Central Otago, the region in which my adoptive town (village?) of Alexandra is to be found, is a hot and dusty kind of place during the summer. This can lead to your wanting to sluice away from the mortal plane of existence like the many drops of sweat you lose per minute during the middle of the day; it also leads to the perennial bumper crops of succulent stone-fruit that keep the region economically afloat. The one thing the heat will definitely lead to is a wish you were somewhere more lively, as everyone and everything slows down to siesta levels on a daily basis before closing up shop laughably early. Alexandra became my home during the stickiest part of the New Zealand summer.
I stepped out of the passenger side of my ride into town, retrieved my pack, and spun to face the old man that had more or less appeared out of nowhere, his one eye a well of experience and sun damage. After a moment’s stunned silence and a lack of commentary from me, he asked me what my plans were in town; after I relayed them he advised I go talk to “Rob’s” to get a job, to which I gave thanks and a half-salute as I walked down the road into town proper. A short two hour meander through poorly marked streets in the deathly heat of the day later, I sat down in my room at the hostel (which was actually a vaguely converted garage without insect screening) and began to cool down. The news that these lodgings, however charming in their Spartan mosquito-chic décor, were only to be available to me for two nights came as a slight blow, though I have learned to wait for things to work out on this trip.
A short two days of walking from orchard office to office in 30+ celcius heat later I found myself shuffled off to a house with 9 South Americans (combination Chilean and Uruguayan), cheaper rent, and above all a pool/bbq combination backyard. Things were once again picking up…so it was even with the picking as I soon landed a job denuding innocent trees of their cherries, and thus somewhat cheerlessly found myself waking up at 5AM in order to eat as much as possible before riding the 10km out of town to the orchard on a ‘house’ bike with a perpetually flat-ish back tire. It was a challenge even before I got to work.
Working in an orchard is an interesting way to slowly kill yourself for minimal profits. It reminded me of my summers spent painting houses on Vancouver Island, with a couple of added caveats: if you mess up a ladder placement you will probably destroy a tree that has been purpose-grown for twenty years or more (rather than scratching an exterior wall or, as in one memorable occasion, sending yourself plummeting down onto a fence from a high height), and your supervisor is a stout and very angry Kiwi woman (rather than a skinny Dutch guy who also sells drugs for a living). The workers on an orchard in New Zealand tend to be overwhelmingly South American or German, unsurprisingly as there is never any shortage of either group no matter where you go in the country, which tends to work out well enough; the way to tell, incidentally, when things weren’t coming along according to schedule is that a SWAT team of very fit African men will suddenly be summoned from some other mysterious orchard vocation to make up the slack. The moral of the story is that orchard owners must make a fantastic amount of money in years where their crops don’t fail for some reason: as a friend told me before I left, “it’s hard work, but at least there’s no money”.
That’s not to say I didn’t like the work in general, as it offered me a once in a lifetime opportunity to brush up on my Spanish swearing, but it could be bruisingly (word chosen deliberately) difficult at the best of times. It turned out that I got paid just about one NZ dollar for each kilogram of cherries I picked – which actually is a great number of cherries if you think about it – that in turn can be purchased at the fruit stand/grocery store for 16 (sixteen) times the price, if you are so inclined. It shouldn’t surprise that there was no such thing as an employee discount, therefore, and it is important to remember that you always think you are going to be fired as it is nearly impossible to pick as much per day as they ask of you. As a result you are constantly hustling/sweating/cursing/bashing your way through the day, after which time you can ride back 10km on a borrowed bicycle/helmet combo that would have been the hottest look in 1981. It was, in fact, the best of times.
Of course there were good times as well, as we all got to experience a sweltering antipodean Christmas from our perches next to the pool (after a 5th application of sunblock, of course). In one remarkably criminal touch of panache some of the Chilean boys snuck off (smart money is on ‘drunk’) in the middle of the night to a local farm and appropriated a lamb, coming back just before I got up to go to work; I know this because I walked in on them dressing the unfortunate ungulate, which they had hanging from a garage rafter, when I collected my bike at 5:30AM. Alexandra taught me a lot about where our food comes from (turns out it’s South Americans)… and wouldn’t you know it, but the boys shared ‘their’ lamb with all, after cooking it over a wheelbarrow of flame for some hours the next night. It was a glorious night of drinks, fun, joking in different languages, and nearly universal food poisoning: the vegetarian, predictably, was fine. Showoff.
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