The two weeks I spent in Punakaiki passed really quickly. I was working at Te Nikau Retreat, as part of a group of 4 or 5 "wwoofers" (originally an anacronym for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, the term is now used for most exchange workers) cleaning the various cabins and lodges which make up the complex, and on a rotational basis baking the day's muffins and bread which we sold to the guests. We worked for the four hours between 10 and 2pm and also doing the early shift when it was your baking day. Eating together it was the bakers duty to cook the evening meal for the group and for Lisa (the manager) and/or James (asst. manager) with that person then excused from the dishes and tidying up afterwards. Baking my own bread it something I definitely want to continue when I get home. It was so easy and relatively quick to bake a batch of four loaves and so nice to enjoy "proper" bread again rather than the cheap and nasty tasteless budget stuff I've been making do whith while backpacking. Nice bread is one of the things I really miss (wouldn't you just know my list of things I miss would include food!). While I was there there was a good mix of helpers from different countries and we had lots of laughs - some intentional and others less so! Working at Te Nikau also confirmed to me how thoughtless and inconsiderate some people are. They seem to reckon that check-out times don't apply to them and that the cleaners will wash up all their dishes for them if they just leave them lying. It also leaves you wondering how some people manage to find the way out the front door never mind to a foreign country! Fortunately though most people were nice, friendly, and reasonably tidy which made life much easier.
Nestled in amongst a forest of Nikau palms, ferns, flax, broadleafs, Keikei vines, beech trees and others, the complex was in a wonderful situation. The range of shades of green was just incredible. The icing on the cake, though, was the fantastic coastline. Just five minutes walk through the trees took you to a stunning stretch of shore. Steps lead from a flat bluff top down the rocks and onto a shingle beach. Great limestone washouts overhang the back of the beach with ferns flax and trees reaching right to the egdes - even hanging over with mosses and ferns dangling precariously. Water drips here and there like mini waterfalls over the edges and from the roofs of the tunnel caves and overhangs. Scrambling across the stoney beach, under the tunnel of rock you cross over more stone outcrops from one bay to the next. At times the limestone was polished smooth into great flat beds, othertimes it was quite dimpled and others again it was absolutely brittle honeycomb like with so many holes and indentations. In the flats there were lots of little rockpools covered in seaweed and tiny black mussels. All the while huge white crested waves come rolling in from the Tasman Sea. Simply beautiful and mesmerising. I could watch the sea and enjoy the scenery for hours on end given half a chance. There are meant to be fossils and penguin burrows along the shore too but we didn't find them on our searches. The sunsets were wonderful though, as I'm sure you can imagine, and on several occasions we'd race down to watch the sun going down and always there was a lovely glow, although often accompanied by cloud so we wouldn't quite see the sun falling directly into the sea.
Just a couple of kilometres along the road were "The Pancake Rocks" which are billed as the star attraction for that section of the West Coast. The rocks are a range of very high stacks and promontaries of limestone layered and weathered through a process known as stylobedding into strange formations looking as if one flat rock has been placed atop another and another and so on. Its reputed to resemble stacks of pancakes hence the name, but I can't say I'd have come up with the same title if it had been left to me. At one point there was a set of three formations which were shaped like some kind of tiger or similar animal facing up to a couple of warriors. I had felt a bit blase about the rocks before I arrived thinking "I'm sure they'll be quite nice, but ..." However, they are amazing - pretty, rugged, huge and intriguing all in one. (Though you can easily spend more time at "my" bit of coast!!) Even the pathway down to the pancake rocks was lovely: stone walls leading to a walkway of flax, fern, cabbage trees and so on. There were deep narrow gorges with little pools where even at low tide the water crashed in and around with a tremendous power. You definitely hear the sea before you seeit or the rocks. At a stormy high tide the blow-holes would be incredible. Needless to say I visited them a few times over the fortnight, even though I did manage to embarrass myself the first time: I was taking photos and turned to get someone to take a photo of me, and here was a couple I'd met the day before in Greymouth so I commented as such. They didn't say much despite having been very chatty the day before, though I did think to myself how much less pronounced the woman's accent seemed than the day before, but they took the picture and we walked on our separate ways. When I was back at the visitors centre they came in again too and the woman asked again where it was we'd met. I reminded her but she looked confused and said she didn't think so. Oh yes, said I assuredly, the penny still not dropping, and wittered on about where we were and what we'd seen. Then the husband chipped in - "but we've not been to Greymouth yet, we're just heading there now". It was a different couple altogether! I felt a fool, but in my defence, and as I told them, they definitely have doppelgangers! They left giggling, and I reckon they were probably still chortling to themselves by the time they reached Greymouth!
Some of the walks along the local creeks and rivers were nice too. On one occasion Tifenn, one of the French wwoofers, and I followed the track alongside the Poraruri River which was lovely. The river was beautifully clear, the cliffs and trees towered up on either side with the sun shining in every so often as the course of the bluffs allowed. The rande of ferns made for a super range of shades of green and without the direct sun it was pleasantly cool. In some places trees were contorted across the path making twisted archways and many of the treetrunks has mosses attached so that even they were green. Also, in a couple of places great lumps of rock, much of it the layered variety but not all, created little tunnels and obstacles for the path to weave through. At one point we were able to get down the banking to the riverside proper and its super stoney bed. Not overly wide it was nevertheless reasonably deep in the middle and a few kayakers were making their way upstream. reaching a T-junction on the path Tiffen turned back having done the next section before but I carried on. The next section was quite different. She had described it like a fairytale forrest and I could see what she meant. Heading up and away from the river the damp muddy track was carpeted with fallen leaves, the woods were more openly and evenly spaced with beech trees and the narrow path meandered round in a real pictuire book way. Peaceful, it was just the bellbirds and cicadas to create a bit of gentle background noise. I crossed little wooden bridges over two or three little streams before the path descended again (not that it was ever hugely high or steep) and rejoined a gravel road in more open grassland. The Punakaiki River crossed the path and I had to take off my socks and shoes to paddle across at the shallowest point I could find. The water was just pleasantly cool but the stones were slippy and uncomfortable to walk on and even at that shallow crossing point the water came up to my knees. so I had to be careful. I must admit I thought back to dad wading across the river at Glen doll last October. Once I was safely across the road passed through rough grassland where a few horses were grazing before rejoining the highway about a km south of the pancake rocks. I followed it back to the retreat enjoying the views and the splashes of colour from the hortensia and crocosmia along the verges (bet you never imagined green fingerless me would know those plant-names!!). All in all a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
Another bonus of staying at Te Nikau was that Lucie, another french wwoofer, spoke Spanish and had lived in Santiago for a couple of years. She duly gave me regular spanish lessons and by the time she left she reckoned I'll survive ok so long as I keep practising. There'll certainly be no long conversations but I should know enough to get by and ask for a bed and food at least! Te Nikau was that kind of place - it seemed that if you really needed or wanted something it would turn up there. One person found someone to give yoga lesson, another conservation work, another carrot cake recipes, me Spanish lessons and so on. There were really only two drawbacks to living there: one was the sandflies and the other the Wekas. Sandflies are totally annoying little beasties which are constantly around in huge numbers and bite away with a nip that itches for days afterwards - worse than west coast midgies! The only small consilation is that being slightly bigger they are easier to swat and take your revenge on by ensuring they'll never bite again! (see what a ruthless streak they bring out in me!) The Wekas are ckeeky brown flightless birds, also known as woodhens, that scavenge constantly for any scraps they can find so you have to keep chasing them out the house. It was just like being at Bayfield and shooing the hens out the kitchen. Fortunately the wekas are just brazen rather than troublesome, although the time one got into Te Ruru just after I had finished cleaning it and left "deposits" all through the house I was all set to roast it for tea. It will never know how lucky it was for it that Lisa and James are vegetarians!
Most evenings we ended up playing silly pictionary type games, Who am I?, or something similar (we'd no TV, limited radio reception, a scratched collection of old LP's and CD's, and a very dodgy and tempremental speaker connection for ipods/MP3 players), but on a Friday night James does a radio programme on the local community station so on my last Friday Jo, Arnaud and myself went down for a listen (and James wanted Arnaud to play some of his French music collection). We had to go to the radio shack to listen as transmission range is only 2-3km and we couldn't get it at Te Nikau! With the three of us and 5 wwoofers from the other hostel in the area coming down James reckoned we'd probably almost trebled his usual listening audience - Pancake Rocks FM is no MFR!! Indeed it would aspire to reach the dizzy heights of even the bootstraps of Keith Community Radio, but it was pretty cool nonetheless!!
When I finished working I stayed on an extra night as a normal guest and used the day to go to a brilliant knife making day. I got picked up from Te Nikau and driven down to homestead of Steve and Robyn Martin at Barrytown. There were eight of us there the day I went and we all came away with super knives by the time we left. Steve teaches, helps with and oversees the knifemaking, with Robyn assisting him, preparing our lunch, taking us for an after lunch stroll to see some of their animals, and organising the bubbly and nibbles to toast our achievements at the end of the excellent day. At the back of the house is the little workshop come smiddy area and each getting a flat rod of steel we had to heat it until red hot (but not overheating it as that spoils the finished knife's strength) then hammer it to take of the corner tip and shape out the blade, reheating every so often to maintain its workability. It was then colled in a bucket of water (with added duck-poo in it to add extra nitrates or something, I can't remember now exactly what it did!) Once cooled Steve marked out an endstop and some curving for the grip. We had to hacksaw off the end and grind and shape the metal through a series of sandings, each time with a slightly finer grade than the last. Next we har to glue the parrallel brass blade endstops on then drill a hole through the brass sandwich before glue and pinning it with a little rivet. The pins were hammered flat, then a similar process was used to attach the two pieces of reclaimed Rimu timber which we'd jig-sawn out to make the handle. Everything was sanded again, then wood filler applied round the handle edges to seal any gapping. While we were lunching Steve had checked the knives and sanded down the wood filler and started to round the wooden handles. We then had to continue shaping and sanding, again on a series of increasingly fine sanding belts. Once they had passed muster we taped the handles to prevent any staining of the wood then yet more sanding - this time manually using dampened very fine sandpaper and ensuring we only worked with the grain, no cross blade rubbing allowed! With that done more cleaning and polishing but with soft cloth this time. Once that was done the handles could be uncovered and wax applied to seal the wood and season the metal. A final polish was given to the blades and our knives were finished. What was remarkable was that although we all started out with the same materials and used the same processes every knife was slightly different and each of us was able to pick our own one out when all laid out together. I have to say I'm really proud of my effort: it's not of an expert standard, and of course I needed some help and a lot of guidance, but I still consider I made MY knife and hopefully I can use it for many years if I look after it properly. It really was the best and most rewarding day I've had, and something I am now probably a bit evangelical about - recommending it to everyone I meet who is passing vaguely in that direction!! It was certainly a fitting end to a fabulous couple of weeks.
