Puponga

We left Nelson and headed for Takaka to meet up with Andrew, Matt, and Tirzah. The road to Takaka, like most of the roads I have been on in New Zealand so far, was pretty winding and nausea inducing, but it was well worth it, Takaka is a great little town. It’s pretty tiny and kind of hippied-out…maybe I just like it because it reminds me of the places I know best.

We met up with John, the guy we are renting the house from, to drop off the money. He works for the Department of Conservation and was totally classic park rangerish-friendly kiwi-outdoorsman, which is exactly what we hoped he would be. We ran into our housemates for the week (even though there was no “town square thingy”) and some other ice people that happened to be in town and hung out for a bit before facing our most overwhelming task….grocery shopping.

It’s been challenging enough ordering off menus for the past week (choices, choices, choices and more choices) but to be in an entire store full of fresh food…well, I think we all wandered around in a daze for a bit. But we managed to get more than enough food for the next few days and, even more impressively, we fit it (and us) into the car. It was just a rather cozy ride to Puponga, bags and boxes on everyone’s laps, a 22lb sack of flour on the dashboard, trying not to squish grapes and bananas, detergent and orange juice crammed into the already packed trunk.
The beach house is your typical vacation house, chipping paint and all the leftover mismatching furniture they don’t use in their real home anymore. But despite the fact the fireplace doesn’t work (big disappointment) it’s pretty comfortable…which is good since it rained the whole first day and we spent a lot of our time inside.

It was the perfect rainy day. In the morning I went for a walk all by myself out on some dirt road and got completely soaked, enjoying the damp, the hills, the green, the lack of people, the overall quiet. Later, after I dried off I went for another rainy walk to this kind of park close by called The Farm, where they have sheep (in New Zealand? Yeah, I know, shocking) and a café that looks out onto the Farewell Spit. The animals here are a bit creepy, they tend to all stare at you at once and not move in a very “children of the corn” fashion…or maybe I just haven’t been around animals in a while. Other than a short trip to Collingwood for internet and milk, I sat around reading and napping all day while everyone else played a weird sheep-herding game (Squatter “A classic Australian pastime since 1961!”) that we found in the game closet while Andrew made squash and mushroom raviolis from scratch.

The second day I walked out to a place called Fossil Point, a little half hour trail through a million sheep pastures and trees, out to a beach of flat white sand and crashing waves surrounded by cliffs and cool rock formations. Other than the quicksand warnings, it was pretty incredible.

Despite the incredible beach and the perfect rainy day, I still wonder what exactly I am still doing here sometimes; but it’s nice to wake up in the morning in an actual bedroom and make breakfast in a normal kitchen. You forget how nice the regular sounds of morning are…birds, the kettle boiling, people cooking. But I’m still a bit static in culture shock limbo.

I seem to feel this intense loneliness after leaving the ice, or maybe not loneliness but a lack of place…either way, being able to walk alone in the middle of nowhere seems to help.