Two One-Ways: Sheep farming and down to the South Island

Our final day at Rohnan’s farm near Wellington was spent tackling sheep, flipping them on their backs and dragging them over to Rohnan so he could shave the wool around their bums. Erica and I (Tim) did this for 2 hours while we worked on about 100 sheep. (Jenn was painting the house on this morning). The reason sheep farmers do this is to prevent their animals from getting a condition called ‘fly strike’ (Google it. It’s disgusting). Covered in sheep poo and feeling like I had just done two hours at the gym curling 100 pound dumbbells, we went in for our daily 10 o’clock tea time. That was a true kiwi experience, but one that neither Erica or I want to do again. Sheep farming is definitely off the list of future potential careers.

After leaving the farm we caught the 3 hour ferry ride from the north to the South Island. We had plans to start another WWOOFing assignment near Nelson on the South Island. When we got there the host told us that he no longer had enough work for 3 people. We moved on heading further north to the very tip of the South Island, to a place called Farewell Spit. You may have heard of it on the news recently because there were two mass strandings of pilot whales at Farewell Spit. By the time we got there with our hitching friend, an English man named Steve, a few days after the strandings, all the whales had either been dead and buried in the sand dunes or re-floated back to sea. We spent the next couple nights with a really cool couchsurfer near Takaka. We took this time to do some internet trip planning and figure out what we were going to do next. We booked a couple tent sites on the famous Abel Tasman trek, which starts near Takaka. Our couchsurfer let us keep our extra non-hiking related items at his place while we set out to do the 3-day, 2-night, 60 kilometer hike through the Abel Tasman National Park. The hike was full of golden sand beaches and cold, clear Tasman Sea waters. Probably the best hike we’ve done so far. The trail infrastructure here is incredible. The entire length of the trail was about 2 meters wide. We later learned that they used helicopters to carry in the tons of gravel used for the trail construction. There were even flush toliets at the campsites!