Full House on the Farm

12/9/13
    Work on the farm has been really crazy the past few days.  Two days ago, there were 16 WWOOFers on the farm; 12 of them from Germany.  If anything, it's made the work easier...with so many people, we are able to form massive chain gangs up and down the hillsides, so we can simply pass the brush and firewood along down the line rather than having to walk it down the hills ourselves and then back up again to fetch more.  We've been doing much the same work every day; collecting ridiculous amounts of firewood and dumping them into rickety old trailers, to be hauled back to the farm by the quad bikes.  One of them has no working brakes, so that's always fun to be riding on.  Earlier today, as it was going up a hill, the bike stalled out and could go no further because of the weight it bore, so it started rolling backwards and the driver was unable to stop it.  All of us who were on board started jumping off, if we weren't thrown off first, and the bike reared up onto its back wheels, threatening to tip all the way over onto the people who had been thrown.  It didn't, though, and after it had been relieved of the overburdening weight of all its riders, the bike was able to make it up the hill on its second try.  The quads certainly put as much work in every day as any one of us does; on our way back into the farm this afternoon, there were eleven of us riding on a single one-seater bike, with an overly full load of wood in tow besides.
    The hundreds of cows roaming around the farm provide an added complication in navigating the bikes over the uneven terrain to and from the farmhouse.  More often than not, the gigantic beasts wind up dashing straight in front of the bikes in their manic efforts to escape the rumbling things that must seem quite foreign to them.  The sheep are never such an obstacle; though there are thousands of them, they keep out of the way of the bikes much better than the seemingly less intelligent bovines.  Something also worth noting: there is a single black sheep on the entire farm, which I thought was pretty funny.  I took the liberty of naming him Chris Farley.
    The bonfires we burned upon the hillsides today were by far the biggest I've yet seen in New Zealand.  The piles of wood were absolutely massive before we set them alight; most consisted of multiple whole trees that looked to be hundreds of years old, as well as countless sticks and branches.  You could feel the overwhelming heat of each fire from over thirty feet away, so it was quite a chore to monitor them and keep them all burning properly.  Fortunately, though, we finished our work at 10 A.M. today, since we woke up to start at 5, and I'm now able to write this post without being shooed out the library door before finishing since we got into town much earlier than we did last time.  The only bad news is that this post features no pictures, since I haven't been taking my camera out with me to work.
    We have another ten days of work ahead of us on this farm in Gisborne.  Though it doesn't really make for the most exciting blog posts, I still feel compelled to keep the thing updated whenever I get the rare chance for some internet.  I don't know when it will be coming out back in the states, but the second installment of The Hobbit is debuting here in two days, so we are about to make our way down to the local movie theater and buy our midnight premiere tickets in advance.  It seems like missing such a thing while we're actually here in New Zealand would be pretty silly, so we want to be sure to have our tickets as soon as we can.  I think we plan on taking the following day off from work; waking up after two or three hours of sleep with a whole day's work ahead of us seems like a pretty poor idea.  Our host Angela says we are allowed a day off whenever we like, so long as we feed ourselves on that day.  Which definitely sounds a lot more feasible to me than hauling firewood all around the farm for hours after hardly any sleep at all.
    I'll close here for now, though I don't know when the next time I'll write will be.  The work on the farm is likely to remain much the same, so I might wait until we head back up north for Christmas with Graham and Michelle to post again.  I think we'll be stopping in to Lake Taupo on our way up, as well as Napier and Hawkes Bay, which make up the most prominent wine country here in New Zealand.  That should make for great photos, and hopefully some good stories as well.  You readers, of course, will be the first to have them.

One among many working on this gigantic Gisborne farm,
Jack