New Zealand Index

Auckland
Northland
Heading South
Wellington
Traveling again
West Coast
Picking Apples
Road to Qtown
Kinloch
Southland
Queenstown
Heading North
Queen Charlette Wilderness Park
to Taranaki
Central Plateau
The End

So now that I have left the comfort of what was a new home, I’m on my way to pick apples. I have an uneventful drive to motueka, and when I arrive, I try and decide where to stay, and how to start. I really liked the place I stayed when I came through here before, but I thought that I would try out a different place, maybe a little bigger, at the beginning. So I arrive and start talking to people. Some guy who’s in my room tells me about the place he works, and that there’s plenty of jobs,, but then I find out he’s working in the warehouse, not in the fields. I also talk to this girl who is working in the fields and finally get info about picking that I have been trying to find until this point. I find out what the rates mean, and what to expect as far as work goes. But it doesn’t seem that the place she’s working is hiring. So I decide I’ll go with the guy in my room to his place of employment, and try there. So the next morning we’re off, no luck there on the picking front there(and I’m glad, they paid like shit.) I then go to the WINZ office (employment office) and they give me a list of places that are supposed to be hiring. I call them up, and then go out to one. I get the job, and start that afternoon. On my way to start, I’m at the post office, and when I come out side, there are fire trucks all over the place. I look around and the liquor store has smoke billowing out of every window. The fire trucks have just arrived and the road has been blocked off. With in a few minutes, the whole building is blazing, and you can here bottles exploding like firecrackers. Where the crowd and I are standing it’s quite hot. The firemen are doing the best to keep the blaze from spreading to the petrol station next door. This is all very exciting, but I have to start work so I leave. I would have loved to stand there and watch for a while. So anyway, I’m starting my picking job. I get shown all the basics, and work for the rest of the day. It’s a little slow to start, but I feel that I can pick it up easily enough. They don’t have any places to stay on the orchard at this time, but said maybe soon, so I book for a week at the hostel. During this week I become good friends with two of the people here, Lee and Becky. And I get better at the apple picking. After a few day though, Becky disappears, and no one really knows where she went. About mid week, I hit my stride and am picking at a level I like. I then find out that I’ve been hired at just the right time. It’s Easter weekend, and there are public holidays, and I get paid for them. So I get Friday, and Monday off, paid! Well that was great, and then on Saturday, I’m told that there’s a place open on the orchard, and it’s super cheap. So I move in Monday. But then Sunday night Becky comes back, from a long weekend, and we plan on doing stuff on Monday, after I’ve moved in to my new place. So, I move in. It’s a shithole of a place, and my flatmate is a crazy older guy, who lives there year round, and is on disability, but works any way. Later on that day, I go back to the hostel to meet Becky, and as I come in one of the owners stops me, and asks me what I’m dong there. I said I came by to see my friends, and he said that I couldn’t be there. So I come in, and tell them that I can’t hang there and that we’ll go out later in the week. I also find out that my friend who I was traveling with in Northland, Corey, tried to stop by, and was kicked out, and no one ever told me. I became a little bitter towards that owner guy, at that point. He’s the reason that I got separated from my friends. So then because I couldn’t really see my friends, I had a whole lot of nothing to do, and got really board. So the week went on, we missed a day because of rain, and I really wasn’t enjoying my self much. That next weekend I decided to leave the next week, I wasn’t enjoying my self. So I told myself that I would work till Thursday, but then we started pairs on Tuesday, and they were slow pickin’, so I left the job on Wednesday morning. I go out that night and say goodbye to my friends and leave the following morn.