Photo courtesy of Laurie (one of this session's volunteers)The last two weeks have brought me to tears on many occasion. They have been 2 of the funniest weeks of my time with CVNZ so far, with a very amusing Volunteer team.
We've also had a great change within the Punakaiki project site, with the contract work being carried out to clean up our office/site and spruce it up to a suitable 'Punakaiki Coastal Restoration Site Office' standard.
So far we've seen non-native tree felling, patching up holes, roof painting, kitchen panelling, scraping and landscaping. Our team worked like ninjas this week; painting the kitchen, the outside walls of the office and tunnel building, moving firewood and cleaning down an outside area, digging in posts and erecting shade cloth to form a plant nursery, picking up and moving 260 plants destined for the project site landscaped areas, and finally planting them all! Awesome week's work in Punakaiki!
With three Brits (Andy, James & Cookie), and two de la Francaise (Laurie & Bruno) we've had quite the linguistic weeks ~ a large part of our dialect melding, with the lingua franca once again becoming French. The typical English attitudes of shouting English louder at the French to make them understand; explored and pushed aside in favour of almost comical adoption of words and phrases - “non merci” and "Oh la vache!" being our favourites.I thought I would give this lot a chance to do something which no others have ever done on my blog; have their own say. So it is that I turn my laptop over to them now, for their chance to say whatever they like about these two weeks;
AndyApparently no others have ever had the chance ever to do this so I'm feeling rather privileged to be writing on the blog of Mr. Rye. Okarito so far has been rather awesome until today when the rain decided to halt work after only 30 mins of UGD (Ultimate Gorse Destruction). Aside from the rain however, the view of the mountains from the beach is superb as these snow capped peaks rise above the tree scattered foothills. Okarito is lush, for serious!
Jim-bobThese last few weeks I have learnt a lot both about myself and my surroundings, some of these including; the French like dipping toast with jam (confiture) in their coffee, I can now make gravy, once a year Hokitika is an odd place to be, don't sleep with your head (tet) on the window (fenetre) whilst travelling due to oncoming stones, Rudyard Kipling doesn't make apple pies, tuna isn't made from dolphins, my French accent isn't as great as I thought it was. Overall, a constructive week with much work being done and a lot being learnt. What more can you want? Oh revoir!
Cookie (aka Katy aka 'Do you know who I am?')Alors.. how to write about these last 2 weeks? Well.. It's been a great opportunity to practise my franglais, much to the amusement of Bruno, Laurie and, well, everyone. Mais, ca c'est le blaireau. In no way were these weeks 'just an addition to my CV' (“Look.. I went travelling for 8 months, and did 2 weeks of conservation. Clearly I'm serious about the cause...”); they were a fantastic opportunity for me to get my teeth into something and actually do something physical for a while. If only I'd thought a bit harder about it beforehand I would have done a few more weeks. Alas, my time is running short, oh la vache. Good times were spent swapping music, initiating the rest of the group to the wonderful bagpipe filled worlds of Kathryn Tickell and Martyn Bennett (don't knock it till you've tried it) and generally laughing like an idiot for most of the day. Obviously conservation played its part too. Go team ecology! I want Sam's job. Watch your back! Till later.... OUI MERCI!
LaurieYes, no, yes, no, no no no, yes... My english is very bad so when I speak I'm a clown but it's not intentional unfortunately... Fortunately for Sam, Andy and Katy who laugh a lot, they are so mocking people! By the way, thanks for this four weeks very good thanks to people, food people too, nature, fauna and flora and the work was interesting (like planting trees or making box trap) in spite of the rain sometimes...
So, other people like Andy or Bruno describe very well the amazing places we saw on this blog so, I stop my text here.
Tchüss !! %)
BrunoIt has been two great weeks with conservation volunteering, not full of work all the time but that let us free time to discover the wonderful places where we've been staying. I can't wait to see again Punakaiki and its beautiful cliffs dressed with dark green native forests. Okarito also has his charm and you can't stay unmoved by the wonder of a sunset on those black sandy beaches with the huge mountains in background. I'm glad to have learned some skills like building trap boxes (me who couldn't hold a hammer properly) or planting trees, and thanks to the eagerness of the team these two weeks have seemed more holidays than anything else.
So thank you again Sam for managing our team the way you did and good luck for any of your plans, I hope CVNZ will keep on giving you happy times and good people to meet.
CVNZ c'est vachement bien.
Cheers, Bruno
Back to me then!
Writing highlights of the weeks here would be purely self-indulgent, with little meaning to others so I shan't this time. Suffice to say there have been so many small moments of gold; misunderstandings between languages, notes of music drifting across the accommodations (melodica, tin whistle, guitar & harmonica), sharing of music – from bagpipes to didgeridoo, folk to funk, Northumberland to Normandy and everything in between.
As a group, we also went to experience a truly West Coast phenomenon – the Wild Food Festival. An event which started as a fund-raiser around 10 years back, which has now grown to an annual event with ticket sales capped at 15'000 (only 3 years after 23'000 swamped the festival in Hokitika). It is mostly about the various different foods harvested from the West Coast of the South Island; weird and wonderful recipes concocted to make palatable the most bizarre of food types – venison and wild pork on one stall was joined by cooked testicles, flicking to another stall brought 'wild stag hearts' to my attention as a foodstuff, even grasshoppers, wasp larvae ice cream, worms, eel, and gorse sausages were offered. When I say 'mainly about the food', I mean the Kiwis have taken the festival into their hearts and found that the word 'Festival' is synonymous in their vocabulary with the words “Boozed” and “Fancy Dress”. Feeling that I had merely dabbled with the more savoury of foods so far (venison roll, whitebait patty and ostrich sandwich) I couldn't quite pull myself past the 'Huhu Grub' stall where gruff Coasters were chopping up rotting wood and pulling out little wriggling white grubs. Crunchy.
We were also moved to hot foot it up to Tauranga Bay in our Punakaiki week. It is a beautiful bay with a seal colony easily visible from a short walk, fortunately it also has a really good cafe where I could hide out (having visited the area about 4 or 5 times already) whilst the others viewed the seals. The sun was dropping in the sky as I went to pick up the volunteers, and what a sunset it was!Our time in Okarito is sadly going to be cut short by an unfortunate event; on driving into the village on Monday, I was passing a ride-on mower as it turned, and the mower spat up a stone which collided with the bottom of the rear passenger window of the van, chipping the very bottom of the window. The safety glass did its job – shattering into a million pieces and holding together, protecting a slightly startled James in the back seat! The next 3 or so hours were spent on the phone notifying CVNZ, and attempting to source a new part to be fitted in Greymouth on Thursday. This sounds like an easy thing to arrange, but of course the part is non-standard, not held in stock on the West Coast, and has to be brought across from Christchurch, so it was a bit of a hassle.
Sadly at this current time we are being rained out of the work we were aiming to carry out. Yesterday we cleaned up the wharf area where the gorse was getting the better of the recreation area. The afternoon was spent combing the beach for gorse seedlings which were starting to invade the area that the banded dotterel nests. On hands and knees we pulled, grunted and strained to remove these prickly little bastards. I even 'got rage' at one point as a gorse bush I grappled with started to come out but then snapped at the critical moment, leaving me with but a thin stump to attempt to remove it with – an impossible task. I was heard to shout 'I hate gorse!' and then set about attacking it with the loppers. Cookie later confided in me 'I was going to offer some help but decided it was best to leave you, as I thought I may get shouted at'. I'm so committed.Conversation topics have so far ranged somewhat over the 2 weeks;
The Attenboroughs, Wine, Rudyard Kipling's racist leanings and insane apple pies, Australia, 'is tuna made of dolphin?', England vs France rugby, Graphic Design, Photography, sleep talking (“help me”), famous Dad's, martial arts, university days, Scuba Diving, musical instruments, crabs and their diets, ninja pirates or pirate ninjas?, STD's (not amongst the team I should add), astronomy, amnesia, Anchorman, “Yes, no... um... no, yes. What's the question? No. Yes”, folk music, Emergency Toilet Roll, Pokemon, ecology, worldly travels, the virtues and limitations of the British Empire, food in general, The Kimberley (my rant), industrious ants, the formation and similarities of bagpipes and black pudding.Food we've eaten: Carbonara, Red thai curry, Bangers & mash, Confit of chicken a l'orange (I cooked it, not the French peeps!), Cheesy gratin of potato veges & Ham, Beef stew, Burrito wraps, and a menagerie of other tasty morsels.
So this is what life has become – roaming the South Island with small bands of volunteers who make me laugh like an idiot. It's not all bad :)
Links;
West Coast mish-mash photo album
Punakaiki Coastal Restoration Project Blog (when I'm given the ok)
