Last Friday, we finally left the comfort of Tropical Bali and ventured deeper into the island. We hired a driver recommended by the hotel to take us to Ubud (a little under an hour away), where we planned to spend the next week.

It took a leap of faith on both our parts to leave Sanur without knowing where we were going to stay that night. We knew there were dozens of homestays and hotels in and around Ubud, but we were a little worried about not having a concrete reservation in advance of the Christmas holidays. We jumped at the first place we looked at, as they had availability and a pool, but after committing, we immediately had “buyer’s remorse”: on second glance the pool looked a little scuzzy, and our bungalow was musty and not the cleanest. This weighed on us at first, but we knew that though we’d verbally committed to staying for ten days, nothing prevented us from seeking out another spot after we acquainted ourselves with the area.

When we hired the driver, the owner of Tropical Bali suggested that we use our trip to Ubud as an excuse to take a tour of the area. We said “Sure” without so much as a clue as to where we’d be going or how much it would cost. As it happened our driver Komang was young, well-spoken, urban-attired (fancy jeans, mirror shades, Billabong cap with a flat rim set at an angle, etc), and ended up taking us on an impressive and informative full-day tour of the sights around Ubud.

We stopped for a photo op at the terraced-hillsides of Tegallalang, learned about Hinduism and temple design at the Holy Spring Water Temple (Tirtha Empul or Tampak Siring), and had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the active volcano Gunung Batur. And then it started to rain—heavily. So much that the volcano completely disappeared from view.

The next stop was an agrotourism site where we saw all sorts of tropical plants, fruits, and spices growing in the wild, including cacao (chocolate), coffee, pineapple, cinnamon tree, clove, snakefruit, passionfruit, tumeric, lemongrass, ginseng, and more. But the highlight was seeing the famous civet cat, and its infamous product, Kopi Luwak, aka poo-poo coffee. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Kopi luwak is coffee made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet and then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. Passing through a civet’s intestines the beans are then defecated, keeping their shape. After gathering the scat, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world.

Yes, we had a cup. It cost 30,000 rupiah (or $3) and it tasted like, well, coffee.

It was raining so hard that we ended up skipping a hillside temple (Gunung Kawi I believe), and went instead to the Elephant Cave (Goa Gajah). At that point we were pretty toured out. Komang deposited us at our bungalow around 4 in the afternoon. The price for seven hours of transportation and tour guiding came to 400,000 rupiah or $40, which seemed very reasonable to us. In the end we had little to worry about, and even the misgivings about our choice of bungalow lessened somewhat after a Bintang beer at the bar with access to our first free wifi in a week.

Panorama of the Tegallalang rice terraces after harvesting

After a short break in Nelson and later Blenheim, we found ourselves another wwoofing gig (previously we spent a week milking goats) at an estate vineyard and winery in the Marlborough region, well-known for its Sauvignon Blanc. The vineyard is composed of 3 separate tracts of land, totaling 163 hectares, producing around 25-30 thousand cases of wine a year (a case is twelve 750ml bottles). They also have olive trees on the estate for olive oil (did you know the oil comes from the pit and not the flesh? me neither…), some livestock (3 cows, 2 horses, sheep, and a dozen chickens), and vegetable gardens.

A week ago Friday (Nov 26) the estate manager picked us up at our backpacker in Blenheim and brought us to the house on one of their properties where we’d be staying. One of the full time employees lives there and looks after the wwoofers, which included one other person during our first week, an 18 year old from Canada. Afterwards he took us on a tour of the vineyard where we’d be working.

What are our days like? Every morning we set the alarm for 6:15 in order to have time to make breakfast and tea and get lunch together for the day. We leave the house around 7:10 on bikes they’ve provided, cycling 5km up the road to the main vineyard property. We find out what we’re going to be doing and usually start around 7:30. Most activities are done in groups, so we’re rarely alone—usually chatting with the people who work there full time. At 10:00 we break for morning tea—which amounts to a “second breakfast” given the substantial amount of food consumed for the day ahead. We resume working until 1:00 when everyone breaks for lunch—usually leftovers supplemented by eggs and olive oil from the vineyard. Then we take off after lunch and ride the bikes back to the house, to shower, relax, and eventually prepare for dinner, which we cook ourselves with food supplied by the hosts.

The primary vineyard activity we’ve been involved in is “shoot thinning”. Essentially we’re pruning the just-beginning-to-flower vines to concentrate the flavors and sugars in fewer bunches of future grapes. The more you thin, the better the grapes, the more expensive the wine. Of course very few people buy expensive wine, and cheaper bottles of wine sell in greater volumes with higher margins, so there’s a balancing act when pruning between maximizing quality and maximizing revenue. At least that was my understanding as we were taught to thin each bay (the area in a row of vines between two wood posts, about 7-8 meters apart, containing 3-4 vines) from 200 shoots to 100. Based on how much a bay had been thinned, and the variety of the grape, they could tell you how much a bottle of wine would be priced. In fact they’d often refer to certain rows as $25 Sauvignon Blanc or $45 Pinot Noir.

The other vineyard activity we’ve been involved in is “wire lifting”. The grape vines are grown on a trellise system known as “vertical shoot positioning” or VSP in which the vine grows vertically (like a tree) about 80cm off the ground, and then splits in two, running along a wire fixed to the posts about 80cm in each direction. Up from these horizontal “branches” (called cordons in French) the fruiting canes (or “spurs”) are spaced out every 20cm or so, and each branches out into six or more vertical shoots. Without any assistance, the shoots would grow in every direction and eventually be weighed down by the fruit. So once the shoots have been thinned, we walk along the entire length of each row (200-300 meters) and lift two sets of movable wires up to variously spaced clips on both sides of each post, in effect sandwiching the vines vertically.

Meat pies are like a national dish in Australia and New Zealand.

Immediately after our Abel Tasman Tramp, we spent a week in Upper Moutere wwoofing—volunteering on an organic farm for 5-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board.

Every morning around 8:30 and every evening at 6:30 we were responsible for milking 8 to 10 goats. To make things more efficient, Stephanie handled the mechanics of milking, while I was the self-appointed goat runner, bringing goats back to the paddock (pasture) when they were done. If you’d like to vicariously milk a goat with Stephanie, check out the video we made of the process on her post, How to milk a goat.

After the morning milking and before breaking for lunch at 1, we’d help with various chores in the gardens, including staking peas, digging up thistle in the pastures, cleaning out animal stalls, pulling up kale roots, weeding carrots and parsnips, and harvesting fava beans and peas for the market. Then we’d take the afternoon off before the evening milking and dinner.

The food was hearty, filling, and largely homemade. Breakfast was toasted slices of dense whole wheat bread, butter, jam, and tea. Lunch was a combination of leftovers from dinner with bread and cheeses made from the goat milk (chevre and feta). Dinner ran the gamut: spinach quiche, roasted vegetables, lamb chops (hoggit raised on their farm), pasta with vegetables. Potatoes were a frequent side dish, often simply boiled, as were stir-fried leafy-greens. Most nights there was a dessert: fresh fruit crumble, “pudding” with ice cream, chocolate cake. The farm supplied the bulk of the food (fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese), and the rest was supplemented with things from the store (flour, pasta, sugar, butter, peanut butter, oil, tea) and things they got from other farmers/food-producers in trade.

There are two passes that we could take eastward on our way back to Christchurch (to return the Spaceship). One is apparently so phenomenal that it has its own national park (Arthur’s Pass), but we were more attracted to the idea of soaking our glacier-chilled bones in Hanmer Springs, so we took the other pass. We made it there early in the evening on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we dipped in the springs twice—after breakfast and after dinner. They have a number of thermal pools, most of which are kept between 34-38°C, but I preferred the untreated (basically unchlorinated) “sulphur pools” that were between 40-41°C, and smelled faintly of rotten eggs. Stephanie and I had at least half a dozen itchy welts on our feet from the sandflies in Franz Josef Township, which the hot water pleasantly soothed.

We were considering sticking around the springs for one more day, but we woke up to rain and cloudy skies on Thursday, so we decided on a whim to head to Akaroa, New Zealand’s only French settlement, situated in the crater of a long-extinct volcano, southeast of Christchurch. On the way we stopped for lunch at a cafe/general store called “The Store” in Tai Tapu and had one of the best meals in New Zealand so far: an open-face BLT that required a fork and knife. We walked around Akaroa after we arrived, but eventually parked ourselves at the holiday park to catch up on blogs, email, and to cook dinner.

Friday was our last day in Spaceship Voyager. We had to return it to Christchurch by 4pm. It was drizzling when we woke up, so we hit the road immediately, left our bags at the hotel we’d reserved for the night, dropped off the van, and walked back to the hotel. And thus our two week South Island road trip, three week New Zealand road trip, and first month in New Zealand came to completion.

So what’s next? On Saturday we became backpackers in the literal sense. With only the packs on our backs, we took a bus up to Nelson, in the northwest corner of the South Island, to prepare to tramp the Abel Tasman Coast Track over the next six days, starting on Monday afternoon. Suffice it to say, our blogs will be unusually silent during that time, but fear not, we’re fine.