Still alive!

November 24th, 2010

Just a quick note to let you all know we're still here, yesterday was the last of 5 long hard days of work doing the shop move for Kathmandu. We have been absolutely knackered, working up to 10.5 hour days of major physical labour. It's all good though, and we even landed ourselves 6 weeks of work at the Kathmandu store in Nelson (south island) this fall (March-April)! Today we are recovering, catching up on all the things we were too exhausted to do in the last several days: laundry, sleeping in, grocery shopping. We are now preparing for Thanksgiving tomorrow, we will be hosting Thanksgiving dinner for all 10 (and an infant) current inhabitants of the Wavehaven, so tomorrow will be an awesome cooking and eating marathon with our friends here, as we give thanks for these gorgeous summer days and think of our families back home in the snow! (sorry, guys. couldn't help it).

I'll check in again with a proper post after Thanksgiving, but for now, here's what I'm thankful for at the moment:

-the 2+ months I've spent in New Zealand, and all the rad people and places we've seen
-the awesomeness of being here with Matt, and experiencing everything here together
-my family and friends all around the world, and their good updates that keep me in tune with their lives, and the steady trickle of mail from the states
-sunshine, good food, surfing, the greeny-blue sea, the view from the front deck here, and the beautiful full-moon-lit cloudscapes we've seen over the ocean the last few nights.
-the chance to cook an enormous Thanksgiving dinner for people who have never eaten stuffing or pumpkin pie before!

Much Love and Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

Some Recent Photos

Friday, 19th November, 2010
9:36 PM

I am absolutely knackered tonight, so am just going to post a few photos to catch you up with some of our recent meanderings. Today was our first day of working the shop move for Kathmandu, an NZ/Australian outdoor store, so we packed, lifted, sorted, and schlepped boxes for about 8 hours today, and I am totally done in. But the physical work does feel good, we're making money, and the other good news is that the owners of the Wavehaven told us today that we've been doing such a good job with the cleaning and upkeep here that they want us to keep doing work for rent as long as we're here! If other guests arrive wanting to work for accommodation, the managers will find other work for them, and we get to keep on without paying rent, which is very welcome news!

(click on photos to enlarge)

 Ahu Ahu beach, our primary surf spot (on a day with no surf). The pinnacles in the background are the Sugarloaf Islands at the port of New Plymouth.

Just up the road...

 The wreck of the SS Gairloch (c. 1903) at Weld Road.

 Kiwi Zone for the win.

 Everywhere around here, nasturtiums grow wild over all the verges/roadsides. I love it!

 Not illegal in New Zealand (see previous post).

 A tree fern nurse stump at a picnic area we walked to in the National Park.

 Redwoods!

 The shipwreck from the other side of the beach.

From Lucy's Gully, in Egmont National Park. The Tasman Sea is in the distance, and the Wavehaven is in the squarish clump of trees right below the tree fern branches, with Ahu Ahu Road at its edge, leading towards the sea.

Some Notes on Kiwi Culture

Written 2:35 PM, Wednesday, 17^th November

Posted 3:35 PM, 18th November

For the last month, I have been scribbling down various notes about cultural differences to blog about, and am only now getting around to actually writing about them! It seems like a good time though- we are just living day-to-day life here in Oakura, not traveling constantly and seeing new things every day, so it seems appropriate to take the time to note some differences in everyday culture. Here are a few things we’ve come across so far that really stand out:

• New Zealand currency does not include any denomination below 10 cents. 1c and 5c pieces were phased out a number of years ago. As such, oftentimes exact change is not given. For example, if an item costs $12.95 and you pay for it with $13 cash, you get no change because there is no such thing as a 5 cent piece. If you pay for the same item by EFTPOS (aka debit card- the acronym stands for “electronic financial transaction at point of sale” – pronounced “IFT-pohss), you pay $12.95. It has taken some time to get used to the fact that things are often priced in a way that you can’t pay exactly with cash, and that you can save a few cents by paying by EFTPOS instead. Personally, I think the United States could take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book and phase out the penny and actually make an effort to phase in dollar coins (in NZ, like many countries, there are no $1 notes, but $1 and $2 coins).

•   I’ve already mentioned to some extent the difference in business hours. In New Zealand, most businesses are open only 9 AM-5 PM or even less hours. Almost no business is open on Sunday, and we’ve discovered that at least in New Plymouth, many are closed on Monday as well. In smaller towns, many businesses close at noon on Saturdays. The majority of restaurants seem to open only for dinner, and those that are open for lunch close during the afternoon and re-open around 5 PM for dinner. If you walk down Devon Street, the main street in New Plymouth, after 6 PM, the only things you will find open are the fancier restaurants.

• We found ourselves surprised to hear on the news about a month ago that there is a lot of controversy going on about a decision to provide firearms to an expanding number of New Zealand police officers; almost no officers are allowed to wear a holster or carry a firearm on their person, but a larger number of police cars will carry guns in secure lockers in their trunk (boot). While I am very much in favor of gun control, I was a little astounded to think about a police force operating without firearms! I don’t know of a single jurisdiction in the United States where any police officer is not armed or given immediate access to arms at all times. There have been a rising number of NZ police officers dying in action that has led to the increase in advocacy for the force to have access to firearms (to my understanding, officers here almost always are armed with tasers, bean-bag guns, etc. but these things only allow them to defend themselves to a certain extent). While I come from a place where the sheer number of shooting deaths in the general populous demands some kind of major action to control who can carry a firearm (in my view), the idea of a police force operating without access to guns was rather astonishing. I’m really not sure what to think about it all.

• We have also been very surprised to discover that New Zealand (and, we’re told, a number of other countries) has no “open container” law. In the United States (at least in most areas of it) it is illegal to have an open alcohol container in the passenger section of a vehicle. If you have empty beer bottles or half a bottle of wine in the car, they have to be in the trunk. In New Zealand, no such law exists, and, apparently, as long as the driver is not over the legal blood alcohol limit, everyone in the car can be actively drinking without breaking the law! I guess it makes sense as long as the driver is sober, but it just goes to show you how we get so used to the laws and ways of our home countries that to see such a vast change like this throws us for a loop!

• Holiday Parks: I’ve mentioned them a couple times, but realized I should probably give a bit of description since they don’t exist anywhere besides New Zealand, that I’m aware of. We don’t really have anything that compares to holiday parks in the U.S. I guess the best way to describe them would be to say that they’re part campground, part low-scale resort, and that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, across NZ. Your average holiday park includes tent sites, powered sites (for campervans and caravans—what Americans would call RVs or camper trailers), cabins, rental caravans onsite, or small lodges of some type, and usually also include a backpackers (a hostel, or at least a hostel-type dorm). Amenities generally include toilets and ablution blocks (sinks and washing stations), showers, laundry, a kitchen (with cookware and dishes provided), internet, and often a playground, pool and things like kayaks or water toys for customers’ use. All holiday parks are private and generally family-owned, and are pretty affordable- the ones we’ve stayed at were about $16 per person per night, with things like internet and laundry and showers costing extra.

•    Almost all New Zealand students below university level wear uniforms, which is not particularly surprising, but we’ve been a little surprised, and also gratified, to see that many kindergarten and primary schools require the wearing of sunhats as part of the uniform when outdoors! It makes sense considering the harshness of the sun here (as I’ve noted before, the hole in the ozone layer is right over NZ and Australia, making sunburns easy to come by and very painful as well as dangerous- these two countries have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world), and in addition, it’s really cute to see a hundred primary school students at recess wearing broad-brimmed cloth hats (color-coordinated with the rest of their uniforms, of course!) strapped below their chins! I haven’t seen any college (secondary or high school) students wearing them, probably because that’s the age when self-consciousness is a factor and students are considered old enough to make their own decision as to whether or not they want skin cancer J Also, at least here in New Plymouth, the male students wear black greek-style sandals with their uniforms! (The girls wear ballet flats or Mary Janes).

• We learned a fun local phrase the other day: one of the constants of life in this area is the daily search for good surf, which involves driving up and down the coast to various breaks to see what is working. If you look at a map of the Taranaki region, you’ll see that Surf Highway 45 skirts the coast all the way around the Taranaki Bight, with little roads spider-webbing off of it every few kilometers. Almost every single one of these roads leads to a surf break, and so the inevitable drive down one of these roads, the discovery that there is no surf there that day, then turning around and driving down the highway to the next break, is known as the “Taranaki Shuffle.” We dance the shuffle almost every day:)

• Matt points out that I should mention the pro-breastfeeding campaigns that we see everywhere. These include ads on tv, signs in businesses that say "This is a breastfeeding friendly area" and nicely furnished quiet parent areas in most pubic venues. This is catching on somewhat in the U.S., but there is still a lot of resistance there to breastfeeding in public (ahem. It's natural, more healthy for mom and baby than any milk substitute, and if boobs scare you, may I remind you that they're there for a reason? Sorry, but I can't let that go without voicing my opinion). I'm happy to see that New Zealand has kicked into high gear with making breastfeeding acceptable on a much more visible level.

Those are the main things I have for now. I’m amazed at how quickly we get used to the differences, though- we’ve been here just under two months and already I do things like watch an American movie and spend five minutes trying to figure out what the characters are doing that makes me feel like something is wrong, only to realize it’s that they’re driving on the righthand side of the road! Despite the fact that Matt and I have American accents, whenever there is an American reporter on the news I always think how blunt and weird their voice sounds, before I check myself. We haven’t met a single other American since we’ve been in New Plymouth, so we’ve been surrounded by only Kiwi, British, Austrian, and Irish accents for the last two weeks. No real complaints here, but every time we’ve met another American in New Zealand, it feels a bit like running into an old friend. I guess that’s what being so many thousands of miles from home can do.

I’ll end with a little Q & A derived from something I experienced last night:

Q: How to you really know you’re not in Oregon anymore?

A: When you go to the bathroom to brush your teeth and find a stick insect in the sink.

A Quick Update

The internet is down at the Wavehaven, so I'm updating quickly from the library where I am looking at more job postings, sending out more c.v.s, and various other online errands while Matt teaches at the YMCA. They are taking a group of kids climbing outdoors today, I'm eager to hear how it went and where they went- I wasn't aware of much low-level climbing near here.

It's mostly been life as usual, yesterday we went out for a morning surf at Oakura Beach and caught a few, but mostly it was a good chance for me to paddle around a lot in the mellow waves and work on my upper body strength! It was a gorgeous day, though- 17 C/63 F, and sunny as all get-out. We went out for another surf this morning, during the one hour when it got chilly and gray- and the swell has been terrible, so we didn't catch a single wave. After lunch yesterday we took a walk from the Haven, across the highway and up into Egmont National Park- the border of which is about 500 metres from where we are living! It was a different world as soon as we were into the park- huge redwoods (yes, redwoods!), very tall tree ferns, and loads of birds that we hadn't heard just a few metres away in the farmland.

I am working on putting together another post of cultural differences and such, and I should have that and some new photos up in a few days. Meanwhile, we await good surf enjoy the sunshine in other ways. I just looked up for the forecast for the next three days- clear and sunny, with a high of 22 C/72 F, definitely excited after a few days of rain!

Daily Life and Photos of the 'Haven

Written and Posted Friday, 12th November, 2010
Oakura, Taranaki, New Zealand

Hello everyone! I am finding that my writing habits tend to change when I go from traveling constantly to being in one place for awhile. I forget to write in my journal, and I have to adjust to thinking about the details of daily life to be shared, rather than the places we've been and things we've seen that day. It is a good adjustment, it just takes some getting used to for me.

We're settling in nicely here, and adjusting to being bored occasionally. That never happens when we're on the road, but while we're here and unemployed and don't really have any projects to work on like we would at home, we have to come up with other ways to fill our time. We're watching kind of a lot of tv, which I don't really mind if it doesn't get in the way of things that actually need to be done. While I will never own a tv, watching it in a foreign country is kind of an interesting experience. We often turn it to Te Reo, the Maori language channel, just to hear the language and try to pick out words we know. And we regularly watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which is a great show and very much in line with the work I want to do in the future. We are also finding it very interesting to watch the public service ads here, anti- drunk driving and smoking, etc. There's no beating around the bush like there is in the U.S., but ads don't hesitate to show people dying in gory accidents while talking on their cell phones, getting hit by drunk drivers, etc. One of my favorite campaigns is the "Legend" campaign. Last time I was in NZ the key slogan was "If you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot. If you don't drink and drive, you're a bloody legend." This time there's one that is "If you don't let your friends drink and drive, you're a bloody good mate." I'll say.

We've made arrangements to stay on long term and pay weekly rent here, and now that we have a residential address, we wasted no time in becoming members of the library at Puke Ariki! We came home today with loads of new reading material, Matt with a stack of books on raising pigs and chickens, and me with Tracy Chevalier's latest, Remarkable Creatures, a photo encyclopedia of Maori culture called Tangata Whenua (a relatively common phrase which means "local inhabitant" or "people of the land") and Jessica Watson's recently published book True Spirit, documenting her solo and unassisted circumnavigation of the world at age 16. The library also has tons of CDs and DVDs, which do cost a little bit to check out, but first we have to figure out if my computer can accommodate media from another country.

Matt has landed a part-time job! He is teaching rock climbing at the YMCA in New Plymouth, probably only about 10 hours per week, but still a pretty cool gig. He basically walked in and asked if they had any positions open, particularly with the rock wall, and it turned out they had been looking for another instructor, and they wasted no time in getting him to work- he taught the open climb last night!

We are spending a lot of our time getting to know New Plymouth better. Yesterday we took a nice long wander through Pukekura Park, a gorgeous place with enough rhododendrons and azaleas to make us feel very much at home, and a lovely British teahouse that I may end up working at this summer. I'll keep you posted on that :) We have eaten at a couple restaurants in town so far and have definitely discovered our favorite kebab shop and spotted some places we want to try once we have an income and can truly justify the expense. We have also been very happy to discover that New Plymouth is a major cultural center, with lots going on in the way of music and entertainment, free and otherwise. We already have our eyes on a Jack Johnson show at the end of the month, and Fat Freddy's Drop is playing here in Oakura at Christmas. There is also a massive light show at Pukekura Park over the holidays.

I thought you'd all like to see where we are living, so I finally got around to some photo-documenting of the Wavehaven and some of its animal inhabitants. Here you go:

 (Click to enlarge photos)

The back of the house, which is very typical of the NZ country villa style. 

Birds of Taradise!

The bunkhouse where the dorm is. 

The front of the house- look closely for the wetsuit rinsing station. 

 The front porch. I am in love with the weathered slab tables. 

 The sauna and glow worm trail!

 Side porch and yard.

 Where we eat our breakfast most days. See the Tasman Sea in the distance?

Detail of our headboard (well, all the headboards here)

The kitchen. Some of you might remember that blue and yellow is my favorite color combination. And you wonder why I like it here? :) 

 Living room, and Matt at the table where I am now sitting and writing this!

 Matt on the front steps with Ralph and Coco.

 Me and Bugcat.

 Our room. 

 Every room also has a photo of Mt. Taranaki. 

 Ralph looks like this all the time. 

And last but not least, we finally saw a weta, New Zealand's enormous wood crickets. Rather, Matt found this one while sweeping the back porch, and alerted me to its presence in a voice that reached decibels almost out of my range of hearing. Oh well, I probably would have had the same reaction. This one is relatively small, only about 2.5 inches without the antennae. 

I'll end today's blog with our other recent weird animal sighting. We were eating breakfast on the deck our second day here when I noticed movement in the field below the 'Haven. I took me a few minutes to realize what I was seeing: ostriches.

Life in Taradise

(Taranaki + Paradise = Taradise!)

Written/Posted 10:55 AM, Tuesday, Nov. 8th, 2010
Oakura, NZ

We've been in New Plymouth for almost a week now! We are settling in and feeling very much at home here at the Wavehaven, and hoping to stay longterm, as the owners tend to let people pay affordable weekly rent to stay for a couple months. As I mentioned before, almost no one stays here only a couple nights- most stay for weeks or months. So far, it is definitely a haven, and though the waves come and go (a surfer's trials and tribulations), the weather has been fantastic!

I don't have any super exciting adventures to relay to you all, as we've been mostly settling in, looking for work, and surfing. We've surfed three days in a row (ok, I didn't surf on Sunday, but we're also hampered by only having one board at the moment), and the coast here is just littered with surf spots. Yesterday there were next to no waves, so we went and played in the hip-deep water at Oakura beach, one of the few breaks without rocks, and only about 5 km from Wavehaven.

 Hi!

 Me paddling out to the sandbar where the water is only a few feet deep (hence the waves breaking there)

 The antithesis of big wave surfing...

 Matt and our new board

 Matt catching a gnarly one-footer :) 

Oakura foreshore from the beach. 

As you can see, the water is so warm we don't need booties or gloves, and we actually could have surfed without the wetsuits without being particularly uncomfortable- a revolutionary concept for us, since we are used to surfing the north Pacific, not the south!

We spent most of yesterday in New Plymouth, running errands and looking for work. Here's a few views of the town:

 Devon Street, the main street in the shopping district

 Puke Ariki, my favorite feature of New Plymouth. This is the enourmous and wonderfully done civic center. The portion on the righthand side is the I-Site, small theater, restaurant, and museum. There is a skybridge to the portion on the left, which is the War Memorial and Library. There is also an art gallery in between the two. The library is to die for, one of the most well done I've ever seen. We discovered that a lot of the funding for Puke Ariki and other public buildings here comes from Todd Energy and Shell. There is a large petroleum industry and offshore drilling in New Plymouth, and while I don't like to see such an unsustainable form of energy used, I can appreciate that the funding is there for such comprehensive public services. Puke Ariki means "hill of the chief," and refers to the heightened piece of land where the civic center sits, which used to be the site of a Maori pa, or fortress, providing an advantageous view over the sea and surrounding land. 

 New Plymouth foreshore and the Wind Wand, a controversial sculpture that moves around in the wind. Regarded by some as art, and by others as an eyesore. There is a coastal walkway that spans the entire foreshore from the port (the smokestack in the distance) all the way past the opposite end of town and up to the White Cliffs. 

The lawn and amphitheatre between Puke Ariki and the Centre City shopping mall, from the waterfront street. If you enlarge the photo and look carefully, you will see Matt (in blue shirt) on the furthest point of the lawn, surrounded by seagulls!

The work search continues, but another temporary gig just fell into our laps the other night, when a guy who used to stay the Wavehaven walked in while we were eating dinner, and asked if anyone here was looking for work. We raised our hands, and it turns out that he has a side business building hammocks, and needs a couple of people to do the staining of the wood frames and some other odd jobs, and has enough work to equal a few weeks' full time work, paid by unit but coming out to about $15/hour. The work is in Oakura, on the street that leads down to the surf beach, so it's really convenient, and we can do the hours whenever. We should be starting next week, but are pretty stoked that we got a job without even looking for it! We are still looking for more permanent work, and dropped our c.v.s off at a local cafe that is looking to hire two people for the summer. We need to makes some more calls and do some more searching, but are feeling pretty good about how things are going so far. 

We are very much enjoying the pace of life here, and being able to cook whatever meals we want, instead of what we can do on a single-burner butane stove, and have been eating very well. Since we are trying to keep spending to a minimum, we shop mainly at Pak'n'Save, which still has great deals on good, local food, but we can also buy in bulk and keep our shopping trips down to one per week. Oakura has a Foursquare where we can go if we run out of essentials, and save the small amount of petrol we would use driving to New Plymouth. Some of our meals so far have been pan-fried Moki (a delicious NZ whitefish) with spring onions and couscous, roasted kumara and pumpkin with garlic and rosemary (oh yeah- there is a small herb garden here!), and we had great success with kumara fritters for lunch the other day. We are still thoroughly addicted to English tea, and now have a massive biscuit (light tea cookies) habit too. I'm certainly not complaining!

I will post some photos of Wavehaven soon, and until then, here's wishing you all well, and I'll end with a photo of Mt. Taranaki, taken from just south of Oakura:

Journey to New Plymouth

Written and Posted 2 PM, Friday, November 5th, 2010
Oakura, Taranaki

We've made it to Taranaki as planned, and are feeling pretty at home here, but more on that later- I  have some cool photos from our trip down!

We spent the night of November 1st in Raglan, New Zealand's most famous surf town, and our first encounter with the Tasman Sea- we've hit the left coast of NZ! The lefthanded break at Raglan is one of the longest and most renowned in the world- but it was dead flat while we were there :) After two weeks of sleeping in the van, we decided it was time for a change, and splurged on a night at Solscape, an awesome BBH hostel and eco-retreat. Our accomodations were a converted caboose, and the whole place sat right on top of a hill overlooking the sea, and the buildings were all old railcars and neat eco-friendly kitchens and bathrooms. Here's some views of it:

We felt much refreshed after real showers, a good night's rest in a bed with more than eighteen inches of headroom above it, and a dinner cooked on more than one burner! We got a lot of inspiration from the setup of the retreat area and took loads and loads of photos for our inspiration file.

On the way out of Raglan, we took a small detour to visit Bridal Veil Falls, and see how it compared to the falls of the same name near Portland. These ones were pretty cool, a short hike back into the woods, and with a really well done trail system and viewing platforms.

We had a lot of ground to cover, so we headed through Hamilton, where we stopped briefly to run some errands, but did not fancy the city at all. After life in small towns for so long, Hamilton was just too big and bustling, and did not have a very good vibe for us. But we were soon out of town, driving southwest across the Waikato, which is relatively flat, and very green and pastoral. In the afternoon, we passed out of the Waikato and into the Waitomo region, which is home to some of the world's more spectacular cave systems, and looks like this aboveground:

In short, it's very rugged and rocky, and we saw some awesomely steep hills! After crossing the Waitomo, we entered Taranaki --Highway 3 hit the coast at the very north end of the Taranaki Bight, and the view that greeted us was this:

Pretty nice, huh? New Plymouth is basically at the very righthand edge of this photo, just where the Bight starts to turn south. There are a whole bunch of white cliffs and pinnacles along the coastline here, you can see some of them at the lefthand side of the photo. Three of the pinnacles you can't see from the highway are named The Three Sisters, which was another fun Oregon reference. In the same day, we also drove through a town that called itself the City of Roses, same as Portland- and the climate in Taranaki is very similar to western Oregon's, except with slightly more sun. Very nice.

After about four hours of driving, we came into New Plymouth, which is a town of 49,000- just the right size, and already it feels like home. Sitting right on the Tasman Sea, there are about 50 surf breaks within a 30 minute drive, including the famous Fitzroy Beach, where New Zealand's first surf competition was held. Mt. Taranaki is less than an hour away, sitting right in the center of the Bight. It is in Egmont National Park, which is perfectly circular (look at it on a map- it's awesome) and is reminiscent of Mt. Fuji (The Last Samurai was filmed here) and also of Mt. Hood back home.

I will write some more later about where we are staying currently, but here's the long and short of it: on a tip from a local outdoors store, we found accommodation in exchange for work at The Wavehaven, a groovy, comfortable surfers' pad of a hostel a few kms south of Oakura, and about a ten minute drive from New Plymouth. After asking at all the hostels in town and finding out that none of them would accept work for accomodation, we came out here, where we found the place empty but with the front door open, and a sign that read "Welcome to the Wavehaven. Please make yourself at home. If we're not around, we won't be far away. Either hang out, come find Jono at the surf shop in Oakura, or call him at this number..." We called, and the conversation went like this:

Me: "Hi, we just pulled up at the Wavehaven and there's no one here."
Jono: "Yeah, that's often the case."
Me: "Anyway, we were wondering about the possibility of working for accomodation."
Jono: "Yep."
Me: "Ok then."

And that was that. Matt and I work an hour and a half here each day in exchange for our room, and it feels great. It's nice to contribute to the space where we are living, and we're trusted to see what needs doing and do it, and do our work on our own schedule. I think Jono was actually a little relieved to have people come and clean- only a couple long-termers stayed here this winter, so the housekeeping had fallen a bit behind. But only a few hours of work makes a huge dent. So far Matt has cleaned all the windows and bathrooms, and I've vacuumed the whole house, cleaned the kitchen, and made up beds in some of the empty rooms. It's a pretty cool deal, and it feels nice to invest in where we're staying.

The place is great, convenient, and already feels like home. We have a private room, free wireless internet, a huge kitchen and living space at our disposal, and are a five minute drive from the sea, which we can see from the front porch. There's just a couple other guys here right now, staying for quite a while, and everyone is really chill and the place stays friendly but quiet.

We've been looking for paid work since we arrived, and after a day of job hunting, we both got a 5-day gig later this month with Kathmandu, a big chain outdoors store, which is moving shop and needs grunt laborers to help out during that time. It's not awesome work, but minimum wage here is $12.10 and we'll be paid $13.50, so it's something. We're continuing to look for something more permanent, and hoping we can stay on here at the Wavehaven after our couple weeks' of work exchange, maybe as long-termers paying discounted rent- we'll see.

On the surfing front, everyone is excited because the swell is arriving today, so hopefully we'll get out on the water soon. Unfortunately, the surfboard we bought a month ago has been massively damaged. We asked around regarding the best place here to take it for repairs, and is currently being worked on, but it will be an expensive fix- basically it was exposed to direct (harsh, New Zealand) sunlight while in the van, which overheated the epoxy coating, which then bubbled up from the foam interior and created a giant blister 18 inches long. It's ugly, and we had no idea it could happen- we've never had an epoxy board before, and compared to New Zealand, we don't even have sun in Oregon. Here's what it looked like before repairs:

After shopping around every board shop in New Plymouth, yesterday we bought a second board, a 7'2" Superfish, the biggest and floatiest board we could find in our price range, that can still fit in the van (we're both longboarders but will be challenged here because we can't transport a board longer than 7'6"- but it will be good for us). We bought this board secondhand from Bill Clark, an American expat with a shop and shaping room in Fitzroy. The board needed a couple small patch jobs, and he was so happy to meet fellow Americans that he threw in a bunch of the repair supplies for free! Matt's been showing me how to do the repairs, and we should have board in working order soon.

In summary: we have a nice place to live for free, a great town just 10 minutes away with everything we need, a lovely view and within a couple days, we'll have two functional surfboards- I think we're set!