Sheep herders, that’s what we are now. Not arts types, not football fans. Sheep herders.
As we work, we’re introduced to a sheep born two days ago. It seems insane to think that, for every single one of us reading this, there was a point when someone referred to you as being X days old.
We’re moving them from the field they are in to another one with sweet tastier grass so that field number one’s grass can grow, so that too can be sweet tastier grass in future.
Whilst we do this, we’re made aware of an injured sheep, she is a mother of two and she’s hobbling. We take special care getting her into the next field and then, in private, we make jokes about her, saying she has Arthritis, but not the human kind, the sheep kind (This is a reference to a short narrated by Matt Berry, search Matt Berry: Lone Wolf on Youtube).
Now though it is the weekend and we have planned to make the most of our sweet two days off. The arrangement at the workaway being you work 5 hours for 5 days and you get your grub, board and weekends. Checking the forecast for the weekend, we’ve identified Saturday as the day for hiking. Our destination is Te Mata Peak.
Being as kind and generous as he is, Bruce, one of our hosts, gives us a ride to the start of the park. I, falsely, didn’t know that is was a park with trails. I, falsely, thought we walked all the way to the park with the peak, we do the peak, we walk back. Wrong. We get to the park and realise there’s options. We decide to take a medium length track that met up with another longer one so that if we fancied it, we could tag that on too.
The walk is brilliant, there are views over the Hawkes Bay area and the sun has been generous enough to share its company with us. Though, I guess not wanting to miss out, the wind has also decided to join. Some of the track up to the peak is quite precarious, closer to the fun challenging side of precarious thankfully. We make it to the top and the top can be summarised as one of those memories you think back to and think the view really was brilliant and you choose to not remember that it was absolutely freezing because it was so windy.
On the way down initially it is quite exposed and we actually have to sit down for fear of being blown over a sharp drop. Holiday fun ey.
Despite the odd moment of oh shit I’m going to die, we enjoy the walk back down and stop in the forest area for our packed pasta lunch.
What we both love about New Zealand is how rapidly its habitats and terrains shift. We’re in forest 5 minutes after we’re on the side of a mountain which gives way to lake and so on. Its constantly varying in a way that I guess, because of home, we’re not used to. That isn’t to say that the UK doesn’t have its moments where two or three terrains seemingly thrown together, here it feels like that is happening everywhere.
One of our highlights of the walk was watching a really big fluff dog, I think a Bernese mountain dog, refuse to walk up a ramp into its owners car. He just was not going up it. Priceless.
After the two hour walk back to the farm, we’re grated with a dog based incident of our own. Jed, the youngest of the three dogs on the farm is basically a bit of an annoying shit, he’s lovely, but a total pain. The other older statesdogs, Diesel and Marley, Chocolate Lab and Jack Russell respectively, have evidently had enough of his shit and are chasing him round the outside of the house. We’re on the ground floor so we stand at the window and watch as Jed races past followed by Marley and Diesel, then nothing, then zoom they’re round again. This lasted 30 minutes. Silly buggers.
Denny and Debbie's Little Big Adventure 