30 September '09

The home sick is starting to fade away now. Feeling loads better about being here. As part of our helpx we are helping with Olive and Graeme’s big garden and painting Graemes dad’s old house. He passed away a few months ago and left them his house. He sounds like he was a real character, but the house needs loads of work before they can sell it. It’s a really nice house or bungalow rather, other than the cosmetic stuff. We have spent the last the few days over there painting. Olive is really cool, she just lets us get on with it. She drops us of in the morning then picks us up at tea time. It’s better to put in full days and have loads of free days of in exchange, rather than working a few hours each day. I really enjoy painting and I think Ring does too although I believe he would rather be doing the garden as that’s his forte.

I started feeling a little fluey last night, which has started getting worse today. Felt like sh*t when we went up Mt Eden and I use the term “Mt” loosely. We had to catch a train from Olive’s into the city then a bus out to Mt Eden village. Like most cities there are hundreds of buses going to bloody loads of different places so I was a little worried we wouldn’t get on the right one but it was easy in the end. When you know the names of local areas it’s far easier to be able to get around but when your new to a place it’s baffling.

It was quite a nice walk to the top, but it wasn’t very big, awesome views of the city though and it started raining once we got to the top. It was like this big cloud above us thought “rather than opening now when they’re at the bottom so they have chance to turn around I’ll let those 2 stupid melons put one foot on the summit and then I’ll let the buggers have it.” I was a little disappointed because I was told it was an extinct volcano, which it is, but I was expecting this massive mountain with a crater in the top but it was probably about the size of Glastonbury Tor. That’s still quite high but more of a really big hill. Auckland it made up of loads of these extinct volcanoes so when you go up to the top of one and look around you can see these mole hills rising out of a field of buildings.