Free Labour

We arrived in New Plymouth just as the sun was setting. We were invited to stay at Glyn and Gail's house and they had dinner ready for when we arrived. They are a cute older couple who are now retired. They are old hippies from Britian who moved to New Zealand 35ish years ago. Glyn has done a few things but the latest job was as a nursery owner on their property for over 2 decades. Gail recently retired from teaching at the local catholic school. They live on a ten acre property of land which they  slowly built up from cattle fields into a wooded natural garden.

HelpX is a program where people can advertise jobs they need help with in exchange for accommodations and food. As such, we are helping Glyn with a bunch of the gardening work around the property. They sold about 3 acres to some friends and sold the nursery off but they still have a large property to care for. We agreed to about 4 hours a day but being retired, they aren't in a hurry and so the work may end early, or bad weather ends it early. They are also okay with us working extra so we can take a day off.

For the work, we did a lot of hauling. Logs and sticks and plants that needed to be removed. The one day we ended up working 8 hours to take the next day off. We also worked longer since a family friend came with his chainsaw to removed a bunch of trees that were starting to die. It is a really heavy, hard wood which burns really well. Later we started helping with the pruning of a bunch of hydrangea plants all over the property. With the weather, we kept having to run for cover and find different work but it's been fun.

Glyn and Gail are very interesting people. They've been together for a long time but never had children. They joke that they have all adopted family instead. They travel a lot, and Glyn enjoys talking about plants. His property has a large variety of plants from all over the world. Many government gardens or botanical gardens have a free plant swap where they can give and take seeds from all over the world. He started doing it in New Zealand since no one else was and thus has a bunch of unique and rare plants on his property. Since he also sold plants, he has breed some of his own breeds and they sell world wide also. They are also part of this elite plant club that you can only join if invited in. Members include people like the head of San Francisco's botanical garden and other large organizations. The club will do a 1-2 week trip a year to a different part of the world to drink, meet, talk, and visit local greenery. This includes countries like Iran, Taiwan, Korea, and anywhere else with local members.

With his large access to seeds, though New Zealand is now much stricter on importing plants and animals, he also set up his garden to always have something in bloom. Though the summer will have more, while wandering around the property you can find hidden gems everywhere. 

We plan to stay here until Saturday morning before traveling on and are enjoying the stay very much. Annika has her own room and washroom while I'm located out in their secondary apartment with my own everything. We share all our meals with them, sitting around the dining room table, drinking a glass or two of wine and talking with them. We also went to a family friend's place to watch the next set of world cup games and are going to be rented out there to help them with their gardening work.

After the day we worked 8 hours, the weather cleared up and was much nicer than most of the days lately. We took the opportunity to climb Mt. Taranaki, though due to it being winter, we could not do the summit climb. We followed the Translator Track up to the Taurangi Lodge which is a steep 1.5 km climb. After that, we followed the Maketawa Track back to the North Egmont visitor center. It took us approximately 4.5 hours with stops and it was a gorgeous day for the hike. By the end of it my legs hated me, but it felt good to complete it. A little sad we couldn't do the summit climb, but that is an 8 hour trek in good warm weather, so not an option. The walk down was through what they call the Goblin Forest due to the dark and sinister look of the moss hanging off the trees. 

We also did a  trip to the Tawhiti Museum. It is a very unique museum where the guy that started it made models of historical events throughout New Zealand history. There is a bunch of Maori stories and exhibits but also large exhibits about the early settlers. This includes a very large selection of tractors and farming equipment, toys, and food products. It was very cool but the amount of work he had to do is insane. He had entire armies of miniatures, life size models, and even used different sized models for perspective. One of the coolest pieces of machinery was the hedge trimmers after the war. The hedges grew so fast that they couldn't control them by hand. Their solution, take an old tank and pretty much put a helicopter blade on top to cut the bushes.

We still have a few days here, but our time has been really fun. I'm really happy to do the HelpX work since it's part of the backpacker experience. I have a bit over a month here so hoping for many more fun experiences.