an interesting experience...

When Joy, an American ex-pat and ex-hippie, arrives to pick me up, I'm relieved but also slightly nervous. She puts me at ease immeadiatly though, mainly by being slightly spaced-out, and also by the hilarious amount of rubbish in her car - it literally spills out when I open the front passenger door! When I get in the car and Joy promptly gets out and disappears for half an hour, I'm starting to look for the hidden cameras. But eventually she returns and we drive off to her property, out in Parua Bay.

As it's getting dark when we arrive, and Joy, who has businesses in Morroco and family still in the US, often works through the night and therefore doesn't get up till the afternoon, I get some basic instructions that she wants the front paddock raked and cleared. We have dinner... fish-head soup... interesting, definitely not something I've sampled before but actually quite tasty (perhaps it would have been tastier if she hadn't told me about the fish-head component...), and I retire to my 'apartment' , a bedroom, bathroom and living room-cum-kitchen at the opposite end of the building. My own room - and two beds to choose from! I sleep very well that night.

The next day I get up and start work around 9am, raking. Raking raking raking. Let's just say that after five hours of that, Professional Raker is not on my list of ideal careers! But the property has a fantastic view, over the rolling hills, towards mountains and the sea, with bellbirds, tuis and fantails singing in the trees, and a family of pukekoes pecking away in a field in the adjacent property. The ten sheep on the property were extremely nervous of me, which is a bit difficult because they seemed to spend most of their day eating or laying about in the vicinity of my path back to the apartment.

Joy appears around 1pm, disappears again to 'meditate', and returns again at 3pm, when we do some planting in the veggie garden until it starts to get dark. That night we make a great stir-fry for dinner, and Joy tells me about her youth in the US, when she was a hippie, hanging out with Dennis Hopper (who is her daughter's godfather), and living in Paris and Marrakech.

The next day I spend most of the morning clearing leaves for the front paddock and the flower and veggie gardens. Then I relax with some music on the chair-shaped-cut treestump at the highest point of the property, before doing some more planting with Joy in the late afternoon. The final day I trim the large spiky plants which dot the property (don't ask me what they're called...) which is actually pretty fun and relaxing, in the sun with a cooling breeze and my ipod on. Even the sheep seem slighty less scared of me... just slightly. Before Joy drives me back down to Whangarei to spend a night at the Bunkdown Lodge before catching my bus on to Paihia the next morning, I clear plants from the large porch, sweep, re-pot plants, and attempt to tame some of the bushes around the veggie garden. I get the feeling she's got a mile-long list of tasks and would like me to stay on, but it's time to move on. It was a nice, different interlude to months travelling around and living in hostels, and would definitely have been more fun with another person, but spending so much time (4 days felt like a long time!) on my own isn't really for me!

written by  LizIsHere on April 19, 2010 from Whangarei, New Zealand
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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