Oops and Hello!

Kia Ora everyone! I have been in New Zealand for almost 3 weeks now and I love it. While I've had some bouts of homesickness I think I've settled in and am starting to plan my time outside of the volunteer house.

hmmm what have I done? We had some bad weather our first week at the volunteer house so several of our hikes or projects were cancelled or post-poned. A lot of what we do is help community partners with projects they've started. A lot of it (especially in the summer) was weeding or "tree releasing". What this means is that when a native tree is planted you go back every couple weeks or months and you pull up the weeds and grasses that would quickly choke out the slow growing native varieties. Several tree species live to be several hundred years old, there is a Rimu tree we saw at Otari Wilton that is 800 years old. Some of the time this is done on sand dunes, sometimes in river valleys. Some of what we do is helping with maintenance, at a place called Nga Manu we cleared overhanging branches from the trail and removed nails from used wooden boards. One task repeated on several tracks every couple of weeks is checking traps. For what? Australian brush tail possum and rats. All we've caught are rats, but thats a good thing because it means there aren't any possums to kill the birds.

In free time mostly we watch movies and just hang out around the house. Its not expensive and we're usually really tired if we've gone on a hike. On the weekends we've checked out museums, the botanic garden, and the beach!

Thats all for now. Hopefully you've had a chance to live vicariously through my photos here, and here.

Take care and enjoy spring in Canada, here it is fall, at 8pm it was alreayd dark.