A Lemon Tree Grows In Lawrence (Apr. 26 – May 15)

Leaving the dusty fields of the Alexandra area behind, we headed south to Lawrence, site of our next wwoofing mission, working at The Lemon Tree Café and Restaurant. In a bit of an unusual twist, the owners of the café were a German couple who rely on wwoofers to do much of the café work since the town has few eligible workers from which to draw.

Lawrence, a wee village of 500 nestled in a small valley an hour inland from Dunedin would seem to be the quintessential sleepy New Zealand town. It’s a fairly unremarkable town, but has a quaint charm with verdant sheep farms and logging-pine laden hills surrounding the town. In the town itself are a heap of churches and a main street, on which all the town’s shops and surprisingly numerous cafes (3 in a row!) are located. Walking around town at night, the nighttime sky is brilliant and full of stars, if you don’t mind the smoky haze from burning coal that most locals use to heat their homes. The locals like their rugby, their Speight’s, and their duck hunting, if our time there is any indication.

Becky, Andrew and Andrea in front of the Lemon Tree. Our last day of work!

As with many towns in the South Island, particularly in the Otago region, Lawrence was formerly a gold town, and like so many of those towns has all the obligatory historical memorabilia, tourist sites, and businesses with names in that vein that inevitably follow. We took the historical gold mining ‘interpretive walk’ in nearby Gabriel’s Gully one day, and while it made for a nice bushwalk, the informational plaques scattered around the trail didn’t really make it a ‘must-visit’ spot. One wonders whether there is that much interest in the New Zealand gold rush among travelers that it can sustain basically the same tourism activities in what has to be dozens of towns on the South Island.

Our buddy, Cam, the sous chef at the Lemon Tree

Not that Lawrence seems to be banking on that most days. As it’s a popular route from Dunedin to Queenstown, Lawrence does get a fair bit of traffic from those travelers, especially on weekends, but other than that it’s a somnolent little burg. We were told that in summer the café really gets hopping with over 100 lunches served a day, but while we were there in the chill of autumn we generally served only about 30-40.

The Lemon Tree Cafe and Restaurant

We found our hosts to be pretty interesting, as you wouldn’t expect to find too many German transplants running a successful café in what can only be described as the middle of nowhere in Otago. Their house, for starters, is a nice, big Victorian-style home with bookshelves in seemingly every room, which are necessary since they must’ve brought a whole shipping container of possessions here. Without trying to be too unkind, you could describe their home as German-Attic-Exploded-In-Kiwi-Mid-Century-Victorian.

They both must love New Zealand, though they seem horrified by small town attitudes and the lack of amenities. Perhaps we shouldn’t have told them about some of our happenings at the pub, as it only seemed to galvanize their opinions even stronger. I didn’t really mean to instigate there, but couldn’t help it… It seems pretty apparent that they would readily move back home except for the café and having a young family.

A view of Gabriel's Gully on a beautiful fall day

One funny anecdote that encapsulates their experience is story of the Giant Ice Creams. When our hosts bought the restaurant property it was the local fish and chips shop that featured giant ice cream cones (an advertisement prominently hand-painted on a shed along the highway a few miles outside of town that is so damn cute and NZ-country you’d be hard-pressed not to want to stop). While they were renovating the property, one day two rednecks roared past in their pick-up and shouted “Where the f*** are the giant ice creams?!” as they looked on in horror. As he said to us, “I was thinking, what have I gotten myself into?”

As far as the actual work went, since we’d just escaped the fields o’garlic, we were hopeful for a better wwoofing experience at the café, especially since Becky is so fond of restaurant work. As I noted in the last post, working for only room and board has served to enhance our appreciation for work that you know, pays. I have to admit that my enthusiasm for wwoofing has been flagging, not to mention that I had to cajole Becky into not quitting garlic farming within an hour of our beginning to haul rocks out of the fields.

A squid salad, replete with ornate presentation. You should've seen the BLTs!

When we arrived in town at noon on a Thursday, we were quickly thrown into the fire at the café, starting work immediately, with none of the cozy get-to-know-you period that we’ve grown accustomed to (typically a dinner and night’s rest before the work begins). Instead, Becky and I suited up in the bright yellow Lemon Tree tee shirts and café aprons to begin our first day of wwoofing.

Our work at the café was pretty typical as far as café labor goes. When it’s busy with customers, Becky does a variety of things: baking, taking orders, running food, busing tables, washing dishes, prep work, etc. There’s also no shortage of cleaning to be done. Because I’m a dude, I’ve ended up with most of the grunt work, like chopping up heaps of pumpkins for their soup (Becky thinks I’ve earned my merit badge on that one), cutting frozen chickens, and other fun things. I actually don’t mind that work, as I’d rather do that then ferry coffees to the tables.

I’ve also done lots of groundskeeping work at their sprawling Victorian property, with some paint-scraping and sanding thrown in, as well. Becky thinks it should qualify as an “estate” by NZ standards, since most are nondescript ranch homes with no landscaping. Again, not bad work, especially when the weather has been nice, though they may have been a bit anal about the lawn, or they were just been giving me busywork. To wit, I raked the property twice one week, and nearly a third, while there were still leaves on the trees. The futility factor of such work gets dangerously close to rock-pulling in garlic fields.

We’re not actually sure how much we enjoyed our time at the Lemon Tree. We found Lawrence to be nice enough, if a bit too sleepy, and despite long hours on our working days, the work was pretty agreeable, making time fly by, in stark contrast to garlic planting. When our hosts were engaging, we got along well with them and enjoyed talking to them, as they’ve had some really interesting experiences. Food at the café was also generally very tasty, and we enjoyed our daily coffees tremendously. One of the wwoofers, Andrea, made some awesome espresso drinks at the Lemon Tree that must be the best in Otago: we were hooked almost immediately and will truly miss our daily gratis mochaccinos/lattes. Camaraderie with our fellow workers was also great, as we really got on well with Andrea, Steffi, Cameron, Thilo, Jessica, and James and Vicki. They were all hard workers, full of good spirit, and a pleasure to work with. Special thanks to Steffi for the German lessons. We learned a bunch of useful German phrases, which will come in handy when we get to Oktoberfest someday.

We did indeed like a number of things about the café, as we asked to stay for a week longer than the two week period we’d originally promised. However, we soon regretted making the request, as we started to get a strong vibe from our hosts that they weren’t very keen to have us around. We often felt that we weren’t meeting some unexplained criteria, and so we just didn’t know how to improve the situation. We did wonder why they said we could stay on longer, and we joked together more than a few times that we wouldn’t really have minded if they’d asked us to leave. I guess not everyone will like you, but we really wish we knew what we were doing to offend them.

Our home in Lawrence for three weeks - "The Property"

Well, we don’t want to make this a completely whingey post, so we’ll skip it for now. We will take some good memories away from this experience and we certainly feel like we tried to make the best of it while we were there. However, our wwoofing days are probably over for the time being. Working hard for room and board and living in close quarters (where quiet hours are always in effect) with a young family and five other twentysomethings may not always be the best combination – we’re learning new things all the time here!