Beardless

Cat and Mel, I am mainly writing this for you.  After bugging me all program about shaving my beard, I have finally done it now that you guys are gone.  See, pestering does not make me want to do it :).  And I told you that when this happened I'd show you a picture:

By the way, I kept in the braids for about 5 days and then the hair bands started falling out on their own. (You should pester Nico to redo them, I hear pestering works better on her).  For everyone else... I'm going to a hot climate, no need to wear my fuzzy chinstrap anymore!

In other news... I'm leaving here tomorrow, and we never did quite finish a cabin.  Got pretty close on both though, as they are all closed in, roofed, have windows and doors and even have the floors varnished.  They still need wiring, flashing, insulation and the interior lining.  Anyway, here are a few more pictures of the cabins.

              

        

In only 2 more days I will be in Sydney and I'm getting really excited about being on the move and seeing loads of new things again.  I am really gonna miss the dogs though.

Last week in NZ

Today might very well be the last day that I just get to chill and relax for quite a while.  On Friday, Jon, Bexie, Cat and Mel left for their road trip to Northland.  Due to "logistical complications" this left Nico and me back at the house for a few days on our own.  This is actually working out quite well for us to get all our shit together, learn some Indonesian language and forge any necessary return documents for our future travels.

There's all of us together on the last night that the girls were here.  Also it seemed it was time for a new hairdo, and Mel braided my hair.  I kinda like it.

I keep talking about making some cabins, but I dont think i've put in any pictures yet.  Here on the right is the first cabin with all the walls up and rafters on.  Below is another picture from when I was putting on the roof.  Here, the construction is so simple.  This is a testament to that, since I've never built anything like it, yet with a bit of Jon's help I wrote up the plans and did all the framing on my own.  For a foundation all we've got are 3 4"x4" bearers that I levelled with bricks.  Then the floor joysts sit right on those bearers.  The walls as you can see are all 2x4.  The roof that goes on top is just some chicken wire to hold up the roofing paper (acts as a vapor barrier) and then there is roofing iron that gets nailed in on top of that.  Right now the walls are nogged and some plywood has gone on a couple of the walls.  The second cabin has all the walls up and rafters on as well, but no roof yet.  It was crazy to see all that happen in just one day.  With 6 people working on it and the walls already built, it really goes up fast.  In this last week, I think that we'll continue to work on getting these cabins finished up.  I doubt they'll be totally done by the time I go, but it would be nice to have at least one totally closed in.

Big Plans

Big news!  Some onward plans have been made from New Zealand and on the morning of July 5th I will be heading to Sydney.  One night in Sydney and the following afternoon onto Darwin (on the north shore in the middle of Oz).  Then on July 11th I fly to Singapore, and on the 14th of July it is on to Jakarta, Indonesia.  Indonesia will be the next place that I plan on staying a month or so.  This should be a cool adventure as I know very little about Indonesia, but have heard some good stuff.  You can get a good Pacific Island experience and see the culture without heaps of tourists.

So the reason all this is happening now, is that on Sunday, the winter program here at earthwise ends.  From there Nico and I had 3 choices.  If we come back to help out Jon for the spring program, we could use the van and work on organic farms or get a job for the next 10 weeks until the beginning of the program.  Option 2 is to not come back to Earthwise and wander about NZ trying to find work, but with no vehicle or home base.  We finally decided on option 3: leave the country all together.  It would have been pretty expensive to stay in NZ and wander and we decided that it was just time to move on.  This is closer to the original plan of spending 4-6 months in NZ.  In the past week we've decided on all three options and then changed our minds.  But now we have flights purchased and it gonna happen!  I am getting really excited to experience another culture and see some totally new stuff.

On a different note, we finally got the needed supplies to move on with the cabins.  In about a day and a half of everyone going hard, we've got all the walls up and a roof on one of the cabins already.  Most of the work figuring everything out and making the walls and bases I had already done myself.  Now it is cool to work with other people and see it really come up.  I'll post again on this soon and add some picts and stuff.

Peace.

Earth Oven Plinth and Spa Bath Fireplace

These are a couple things that we have been working on recently.  We are soon going to be making an earth oven, but need a base upon which to build it (plinth in kiwi terms).  This is just a mound of rocks that I have carefully placed and we've mortared together so that the earth oven will sit at a height that is comfortable to work at.

An earth oven is basically a hollow dome with a door that is all made of clay.  You build a fire in the oven and let it burn for a while to heat up the inside of the oven.  Then after 30 mins or so, you can take out the fire and put in the food to be cooked. supposedly it is significantly more efficient than a normal stove, and since we have more firewood here than we could ever possibly use, it is way more sustainable too.








Another thing that I have been putting a lot of energy at is building a fireplace for the spa bath.  We cleared out an area and concreted a level(ish) base.  A couple days ago we started building the walls that are going to enclose it on 3 sides and will also support the vat of water and a chimney.

Here is a picture of the vat and the bricks that we have laid so far.  We still have a couple more courses to add on, but it is surprisingly sturdy so far considering I was leading the charge for the day and I have never done this before.

Anyway, the vat will sit on top and we will plug up the holes except for a chimney in the back.  Then we can have a fire underneath the vat and heat up the water which will then be gravity fed down to where the bath is.

PS, I was up early this morning and caught a beautiful sunrise that I thought I'd share.

Whats Happening

I've realized I've been pretty terrible in actually saying what's been going on aside from the few things that i specifically mentioned so far.  So lets see, starting at the house...

• We've made some new picnic tables.  I planned them out and got some people to help out.  Just yesterday we finished putting together the octagonal one which is sweet.

• Eradicated all the mistflower here, which is a foreign weed.
• Planted flax.
• Made a new garden
• Set up the Extreme Hammock!
• Built a wood box and filled it up
• cleaned out and organized all the crap under the house
• Shoveled out a pile of dirt left here and added it to the dam on the land
• Cleaned out and reorganized the garage
• Setup a tree nursery to grow native trees until they are big enough to plant on the land.
• Turned the house that we just moved in into a home.

Then on the land we've done a whole lot as well:

• Clean crap out of the river from the flood a couple months ago.  (like a once in 50 years type of flood, it is amazing to find doors and picnic tables about 2 kilometers away from where they started)
• Make a new garden and plant loads of veggies.
• Make pumpkin heaps.
• Put up a chicken house and fix up the chicken run.
• Release and mulch hundreds of trees
• Harvest flax and plan more on the land
• Dig up pohutacawa trees off the side of the road for the tree nursery
• Bash wooly nightshade, another weed from europe.
• Make shelving and clean out the containers on the land
• General clean up around the land.
• We've also set up a fishing net and caught and filleted a whole bunch of fish.  We made a smoker out of an old gutted stove and smoked thie fish which was quite tasty.

Then we also have a bunch of rec trips mixed in here.  Much of these I've mentioned already, but here's another list:

• Today we went horseback riding and hung out on the beach.
• Seakayaking to the Gannett Island, and a couple other mini trips
• Loads of snorkeling
• Whitewater rafting on the road trip south with additional picnics and beaches
• A couple forest walks out the back of the property
•  Bonfires, making american and kiwi smores.  (the kiwis dont know what they are doing, Bonesaw was right, you need to bring your own marshmellows)
• Gnome treasure hunt!  Jon and I set up a rope follow and got the volunteers to follow it all over the place while blindfolded.  It was hilarious, especially messing with them, muahaha.
• Then this saturday we are leaving for an Epic Trip! of 5 days of seakayaking on a lake and camping and hiking.  Dont know where yet...  also on the way there some of us are going paintballing.

We've also had one or two free days each week to just chill and enjoy the beauty here.  Read, play games, nap in the extreme hammock, use the interwebs (like right now!) are some of the stuff we do on these days.  So here you go, this is whats been happening.