Milking goats

bed count: 46

Well - the last Wwoof (on the Coromandel Penninsular) was not the best. They were nice people but really disorganised. The most disheartening thing for us was to work away at something all morning (under their direction) only for the hosts to decide later that we needed to undo everything we'd done that day and start again. Consequently we had 3 days of doing the same job - literally.

We managed a trip to Coromadel town one day though and would like to go back at some point. Very pretty and it has a miniature railway!!!

All that is now a distant memory though. We had a few days off between the last Wwoof and this one and managed to meet up with Matt and Trace (the couple we met in Ahipara) again. It was nice to see familiar faces again. Raglan was a pretty cool little town, even if we did have to share the camp site with two school parties. We headed out of town to the surf beaches before we left and watched some surfers catch some wave - rather them than me!

We've been at a goat farm about an hour south of Hamilton since Friday. I helped milk a couple of hundred goats this morning. We have to leave tomorrow to continue our road trip of the north island, and it really is a shame because it's a good place. Again, really nice people, really good food (and plenty of it) and interesting work. If we hadn't gone to the other Wwoof we could have stayed longer... Ahh well.

Jeff and Fiona are really near the end of building their very beautiful strawbale house and have been a complete mine of information about the building process. We've got heaps of inspiration on everything from ceiling heights to sewage systems. We might do well to save up our money and fly them over to the UK if / when we end up building our own house.

The work here has been cleaning the lime plaster off the windows, concreting the floors and doing the garden mainly, accompanied by 2 other Wwoofers - Atila from Hungary and Ludovic from France. It's our first Wwoof with other Wwoofers and it's good having the extra company, plus we can take turns lugging the concrete for the floors so we don't get too knackered!

Managing to find some river fishing for Alec, a mountain walk (almost) and a shady spot under a tree for our afternoons off.

In town all the Christmas decorations are up but it's still ultra surreal to us. It's summer for god's sake!