“You two aren’t from around here are you..” -most everyone we meet New Zealand.

Chika and I arrived in New Zealand’s second largest city, Christchurch one month ago. Our flight, apart from being leg numbing long, was nothing special. Upon arriving though we have experienced so much and met so many people, which is normally the case coming to a new country. I write to you now from a little café in a city five hours to the south of Christchurch, Dunedin, from which we are already about to depart, so I think I have quite a bit of filling in to accomplish in this first newsletter.

Before hopping on a plane, I found a website through which we have found all of our accommodation so far called Helpex.net, which I would recommend to everyone. The way it works is people post that they have a room available in their home and will offer meals to anyone who is willing to work a few hours in exchange for it each day. On the site, people are looking for help with cooking meals, taking care of farm animals, painting homes, building projects, garden work etc. Right when we started to look, I saw one listing that looked especially promising which was looking for help in an organic café right in the city where we wanted to live. We emailed the man and had a response within an hour saying we could stay for as long as we would like. To tell the truth, it seemed too good to be true and a small part of me thought he might turn out to be a serial killer, but we decided to go for it anyway. Fast forward three weeks and we are stepping off the airplane and Dan is sitting at the airport waiting to whisk us, and all of our absurdly large luggage, off to his home right on the beach.

Dan indeed runs a small organic juice bar in a part of the city right on the beach. He is very relaxed about the whole business and after just one day of working we were left in charge of the café making smoothies and juices and serving food to 30 people at a big event. It was baptism by fire but December 5th, 2015 after that night we for sure knew how to make everything on the menu and felt comfortable from then on dealing with the normal lunch rush every day. During the month that we stayed at Dan’s home, he continued to accept more and more people through the Helpex program until we had 10 people staying at the house. By shear luck we were the first to arrive and got set up in the small apartment downstairs and had our own kitchen, shower and queen sized bed. It also meant that we worked almost exclusively at the café while others were put to work pouring a foundation and clearing rocks for a future sauna. It also helped that I got three stitches in my finger while sledge hammering a tin shed which mostly eliminated me from the manual labor camp. Just a quick note about that whole experience because I think it is interesting how the health system works here. Long story short, I got a pretty deep cut on my index finger which required three stitches. Dan drove me to the hospital and within ten minutes I was seeing a doctor and from the moment I smashed my finger to the moment I stepped out the hospital was one hour. All they asked me was my name, address and date of birth and the entire process cost just 45$ out of pocket, which included the multiple checkups I had to have on it to change bandages and eventually get the stitches out. It was a welcome surprise especially because I don’t yet even pay taxes here and my insurance is basically just for extreme accidents. I am all healed up now and have most of the movement back and I don’t even know if I will have a nice scar to remind me of it all years from now because they did such a good job sewing it all up. OK, back to the café. One of the drinks that they serve at the café is a wheatgrass shot which sprouted wheat seeds put through a high pressure juicer and which required quite a bit of wheat to produce.

Dan is extremely busy with running two businesses, having 10 people stay at his house, and having two children so I took over the wheatgrass grow operation at the house which I can proudly say was the most successful thing I have ever grown. I normally kill most plants in my realm so I was quite surprised to be able to take wheat seeds and coax them into tray upon tray of bright green grass over and over again. Eventually I had about 25 trays going and it basically took over the entire patio of his home, but we were all happy to have a constant supply at the café. The chef at the café, which is called Antidote, is from India and is a really wonderful guy. His name is Sam and he cooks everything fresh every morning and changes the menu every day. We get to eat there every time we work so we are happy it is such great food and constantly changing. I also started to cook a few breads for the café which was fun to do because they have a really great, full sized oven and all of the pots and pans to make pretty good stuff. We started to serve breakfast and Sam would put a few slices of my bread on the plate to give to real paying customers which of course felt pretty good.

Over the course of our time in Christchurch we heard many people mention a town called Dunedin and we figured that we should maybe check it out before settling down for sure in Christchurch. We hopped on the same Helpex website and found a woman offering her beautiful, historic and centrally located house up in exchange for some garden work. We emailed her and it was soon decided that we would head down there after spending just three weeks in Christchurch. It was nice to have a timeline set because it allowed us to focus on getting everything in order for eventual long term travel here. We bought a car which was again, just like the health care system here, incredibly easy and straight forward. We were very lucky to find a pretty good deal on a slightly larger minivan and a very nice previous owner. For some reason the bank didn’t have enough cash at the bank to let me withdraw how much we needed for the car, so they said to withdraw from the ATM. The only problem with that being the ATM only dispenses 20$ bills, which meant we pulled up to the man’s home with a ziplock bag bursting with cash. After getting the van we went on a search around town for wood and stumbled upon a demolition sight all too grateful to get rid a huge piece of particle board and some planks. With a stitched up finger and a power saw I hammered together a pretty cool elevated bed with pull out table for the back of the van. Around NZ there are many free camp sites in the most incredibly beautiful locations, so having a van to sleep in is a pretty convenient thing and very common as well.

Before we left for our next city, Dan offered for us to come back and live with him again in January because he liked having us at the café so much. It is really a great set up now because we can go traveling for most of December and return to a place that we really love for more exciting experiences and a roof over our heads for January. On our last night we had a big party at the home with most everyone we had met in the past three weeks. The Spanish guitar player Oscar, the kiwi gentleman Tim, the pirate Ukulele player Kerry, the Yogi Israeli Adi, Chef Sam, the French Diablo juggler Soni all showed up for our big send off and we spent the night singing and dancing and just being silly. It seems like people don’t really slow down here much, even into their 70s, and we hang out with lots of 60s men and women who have wonderful and creative lives and are very outgoing. In fact people of all ages here are really outgoing and have made us feel very at home very quickly. I think it is even more striking after having lived in Japan where people were very curious about me and where I was from and that I spoke some Japanese but rarely invited me to participate in their lives. Here right away people invited us over for guitar jam sessions, tea and to cafes to have a drink which all kept us quite busy during our time in Christchurch.

Finally the day came for us to leave so with stitches freshly removed , a loaded up and newly retrofitted van stocked up for the journey and the wheatgrass torch handed off to the next group of people staying at the home, we were off to give our van its maiden voyage. Luckily our van is automatic which is nice because with driving on the other side of the road there is already quite a lot to think about. One is that everything is reversed, including the blinker and windshield washer which makes roundabouts fun where the pressure if really on to get blinkers right. Before purchasing our van, Dan lent us his manual Subaru station wagon which was my first experience driving on the left hand side of the road. Of course we had to go into the center of the city my first time driving it too. To this day I have never driven an American manual on a road system that I fully understand. I have driven a tiny French manual car in Peru in the desert on sand roads, a French utility truck in France and now a stick shift with all of the gears reversed in New Zealand. After a few stall outs and some grinding of gears I felt pretty comfortable in the car and now I am so fully switched over to this side of the road that I don’t even question it anymore. Our first campsite was incredible, with a beautiful view of the ocean and great weather. We were able to pull out our little table and cook dinner while taking in the view of the waves to our left and meandering sheep to our right and it was exactly what I wanted to be doing while on a road-trip in a new country.

In 2011 Christchurch was hit with the worst earthquake in its history. Apparently before the quake it was known as a beautiful, very English influenced old city full of historic buildings. We are here now almost five years later and the damage is still absolutely unbelievable. In the center of town everything is under construction and virtually nothing remains of the old part of the city. In our neighborhood mile long sections a couple blocks wide bordering the river have been completely torn down and nothing still stands. It is really eerie because all of the trees are still planted just like they would be in a neighborhood, in little squares and in a front lawn but no there are no houses. The city where we arrived a week ago, named Dunedin, still has beautiful old buildings and is a real joy to stroll about. New Zealand wasn’t colonized by European settlers until fairly recently and most of the buildings here don’t date more than 1900 so it reminds me a lot of Milwaukee in the style of architecture and colors that are present here. It is also a huge university town so about one is five people is a student here. The downtown is wonderful because it is bursting with cafes, restaurants, used shops and even two little three screen movie houses. The house where we are currently staying is a beautiful hundred year old home with a wonderful garden in the rear where we have spent most of our time. We spend our days weeding, planting new plants, watering, mowing the lawn and everything involved in caring for a garden. I now know the difference between a peony and a rose, which is a step in the right direction for sure. We both don’t mind the work and Marylyn, the owner of the house, has been really generous and feeds us great food, lets us use everything we want to cook, and we have our own private room and bathroom. Chika’s favorite feature is the fitted sheet of our bed which has heating pads built right in so when we climb into bed after a long day bent over weeding we hop into a spectacularly toasty paradise. The weather here is pretty nuts and changes constantly. I was explained that because New Zealand is so small it doesn’t really have enough land mass to generate its own weather system so it is constantly caught in a dance between the hot winds blowing in off of Australia and the extremely cold winds blowing up from Antarctica.

Yesterday for example we had winds so strong you could hardly stand up in the morning, then rain, and by night it was warm and totally agreeable. Marylyn has a second house in the mountains on the apparently stunning lake Ohau and is letting us go up and stay for a week just to hang out work free because we put in so many extra hours here weeding and so on. Chika is wildly good at weeding and will leave an area perfectly weedless if given the time to do so, which I think impressed Marylyn and put us in her good graces. After that we will spend two weeks just traveling around in the mountains and camping wherever suits us for the night. We haven’t really gotten into the mountains here yet, which will be a completely different atmosphere, and I am sure quite stunning. Right after Christmas we are going to work for one week with a couple who runs a hotel and takes Helpex volunteers and seem really genial. Then we will go back to Christchurch to work for maybe a month or more with Dan at the café again. I can’t believe one month has already passed and I have a feeling the year is going to fly by so quickly. I am really impressed by New Zealand, and especially the people here who are so generous and nice and yes there are as many sheep as everyone says there are. I hope that everyone has a wonderful holiday season and gets to spend time with family and friends. Chika and I will be sleeping in our van somewhere on a mountain on Christmas day so hopefully Santa is able to find us because Chika already said she isn’t getting me a present this year because we have to save money. She’s as cheap as me.

Merry everything everyone, -James