Migrant labor

So cherries turned out to not as hard as I expected. Because of rain and a Waitangi I ended up working less than five full days each of the last two weeks. Picking cherries is physical, but not bad and I got fairly fast at it pretty quick. It was nice being in the same place, with the same people for two weeks and getting to know a lot of people from all over the place, including four americans, some guys from vanuatu, chileans, new zealanders, israelis and of course, germans. On Waitangi day we spent the morning listening to a concert by a group of Vanuatuans then went swimming/jumping off rocks in the afternoon. Unfortunately the cherry season ended a little sooner than we expected, so it was time to hit the road again, this time with our new friend Ignacio, from Chile.

The first thing we did was head to nearby Queenstown, which is known for it's BUNGY JUMPING! We decided to jump at the Karawau Bridge, which was the first commercial bungy site in the world. It was pretty fabulous. You can choose whether to touch the water or not. Ashley and I both said we wanted to just barely touch it, but both ended up soaked from the waist up(or down rather). It was great. One amazing rush at the beginning, then crashing into the water, then on the way back up to start to regain the power of thought again. Very cool.

We spent the next three nights driving up the west coast, seeing two glaciers along the way. It's hard to convey in pictures just how massive they are. We stayed one night in what is our favorite backpackers, the global village in greymouth where Ignacio played a game of tennis and we all enjoyed a nice dinner and an evening in the hot tub. The next day we drove all the way to Motueka, where we're staying now. It's a fairly small town just north of Nelson. Motueka is known as a launching pad for the Abel Tasman National and its many apple orchards. The packhouses are all pretty full, so Ashley has to wait a few days to start working, but I had no problem finding a picking job, with my first day on saturday. So far it seems a lot more difficult than cherries. I was picking over 110kgs(242lbs) of cherries a day. We're expected to do 4-5 bins of apples a day, each bin being somewhere around 400kgs(880lbs), so it's definitely a lot more to carry. We'll see how it goes.

For those of you keeping track at home, we've been here nearly 8 months now, with just two left, not long now at all.

Cheers