Farmlife at Onuku

After watching the sunrise and swimming with the dolphins, I was pretty exhausted. I had been dozing off in one of the hammocks and helping Graham set up the programs on his new laptop as new guests started to arrive at the camping ground (it's typical how people with no idea about technology always get state of the art equipment and don't know how to use it!).

There was Bridget from Holland - a looney and no mistake - Sebastien from Germany - a looky likey of Marcus Gray - and then there was Ferdinand and Katrin from Austria. After an evening game of volleyball, doing our best to avoid the sheepshit, everyone seemed very keen on going fishing the next morning and trying to catch some dinner. As Graham had been kind enough to cook me some freshly caught (and delicious) Moki for helping him earlier, I was keen to tag along in the hope of getting another free meal.

We all set off to arrive at the fishing spot, reccommended to us by Tristan, for low tide. However, we all got a bit lost (as nothing is signposted) and we went full circle and arrived at the swimming beach instead! It didn't matter though as there were plenty of mussels to pick and use as bait there. In fact, we had a back up plan and we picked enough mussels for us to have for dinner if we didn't catch anything (which is what I expected to happen). However, that wasn't a problem as we caught 4 fish and two of them were big-uns too!(well.........Sebastien and Ferdinand caught them - I was supervising them). The fish we caught were called Guffeys - I've never heard of them before but they were damned ugly.

When we got back from our successful fishing trip, the german-speakers gutted and cleaned the fish while Tom, "Camp Andy" (as Tom has taken to calling him - he's responsible for cleaning the campground, see?) and I decided to make some goalposts out of any spare straight wood we could find. We made it a bit of a quest and once we'd started, we were adamant of it's completion by the time I left the following day and we wanted to have a bit of a kick around. It was a great distraction for us all and we felt quite manly and butch once we got the hammer and nails out! Once the frames were made, we wrapped chicken wire over the back as the netting and then they were complete. We were all so proud and we even signed them for future generations of travellers to marvel at them - saying that, they probably fell apart just after I left!

That evening we had a banquet of mussels, fish and veg - there was so much that no-one went hungry. Bridget exclaimed at one point "It's like an angel has pee'd in my mouth!". I was in hysterics at that point but in hindsight, the thought of receiving a golden shower from a celestial being should be quite pleasant.

Afterwards we had a bit of a kick around but not for long as we were all far too full. As darkness fell and all the washing up had been done, the "onuku gang" all gathered around the wood burner in the lounge room/ hut and those with any musical talent entertained the rest of us. The headline act was Sebastien to seemed to have all manner of instruments with him - he played the guitar extremely well and was adept on the mouth harpsicord too but the best part was when he started to play the vacuum cleaner like a didgeredoo!

The next day I went for a walk to the Nikau Palm Reserve which is at the far end of the farm. There was all manner of wildlife on the way - red-taled hawks, califonian quails and lots of inquisitive (yet easily scared) sheep. The palm reserve is the most southernmost location of palm trees in New Zealnd because the valley it is in has it's own microclimate. The entire walk was fantastic for the simple reasons that it was a beautiful sunny day and there was no-one else on the track at all - the whole of the Banks Peninsula felt deserted and for my eyes only.

That evening we had our inaugural football match and gave our goalposts their first real test - as rustic as they looked they were bloody sturdy! There was a lot of sheep shit around so there were a lot of (unintended) slide tackles. It was a shame to be leaving Onuku as it was very special to me and a great place to end my adventures in New Zealand.

That evening, I received a message from Carr saying that he had just been deported out of Germany as he forgot his passport - apparently he was escorted (frogmarched even) out of the country by the police AND the army. I haven't heard from him since as my phone was defunct in Fiji and there have been no emails - why do things like that always happen to him!