Christchurch New Zealand - First Stop

New Zealand

My travels to Antarctica started with a long day and night of travels. I left Billings Montana September 23rd, 2010. The First leg of the journey flew me to Salt Lake City, Utah. Then on to LosAngeles, California where I boarded a large Quantas A330 that flew me over the next 14 hours to Auckland New Zealand. Upon going through customs they were very adamant about washing my sneakers due to some mud on them. In New Zealand they are very concerned with bio security, so I gave in and stood shoeless for 5 minute. To their credit the shoes have never looked better. Off I went to my next flight that would land me in Christchurch. In Christchurch it has become customary to stay in the Windor Bed and Breakfast. It is a warm elegant place with perfect balance of convenience and New Zealand atmosphere. It had sustained minor damage to it's chimmneys during the recent earth quake here. Yet Don and his crew carried on. They have the scaffold up and rebuilding going on.

All throughout Christchurch are examples of the power of that quake. Many of the victims were the Ood and dilapidated builings. The churches harbored damage to their high decorative gable ends and garnishments. I was impressed how quickly the structures were stabilized given the size of the earthquake.

Going South to Oamaru

After a couple days in Christchurch I ventured south to the city of Oamaru. It is a town of 13,000 about a 3 hour bus ride from Christchurch through the eastern farm land of Southern NZ. Wikipedia has a great overview of the town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oamaru. My destination was the Sherman Farm in Weston just outside Oamaru. Gail and Zim Sherman along with their son Levi and faithful dog Blaze provided a fantastic Work-for-Stay farm experience. They often host WOOFers in exchange for a few hours of work a day.

Meet Gail, Zim (David), Levi ( in true form) Also around somewhere chasing rabbits is Blaze the faithful sheep dog.

Here are the are the faithful milk cows. These along with about 4 more provide subsistance for the family in the dairy products rhelm. They are a focal point of the off season work. The milk , Zim told me, really improved when the cows got on new fresh green grass this spring. I can attest to the wonderful taste and cream. Now all we need are the vegetables the summer will soon bring.





Zim took part of a day and showed me around Oamaru.

It is a fantastic unknown destination. The City is a bussling center of small single proprieter shops and cottage industries. One in particular of interest was Michael O'Brien book binder. This husband and wife team carries on the dying art of rebinding and restoring old books. They do actually create new books for journals and custom items. The shop looks like a piece of time circa 1880's as the equipment they were using dated certainly close to that age. I felt as if I walked into the past. We then satisfied our appetite with a stop at the local bakery where we indulged in two baked breakfast pies each. A walk through the Botanical Gardens was astounding as its 30 acres seemed like hundreds all ordained in exquisit landscaping and waterscaping.



At the farm we spent time planting seeds for the coming season. The firewood pile had to get re-arranged so as to facilitate drying for this coming winter's heat source. Note that their hot water is generated via the kitchen woodstove's water circuit. So when they need hot water, someone has to get the fire going in the morning. Yet a short wood fire produces enough boiling hot water for the entire day in part to an ingenious hotwater tank used for storage (270 liter cap.). All the water is gravity fed from a roof mounted tank that the well pump feeds.

Zim and Gail are fantastic cooks. They prepare meals of a quality and flavor found only in fine restaurant in a major city. Their small community, though full of almost every nessesity, lacked a variety of fine food quisine so Zimm and Gail took it upon themselves to create their own specialty meals using a great percentage of their own produce for the meal. Another great skill to pick up here is bread making. Zim is very excited to show one how to make many types of bread, even traditional types like Challah. This is a traditional Jewish bread that has a woven loaf form. It was so good I could not stop speaking of it for three days. I look forward to baking a few loaves of this myself.


My accommodation was a quaint little recycled cabin that had some very modern conveniences like hot water sink, my own restroom - composting toilet, and large foldout bed with heating blanket. This is paradise for a WOOFER or farm intern. Plus I was able to get on the wireless internet from the cabin. Nice!







Pretty nice huh? Well Stop by and work for a while. His contact info is:
zim.sherman@gmail.com
But please no loafers. They are a hard working farm family and need your help in exchange for stay.