Swamped in Akaroa (Mar. 28-30)

So we may have left Amberely a little too soon, as we’ve encountered some crappy, rainy weather these past few days. We’re at Onuku Farm Hostel just outside of Akaroa right now, originally a French settlement and now a small tourist town on the harbor on the Banks Peninsula, only an hour or so from Christchurch. Banks Peninsula is actually an extinct volcano jutting out of the east coast south of Chch, and has some tremendous views of the harbor that cuts its way north from the sea. This is at least what we’ve been told, as we drove in the clouds on the way in, and are marooned in the mist in the mountainside hostel right now. Hopefully the weather will break by Friday when we leave, or we’ll be bumming about having come to Akaroa in the worst weather of the past few weeks…

The outdoor kitcken at Onuku Farm Hostel

Update – Good news! Friday morning provided gorgeous weather in Akaroa: blue skies, sun shining, birds singing, etc etc. We could actually see stuff, it was terrific. With the first nice weather in days, we felt we had to do a small hike in Akaroa and take the scenic drive out of town. The drive was great, taking us along the ridgelines of the volcanic mountaintops and providing breathtaking views of the harbor and the outer edges of the peninsula. The weather almost made the entire previous day’s mope of sitting in the hostel with other similarly disheartened travelers, mostly Germans if you were wondering, worthwhile. I say almost because it was a pretty damn sad mope-a-thon; most of the people there couldn’t be bothered to even put some music on. C’mon people, when life hands you lemons, you don’t just say “I have a citrus allergy”!

The gorgeous view of the Banks Peninsula

Before leaving K&B’s, I got a proper look at the winery on Thursday. As it’s harvest time right now, it’s totally abuzz with activity, especially since the bottling truck was in for the day. After working the dual-head filler at Brew Moon and cranking out several hundred bottles a day, I was quite able to appreciate a machine that could do hundreds an hour with much less human labor input. Kieran, you need to get something like that at the brewery, man! We gather that harvest time is like tax season for wineries, as Belinda said she’ll be working at least 12 hours a day/7 days a week for the next few weeks. Picking grapes, cleaning barrels, bottling, processing grapes, it apparently all comes to a head at this time. But if we’ve ever met someone equipped to work tirelessly for weeks at a time, it would probably be Belinda, which might explain how she finds herself in this line of work, I suppose.

The automatic bottling works at Muddy Water

On leaving K&B’s, we immediately had to come to grips with our itinerant, peripatetic lifestyle again, making trips to the grocery store and gas station, and having to pay for lodging once again. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to staying in one place, and not having to shell out every day for the basic necessities. With all the travel we’ve been doing, we’ve learned to appreciate thriftiness. Even when you can nominally afford it, it’s a good feeling to give the wallet a rest.

These are perhaps the cutest cows I've ever seen... they have teddy bear ears!

But I’m sure we’ll get in the swing of traveling around again soon, and the desultory weather might be a large part of our angst right now. After we leave Akaroa, we’re planning to make our way down the coast to Dunedin this weekend, then on to our next wwoofing spot, a backpackers in the Catlins. We’ve heard plenty of good things about the Catlins, so we’re pretty keen to get there. The hostel promises free surfing lessons for its wwoofers, so plan on seeing some pictures of us flopping around in the Southland surf sometime soon. We may also get to do some work with penguin conservation there, which sounds quite cool as well. Suppose we’ll see…

Becky enjoying the view at Lookout Rock

Andrew in front of the Akaroa Harbor