baked) koalas and Aki's favorite, monkeys and chimps.

 
 
 
Aki: The biggest monkey of all

After a couple days and much more Chinese food consumed, it was time to fly up the coast to Byron Bay. I had gotten mixed reviews about Byron Bay, most people saying that it's beautiful and worth going to but has gotten more commercial because of its popularity. The beach was indeed gorgeous, but the weather was wet and inconsistent for the 5 days I was there. Bursts of five minute showers throughout the day, followed by hot scorching sun. Repeat. The highest expectations I had were for the hostel I stayed at called the Arts Factory. I knew about it through Luminate festival peoples, namely the drumming teacher Albert and his girlfriend Hiro, who have been living at Arts Factory for the last four years. The pictures I had seen made it look like the perfect hippy paradise, and for so much monies per night I subconsciously expected a festival repeat with NZ standard facilities.

 
 
Hangout area; view of my room across the pond; damn bush turkeys; Me Hiro & Albert

Unfortunately, the real hippies seemed long gone. The hostel had been taken over by another company, so despite the hippy surroundings, quite a number of guests were young North Americans who were in 'WOO Spring Break!' mode and drank and smoked late into the night. It would've been fine if I had been able to hole myself up in my room, but the one I had chosen was a big pentagon tent with no door, just canvas curtains. So we could hear everything and everyone outside. And some bush turkey wandered into the room and got into my food! People also didn't know how to clean up after themselves, so the kitchen and bathrooms were always dirty no matter how many times the staff cleaned it. As a result I didn't feel like meeting new people. I did find Albert and Hiro though, who were across the pond with a sweet setup in the camping area. They had a living room outside their tent with a couch and aquarium, so when things got too overwhelming on the 'mainland' I hid over there and shared some tasty meals with them.

Not that my time at Byron Bay was a total bust, I think I was mostly going through a funk and had too high expectations. I eventually met a few awesome people at the hostel, did some gardening and got veggies out of it, practiced some yoga, saw live music, and had delicious meals at a Hare Krishna cafe. One day I had a pleasant afternoon at nearby Brunswick after a failed attempt to hitch to Nimbin (famous pot town 1.5 hrs away). On another day in the midst of a downpour at the beach I met some Melbourne uni students (incl. a Vancouverite) under a tree and hung out with them for the afternoon. We walked to the lighthouse and saw a pack of 10 dolphins swimming on the beach below (finally!).

Byron Bay

By the end of it, I decided that my time in Australia was nice and all, but I'm a New Zealand girl at heart. I was also tremendously looking forward to my arrival in Bali, Indonesia to reunite with Ken. And it worked out great! But more on that later...for now we're going to enjoy paradise and eat heaps of delicious cheap Asian food :)

Saturday 7 April 2012

The End, The Beginning

And now the time has come to recount the last leg of my Kiwi journey. To borrow the words of my sister.... SAD FACE.

Now back to happy face! Don't bum the little dude out.

After zipping past the west coast and resort towns, I made it to the highly recommended and much-awaited farm that was to be my last in NZ. The sense of community from young, like-minded peers was what I craved and lacked from my other farming experiences, and in my mind this was going to be full of communal food-making, drumming and hippy free love times. When I got to the farm, the owner Shaun gave me a hearty welcome. My first impression of the farm seemed fine, but then the faces of the other wwoofers made me blink.
Why did everyone look so ... disgruntled? Where was the free hippy spirit I had idealistically imagined?
Turns out that the couple owning the farm had recently split up, leaving the guy in charge of running the farm, the wwoofers and a part-time job to supplement the income. Also left him with some emotional baggage, which wasn't helped by the fact that the woman still handled the emails and he had to keep explaining her absence.

Hmm, potentially awkward situation noted. Still, things don't seem that bad. So why does my caravan roommate from HK look like she's about to break down? In Cantonese she explains that there's no heating and the night before it was so cold she hadn't slept a wink. Yikes. Despite her grievances and willingness to hurl the whole concept of wwoofing down the toilet, I decided I had to try things out for myself, and figured it would go over a bit better since I was more used to country life. As it turned out, there were lots of ups and downs, but it was an experience in itself that I'm glad happened.


My theory is that at the core of the unpleasant things we experienced was the breakup. I guess the woman had previously been in charge of the household and the wwoofers' survival and happiness, whereas with Shaun we noticed throughout the week that he possibly had an impression of us as wussies (complaints about the cold) and rabid greedy children (continually asking for more food staples from the pantry).
The biggest problem was there were too many people. Wairuna Farm was 10 acres and the land needed a lot of helping hands, but with the delicate situation in the house and only one man to take care of everything, it was way too crowded. Our highest wwoofer count one night was fourteen people! This place was used to high turnover.
The heating could've boosted morale, but nothing doing. Nights indeed were cold, and luckily I managed to forage for some extra sleeping bags and blankets. It was basically camping. Nobody would've noticed it in summer, which is when my friend had wwoofed there, but now in mid-March, fall was approaching fast.

  
 
 
My caravan home, Pizza the cat, sheep, dog Chloe, Bacon, Dunedin market

But on to the positives! Indeed, everybody wore the same "what the hell am I doing here" face for about a day and a half, but it was because we were all adjusting at the same time. Over the week we slowly got to know each other and created that communal vibe I sorely needed, over rigorous rounds of Bananagrams (FINALLY), a sweaty game of ultimate, and of course over FOOD! Oh man. First of all, Shaun was a really good cook and there were big heaps of all the different courses (SO much zucchini). Second, in our group there were backgrounds of French, Italian, Chinese, German, Belgian and American, meaning lots of diverse food being shared at a long dinner table. In one day we had tons of amazing bread made by French baker Julien, with Italian Luca overseeing the pizza party. Another night me and Lee were put to the task of doing something with all the bok choi, so we scraped together an Asian dinner.

 
Asian menu: miso soup, stir fry, rice, steamed egg, and non-Asian desserts of apple crumble with my vegan chocolate mousse

What else was good? All the animals had funny quirks and were big softies, especially when given affection, and weeding was less tedious with others to talk to. I was selected to be the Vanna White at our Farmer's Market stall in Dunedin, which required a wakeup time of 4am in the brisk and dark night, but involved a lot of fun selling veggies and ogling all the amazing food in and around the railway station.
For St. Patrick's Day all of us wwoofers went into "town" to celebrate, which meant going to the only bar/restaurant in Clinton (there's no proper supermarket but oh boy do they have a taxidermist) and watching the local young rednecks get completely plastered by 9:30pm. One of those big boys had ripped his shirt down the middle, and as he was drunkenly trying to talk to us, his equally intoxicated friend hunched beside him, trying to keep a steady hand so he could light his ripped shirt on fire. Good show.

 
Orgasmic French bread; St. Patty's

Things were getting much better despite some difficult living conditions, but unfortunately the last straw came when one wwoofer accidentally flooded a greenhouse, sucking all the water out of the pump and leaving us an afternoon deprived of drinking or cleaning water. Anyway, for me one week was enough to enjoy myself and not mind the conditions. After the weekend, 8 of us out of the 12 hightailed it out of there and went our separate ways.

Me and Lee went with Belgian Daniel down to the nearby Catlins Reserve for a short but awesome nature roadtrip. It's a scenic drive along the southeast coast of the island, chock full of bays, coves, waterfalls and wondrous marine creatures. Despite all the stops, we covered half the way on the first day. Of special note was Nugget Point, a lookout with rock boulders strewn about in the sea; Parakanui Falls, a serene multi-tiered waterfall; and Jack's Blowhole, fantastic not just for the innuendo but also for the sheer power of water traveling 200 meters inland to crash against an enclosed rock wall.

 
 
That last photo makes me want noodle soup so bad

We slept luxuriously in Waikawa that night (luxury meaning warm and comfy beds after the farm), and in the morning spent ages at Porpoise Bay taking in the view of giant ribbons of seaweed whipping about in the surging waves while clinging to the rockbeds filled with petrified wood. Both Porpoise and nearby Curio Bay were also prime locations for dolphin spotting, so we kept our eyes peeled.

 
 
 
Curio & Porpoise

No dolphins, so our next stop was to gorgeous but furiously windy Slope Point, the southern most point of the south island, and then to Waipapa Point, which had a lighthouse but much more importantly gigantic sea lions. Apparently some people from our hostel said the sea lions were frolicking and kissing each other the day before, but that day we appeared to have stumbled upon their naptime. Lumpy but still cute; Chinese analogies translated would've pegged them as "logs of wood" or "clumps of rice". Being potential killers, we didn't try to rouse them for our own amusement, so we had a nap ourselves on the sunny and less windy side of the hill.

 
 
I guess they're more logs of wood because they're brown

Later Lee woke us up because it was time for her to hitch back to Owaka, where her hostel was booked. So we drove back to Curio, let her off, and me and Daniel parked the car at the campground. We vainly tried to dolphin watch again but gave up and headed over to Porpoise Bay, for it was time to catch a glimpse of yellow-eyed penguins coming back from the sea to their nests.

Yellow-eyed awesomeness

As the sun started to set, slowly the first penguin appeared, however it was a bit awkward because of all the gawking humans blocking his path. But he was a pro, and after an extended period of preening and posing for pictures, he decided enough was enough and hopped and waddled his way through the crowd. A few more arrived also rather slowly but very close to us, making it a total of four that we saw before it got too dark and cold. We headed back and celebrated our day's successes by having dinner in the back of the car. Sleep was in the back of the car too, although neither of us got much what with the space constraints.

Backseat huzzah!

No matter, because the next morning was our last chance for spotting a dolphin. We parked ourselves on the beach and waited. Finally we saw in the far distance one or two black things bobbing in the water, so we made haste and ran into the ocean. BRRRR! I didn't get very far because even though the water was waist deep, some of the waves crashed over my head. Daniel went further out but after awhile we couldn't see those black bobs anymore, so got out and dried off. Oh well. It was still a successful mission, full of raw nature, seals, sea lions, penguins and a 50% possibility of a dolphin sighting...and all for free!

Oh and at some point we got quite silly:

 
 
That's me in the first one attempting a high kick

Same afternoon as the 'dolphin swim', we drove to Bluff for some disappointing oysters (no comparison to Canada) before Daniel dropped me off to hitch to nearby Gore. The next morning I started hitching towards Mt. Cook, which was 300km north on the inland highway and almost half the length of the south island. I knew it was ambitious so I decided to stick my thumb out and go as far as I could get that day. This hitch definitely had more a sense of adventure and randomness than before. Highlight was the huge ice cream a sweet couple in their 80's bought for me. Lowlight was late in the afternoon when one guy dumped me on the side of the road across from his house, and the few cars that drove by weren't biting. However, in my desperate hour of need, a camper van came rolling by with no passengers (what luck!) and the girl's destination was all the way to Mt. cook. We stopped at a lookout to take pictures of a lake and who should stop beside us were Nicola and Santi, friends from Wanaka and Qtown. Seriously! 7pm, middle of nowhere. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by these things anymore.

Hooker Valley

As we rolled in to Mt. Cook, we couldn't help but feel awe at the expanse of mountains surrounding us. Couldn't say the same for the village though, which was nothing but a few areas of pricey accommodation. In the morning me and Nicola do a short but sweet walk through Hooker Valley (freebie) towards a milky lake filled with what look like animal ice sculptures. Actually, the mountainous landscape was very similar to British Columbia, although the difference is here you have to do a lot less work to see it.

I spy with my little eye a seal, some iguanas, a few ducks and toads

Later on we grabbed our stuff and hitched to Lake Tekapo to spend the quiet night there. The next morning we run into Santi and drive together to the Akaroa penninsula, just off of Christchurch on the east coast. Akaroa itself is a charming French village (due to French settlers) with streets that start with 'Rue', although I'm sure they're pronounced very differently by Kiwis. The sun was shining and our hostel was extremely cute, fit with a dog named Pongo that was bigger than me. Definitely the perfect place to relax for three days.
Me, Nicola and Dutch Jellis do our best to have a very French afternoon, bikeriding along the beach (me humming 'foo de fa fa' from Flight of the Conchords) and having a baguette picnic on the grass. That night we went across the street to an aptly named 'end of summer' party to hear a bluegrass band play on the porch of an outdoor cafe/bar called the Stables. Nicola left the next day, so me and Jellis spent a chill day walking, eating and lazing in the sun. More Bananagrams that night.

 
 
 
Sad face for nerdy broken sunglasses; Pongo the gigantic softie

Then it was time to say goodbye and hitch to the confusingly sprawled streets of Christchurch. Stayed with a friend of a friend of a friend Louise, had a good soak on my daytrip up to Hanmer Springs, then back to Louise's again. In Christchurch, there are lots of empty or damaged buildings. It's a slow recovery but at least there are still lots of people. It was sad to see the few old churches destroyed, especially since New Zealand, like Canada, is so new there isn't much historical architecture to boast about. There was some interesting development coming out of the earthquake though, with one small strip of shops and cafes made of shipping containers. Very modern, hip and colorful, and a great use of recycling.


Louise's cool mom drove me to my flight bound for Auckland, and I stayed with sister's friends Jessica and Dan for the weekend. It was Jess's birthday that Saturday, so there was a big feast and afterwards even bigger bellies to show for it. Those two were great hosts and troopers for driving me at 5:30am to the airport, where I had to give a sad floppy wave to New Zealand, before boarding for its bigger and supposedly more crass neighbor (sound familiar?).

The verdict? Coming to New Zealand was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I realized last month that on this trip I've grown so much and yet haven't felt this young at heart in a long time. After spending 5 months in this beautiful country and being totally independent, I feel more myself than I ever have before. I think my routine back home was dulling my sense of adventure, curiosity and self more than I really knew. I was close to wasting my mid-20's in a directionless zombie state, and it was here that I relcaimed the essence of Joey.
Now I'll go home refusing to settle for 'good enough', and hopefully be able to carve my way and be free not just on vacation, but in real life.



OH WAIT PSYCHE! I ain't going home yet. Mwahahahahaha!