These two are the same view, five minutes passed between the taking of these photos, you see, very changeable
Well not as bad as you might expect. At times it is quite boring, as you know I am fantastic but it is terribly difficult to keep myself entertained 24 hours a day. Hence I've been through three books in the past two weeks and played quite a lot of Nintendo Ds.
For the past 8 days I've been living in Dunedin, working for a rather unscrupulous character and with a very nice Czech couple. I originally feared, as stated in my earlier post, that he had "hired"* me because he was under the impression that I was some kind of expert gardener. Oddly enough after one day in the garden he asked to start stripping wallpaper inside. This may or may not have had something to do with fact that on my first day in the garden I just killed just about everything in sight. Leaving a barren patch of dirt about 5 x 2 metres. Well I did exactly what my time with conservation volunteers taught me to do. Kill non natives. You see whats considered a weed in conservation work isn't quite the same as what's considered a week in household gardening So after that I was stripping wallpaper all week (with one brief escape to the garden, where I rained more death down upon those pesky non natives. The Czech guy was a bit surprised I think. He was delicately hand weeding everthing. Then I emerge with a Hoe, the garden tool not the other kind, and start hacking into everything and anything). It was somewhat dull. The weather was also insane. Dunedin has the most changeable climate I've ever seen. Had everything from pleasant summers days to the worst hailstorm I've ever. The hail storm was pretty cool. We happened to be on the top of a rather exoposed hill at the time. When we got there it was nice and sunny, then as we looked down from the view point black clouds rolled in at either side and a chilling wind began to howl around the the radio tower on top of the hill . Then before we knew it the cloud was everywhere, you'll see in my pictures above...
What else did I do in Dunedin....
Ah I hung around in a lot of second hand bookshops, as I said I read a lot. Oh! AND I had MY OWN ROOM and A TV! It was amazing, and our 'boss' though unscrupulous was pretty lax on the work side of things so I selpt in til like 10/11 every day and then did bout 3 hours work. It was pretty good. Though as I said boring. What else... Went to see Royal Albatross. Huge things wingspan of close to 3.5 metres. That's probably twice my height, and they're lazy buggers. They don't fly, they only go into to the air if its windy and glide about on the breeze. They do look very cool in highwinds, their flight resembling that of jet plane.
And thats' about it for Dunedin. Met up with the lovely Delphine again, who I met originally on Stewart Island and who hails from New Caledonia. And today I'm on the road again. On my way to Kaikoura, home of seals, dolphins, whales and albatross. And also great big mountains that come right down to the sea. I'm staying there before I resume my journey north. Thus far I've only planned as far as Wellington, will arrive there Wednesday and following a somewhat open plan route after that. I intend to wander my way back up the north island looking for work on my way. Slowly going back towards Auckland and if I don't find anything before I get there I'm homeward bound. Bout as good a plan as any I reckon? Some interesting things left to see, including Mt. Taranaki (Which is a mirror image of Mt. Fuji in japan I'm told. So much so it was used as Mt. Fuji in 'The Last Samurai') and then there's Tongariro national park which is home to the mountain they used as Mt. Doom. Can't remember the name of that one, is some silly Maori name.
So that's about all I have to say for now, will update if anything of import comes to pass.
*I say 'hire' but I don't think that hire is the right word, I wasn't being paid after all...
