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| On New Years day
we moved on again and travelled not very far to a campsite at Kuaotunu
Beach for just one
night. We got our first experience of what the Christmas rush on a
campsite looks and feels like. All I will say is, it was not nice nor was
the drunken behaviour on the next campsite in Whitianga. In fact it was so
bad that two lots of campers got evicted the following day and that made
life much more pleasant again.
We decided to stay in Whitianga so that Fergus could have his six monthly blood tests done. We are parked under a beautiful tree and there are lots of lovely trees on this site. On the 3rd January 90% of campers disappeared, leaving us plenty of space to enjoy. |
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Exploring
Whitianga and catching up with old friends 3rd January to
Monday 9th January We
have explored Whitianga on foot and caught up with two of Fergus’s
friends. The first is Alex who comes here for six months of the year and
thinks he is the world’s most famous artist and musician. In reality he
lives in a rundown house on the edge of Whitianga, and is supported by his
wife Helen in London. When we questioned him about the whereabouts of
Helen, he said that she needed to learn to live with out him. They have
been together for many years and have had three children.
<------ Bobbie and Fergus |
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Then Wednesday we spent the day with Bobbie. Bobbie is also English and followed Fergus from London to New Zealand in the early 70s. She stayed here and travelled the world from here and Fergus returned to England. She is a potter just outside Whitianga and lives on her own plot of land and a ramshackle but very charming house in the bush. She is surrounded by books, plants, printed silk and cotton, pots, statues old sowing machines, a potbelly stove and an open-air bathroom under the veranda. The house is hidden up the hill and in the middle of the bush. She lets everything grow and so the trees have lovingly enclosed her and the available light filters down through the tall trees. A secrete hideaway. When we arrived she took us to meet most of her friends on this jointly owned land and some of their houses. Some are very simple and some are very elaborate. The gardens too obviously reflect the characters of their creators. There are small rivers, ponds and pools with waterlines, vegetable gardens and flower gardens with what Bobbie calls beautified edges. It was lovely to be shown around these 280 acres of land and to be given an insight into how other people live together and yet totally separate. |
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We came upon two small children or should I say we heard their voices first. Nina and Isla were busy helping to collect firewood with their mother Alison. Then they popped out of the bush, full of the joys of live and thrilled to see Bobbie. Alison offered us fresh water to drink and a tour of their A frame holiday home. We climbed up the steep ladder and they had princess beds upstairs. They were created out of pink coloured mosquito nets, what a lovely idea? Then it was time to go and feed the eels in the stream. The girls gathered each a damaged egg, which was to be brought to the eels for food. We walked through the bush down to one of the streams and found the eels. They were very long and quite big. The water was very clear and they looked amazing in the sunlight. The girls got all excited and did their best to frighten the eels away instead of coaxing them out of their hiding places in the stream. Alison instructed them as to where to drop the eggs and then asked them to stop moving about so much but just pat the water against a stone to encourage them. Gradually the big eel came out of her hiding place and almost came out of the stream to get at the egg. She was 1 metre long, very shiny black and sleekly elegant. It was all great fun and I really enjoyed that very much. Then we moved on with Bobbie and Alison invited us to come and stay with her in Auckland when we are next passing. Bobbie finally took us to her house and we sat on the veranda having coffee and Christmas cake. It was easy to talk to her and she brought out lots of books on herbs, homeopathy and crystals. She knows a lot about these things and reminded me that I too have had a great interest in all these things in the past but due to lack of time I had lost touch with it. |
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Bobbie cooked us a lovely lunch and we sat in her kitchen enjoying the freshly grown food. After lunch she took us to see where her electricity was produced. This involved moving down a steep bush side and fighting our way through dense greenery. We got down to a lovely and quite sizable stream. It even had pools in it and Bobbie told us that she can sit in them when the weather gets too hot. The stones in the river were beautifully rounded by the constant flow of the water and some were covered in a light coat of green velvety moss. The light filters through the bush and makes the water sparkle in places. A magical and quite spiritual place. I would have liked to stay there for a long time and absorb the energy of the place. Cascading stream ------> |
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Then we got to the pipes
and the water wheel and Fergus will fill you in on that part as he so
enjoyed seeing a working steam electricity system……
There were two mini hydroelectric power systems, one belonging to Bobbie and one to a neighbour. Both were fed from further up the stream by black plastic pipes about 100mm diameter. The head of water must have been about 15m, I could look into the works of Bobbie's system only. The pelton wheel was mounted in an upturned sink, Her generator was water proofed by being in an upturned plastic box above it. I was told the the generator itself was a washing machine motor which was being driven by a pelton wheel. Check out http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/coote/pelton.html . The system appeared to generate about 100 Watts of low voltage AC which was rectified and fed up to Bobbie's house by about 300m of mains cable. At the house a good line-up of old batteries was being charged. |
| Eventually we climbed back
up again to Bobbie’s house and we settled on the veranda with a glass of
her own spring water. Delicious! Bobbie told us her life story, which took
her travelling around the world. Instead of saying" Bla, Bla, Bla"
she would say "Bla Bligady Bla" which I thought was very amusing.
We have had a lovely day with Bobbie and I hope we will see her again some
time.
Batteries under Bobbie's house ------> |
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On Wednesday Fergus went for his blood tests for his prostate and we were told that the results would be in by Friday afternoon. So we had two days to get our anxiety levels up and I wondered if the tablets Fergus started to take last August would have made a difference. Fergus got quite anxious about it and we tried to distract ourselves from it by working on the Dance Laines Web-site. The plan is to stay in this town until we have launched the new site and have a working frame to update it as our travels continue. Friday came around quickly and after lunch Fergus went back to the surgery to collect the results. The results were much better than expected and his PSA level has dropped from 5.7 to 2.7 which is fantastic news. We were both so relieved, that we decided to walk into town for a bit of retail therapy. Amongst other small things we bought a little ghetto blaster so we can play our CDs when we are working. <------ One of the gardens |
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We had also been talking about buying bicycles and have a rack at the back of Turbo Snail to carry the bicycles for us. By chance we found the "Bike Man" in town and Tina and her partner Greg run it. Tina was great to talk to and she showed us all sorts of machines. She seems to have sussed us out quickly and suggested bikes which where designed for comfort and easy to ride. The problem was that we do not have a tow bar on the back of Turbo Snail and so we needed to have a frame made to measure. Tina new just the place to have such a thing made. She suggested that we went to see Kirin first to find out if he could make and fit such a frame for our vehicle and then, when that had been sorted we could come back and buy the bikes. That is what we did and we are now waiting for Kirin to complete the job. Meantime we bought the bikes and are having great fun exploring the town with our new means of transport. We found a new campsite on the other side of Whitianga and we have moved to it yesterday, Tuesday, morning. We are 150 metres from the beach which has patches of 1000's of white sea shells and has schools of little fish in the water. We now swim every day. |
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