Old MacDonald had a farm E I E I O

We have been one full week on the farm now and have a couple of more weeks to go and I thought it could be worth giving an update!

In all honesty Erik and I suffered from a big cultural shock the first couple of days. From glamorous (ehh) camping life to a very different farmer life. But we have adjusted more and more and suddenly picking up different type of animal diarreah poo feels like a piece of cake! ;) The owners of the farm are very friendly and we are woofing together with a german guy (who is a typical handy-man, which is very good since Erik and I are the total opposite). We are working every day, but three times a week only from 8.15-11.15 and the other days to 16.15. A typical day can look like following:

• Up at 7.30. Damn we sleep good here. Completely exhausted, even on our shorter days since we usually bike in to the city which is a total of 8 km). Feeding time at 8.15. Our least favourite are the pigs, freakin' huge and super annoying and they eat garbage. Seriously if I would slip and fall on to the ground I think they would eat me up in 10  minutes. The rest of the animals are supercute and excited for food, and they have all such different personalities. There are 13 lamas here and feeding them is a challange...they are bigger than me and I am fighting for my life while giving them food (kind of). They havn't spitted on us yet and they are actually quite cute...especially from a distance. But the owners do a lot of lama trekking for tourists here and it would be interesting to join once.
• Change and fill up their water. Since there is over 100 animals on the farm this takes a while...at least feeding is more fun since they actually get excited to see you (the food). They couldn't give a rats arse about the water. Except the ducks. The ducks love water time.
• Poop time! Best time of the day, of course. Haha. Erik is seriously thinking about breaking up with me and run far, far away every time its poop cleaning time ;) But we are starting to get pro's! You can call us "The Poop Pro's" from now on hahaha (please don't).
• Preparing the food for afternoon/ next day. Ever wondered what a lama/wallaby/sheep/a bambi eats? Well think no more, now you can just ask us in the future! haha
• After lunch time its' time to do different projects if you work the full day....Erik is for example the gardener  here and I am painting a door...only been here a week and the door is still not finished but that's a different story...
• 15.15 feeding time and water time again. Done!

My dad think this sounds like hell on earth, haha, but I enjoy it more and more! It is not as hard work as it sounds like and we can often bike in to civilasation after work for some drinks and to see people instead of animals. I am getting more and more attached to these animals though..especially a particular three-legged border collie dog who is just the cutest thing on earth...

Both Erik and I (especially Erik) are very much city-folks. Haha. We like things clean...and luxuries (okay especially I am very comfortable...I like the good life,yupp). But we are learning a lot from this experience, and I promise I am not forcing Erik at all to be here, even if some people might think so... ;) 

We have booked our ticket from Christchurch back to Auckland 23rd of April, and then we have about 10 more days left on the north island before we fly of to Sydney!

Tonight we are off into town to partyyyy. It is St. Paddys day today of course. Luckily Kaikoura is an extremely touristic town so there is a nice international crowd here!

These are the murderpigs I mentioned...this guy looks like a grumpy old man and snores louder than my dad during most of the day

Me and Erik are either considering to become "pigvegetarians" in the future OR enjoying eating bacon even more after this...we havn't decided yet... ;)

Okey so PLEASE ignore my horrible hair/outfit, I know I look like a run-down Britney Spears here on the farm but hey...it is not all about the looks right (eeh yes it is!). Erik has completely forbidden me to EVER post any pictures of him in his farm-uniform so I gotta respect that...haha. Charlie the Wallaby is such a character...a very gently girl.

A common view here

I saved three baby chickens that was 1 day old when I found them! They were bullied by a goose...however now only two remains :(...nature has her way...

Erik and Jess the-three-legged-dog, a love story...

This farm is known for their popular, odd accomodations we help out to clean sometimes...they are on tripadvisor "Wacky stays".

Bambi came here when she was only 2 days old...now she is 7 years. She thinks she is a pony but love to get a good scratch like a dog....(once again, ignore my britney-hair)

Very relaxing here...especially with a glass of wine in your hand

Kaikoura beach....then I have many more pictures of me in different resturants in the city eating and drinking, however that will be too many "selfies-with-a-glass-of-wine"-pictures...

The last few days with our campervan...and work!

The last few days with our precious campervan was spent in Dunedin and the Otago peninsula. Dunedin is the only Scottish city in New Zealand (the rest were claimed by the English) and we liked it a lot. Fairly small, like every major city in NZ, but with a lot of students and bars (me like!). 

But the best part was really the Otago peninsula, which is an hours ride from the city with a car. Can’t really say that my expectation where high, I mean, the “Royal Albatross centre” doesn’t really sound all that sexy. But it was very beautiful and interesting. My eyes opened up for the Albatross bird, damn they are cool! Also saw some cute furry seals laying around everywhere (I think they are my inner animal). Unfortunately, we did not see the world’s smallest penguins that hang around on that peninsula as well.

The day after we went to Lake Tekapo which we heard about but was not overwhelmed. Perhaps because the weather was crappy and the lake was no competition to what we had seen down in the Queenstown region. I think we are getting pretty spoiled!

The day after we got up early to leave our dear Milli Jucy as we called her at the airport in Christchurch. Went very smoothly…we stressed out a little the day before and cleaned her inside out, and they didn’t even come to check her out with us! We just left the keys and could go…

We got to our hostel here in Christchurch, had about an hour nap (aka Me on Instagram/Facebook for an hour while Erik slept) and then went to the common room to start applying for work.

When we were visiting Fox Glacier two weeks ago we already saw an ad to come and work at an animal park farm just outside of Kaikoura (2,5 hours north of Christchurch). It involved a lot of animal care (feeding, cleaning etc) and I died a little bit inside because I would loveeee to work with animals on a farm in New Zealand and get my hands dirty. But they were only looking for one person and we had still had some travels to do. 

But yesterday we saw they had just posted a new ad, and this time they were looking for two people. We send them an email at once and literally two hours later, after some phone calls, we got it! So lucky J So we are leaving our hostel one day earlier than planned and tomorrow we are off to Kaikoura with the bus! We get our accommodation and meals paid for and will save so much money now for Australia and South east Asia. 

So, we will be farmers until the end of April hopefully, haha. So looking forward to see Erik in his farm uniform mocking poo! Hihi. And I will try to snuggle with the guinea pigs as much as possible:D Here is some online promotion for the farm: www.kaikourafarmpark.co.nz

Today we spent the whole day in Christchurch. It has been very interesting and also very sad. 5 years ago Christchurch has a terrible earthquake (and another one, weaker, just three weeks ago). 185 people died from over 20 nation, and the city was damaged so bad. Still, 5 years later, they are still trying hard to rebuild the city but it is a slow process. The city center is literally now temporarily built out of containers. But they have done a really cool and creative job, with a lot of art and amazing not-so-temporary delicious street food and high fashion stores are located in these containers. It is not fair to give an opinion of the city based on how it looks now after this catastrophe. Would be interesting to come back in 10 years time to check it out.

Cheers to you who actually read this very long text! (In order words, tack mamma!) ;)

happy Erik, lazy seal 

The mighty Albatross

You don't see these types of signs every day

These pictures above are all of Christchurch city centre...buildt out of containers. Very nicely done and chill atmosphere

Milford sound

(Two new posts ahead!)

We stayed in the Queenstown region for about 3 nights and then headed out south west to Milford sound. I had really looking forward to this part of the trip, but was also a bit worried about the weather situation. It rains 100 days per year in Milford Sound and many other days it can be very misty and cloudy. Imagine this, it rains a bit more than 600 mm of rain per year in London. In Milford Sound it rains more than 6000 mm per year. Crazy stuff. We had already booked kayaking two weeks before so we just had to cross our fingers for good fortune.

Just the car drive to Milford Sound was beyond spectacular. So pretty. Cannot describe it and nor can our camera. We drank 3 red bulls and put on party music and suddenly the 300 km drive felt like nothing from Queenstown!

We had the worlds luck with the weather. Freakin’ sunny, not a cloud on the sky and not windy at all for our whole stay there (3 nights). We discovered one thing though. Imagine that it was 24 + C during the day. The first night we woke up 6 o’clock in the morning feeling like what Jack and Kate probably felt went Titanic sank. Soooo cold. Close to minus degrees. We learned our lesson for the other two nights and went to bed with two pants, a shirt and a jumper.

The kayaking was spectacular. We saw seals in the water next to us and on the cliffs. Our guide Ollie, a funny mustache Kiwi man, says there are seldom dolphins in these waters only once per month or so. Suddenly we saw some activities like 2 km away and we paddled our way towards the tumbling in the water. Around 8-9 dolphins were playing there and they got very curious of us. One really cool moment was when a dolphin just came underneath our boat and, because the water is very clear there, I could see her cute face and everything.

To make a long story short, we are currently in Dunedin with some pretty OK internet for the first time in a week. Our car is starting to break down. Yesterday we had to start it with some jump leads that we could borrow from some friendly Germans, then again after 1 hour of drive the battery went dead again. We went to a garage to get it fixed. But now AC doesn’t work nor does the lights in the car etc etc haha. We have to return our dear Jucy on Tuesday in Christchurch, so only three more nights (!).

We had the best time in this car, even if she is getting tired now. We did not kill each other, on the contrary I must say I have very many butterflies in my stomach when I spend time with Erik. It has been great to actually spend some quality time together WITHOUT INTERNET and WITHOUT WORK. It has been great and I am so grateful that we had the opportunity to do this trip.

From Tuesday next week a new adventure begins when we do not have a car anymore. We would like to find some work for a couple of weeks, doesn’t matter if it means getting our hands dirty. Let’s see how that works out!

Cute seals!

Queenstown, a Fergburger and horse riding

After Franz Josef Glacier we headed out south, a loong way south until we after 7-8 hours in the car reached Queenstown. We had a 3 min stop on our way to have some “lunch” (spaghetti and cheese in a can) when we suddenly got attacked by a billion sandflies and we fled the scene very quickly. These sandflies are really the back ass of NZ. Worse than mosquitos because they are smaller and their bites are even more itchier.  

I think we both fell a little bit in love with Queenstown, super cute town with a lot of activities, bars and cafés and a beautiful surroundings, like, better than a postcard.

On my bucketlist in Queenstown I had “eating the legendary Fergburger”. Everyone speaks about this damn burger! Lonely planet, people at my office in Amsterdam and friends back home. So…expectations were immensely high! But yes, oh yes the legend was true! A damn delicious burger. We were lucky with the queue, we only had to wait around 45 min for our burgers. We also went to cinema! Deadpool! Super awesome I though, less super awesome according to Erik. Sooo…that’s more or less what we did in Queenstown. Had burgers and went to cinema…haha!

The next day, as pictures on Instagram and Facebook already revealed, I went horse riding! Erik want me to make it clear here that I was the only one that went horse riding, Erik is way to cool for that ;)

The horse riding tour was called “the Ring (something) and River wild (something). Don’t really remember the name actually but it had a lot of association with LoTr since we went riding where they filmed a lot for the film…for example were Boromir dies and were the Rohan riders went running, whaat. Yes, that was the only reason why I went horse riding just there. 

A little bit advanced for me I noticed since we suddenly were supposed to…I don’t know the term but run with the horse…galopp…? But the slower version. Well, it was fast enough for me and I held on to Danny-the-horse for dear life. Must have been a sight. I survived though!

Some non-professional pictures taken of Queenstown

Before delicious Fergburger

After delicious Fergburger. Me like food.

This is where we were camping outside of Queenstown. Beats hostels in the middle of the city (shouldn't say too much though since we will soon start sleeping in 10 dorm hostels I guess!)

It was a lot of crossing rivers. Yes, I took these pictures while on a horse back for the first time in years. Silly me.

Me and Danny-the-horse! (Who refused to cross water without a push from the leading horse)

Spectacular!