It was still pretty drab weather in ChCh, but as soon as we passed the Alps we got sunshine. We sampled the first plot which took us a good three hours, but it was going well.
Then we passed a little village and Chris said we might better buy food there because the place where we wanted to stay didn’t have a supermarket or restaurants. So after the shopping and getting to the motel/cabin, we didn’t have enough daylight left to sample another plot.Chris cooked pasta, Ian ranted about the plots and the samples and how we needed to be faster and I was labeling sample bags. After dinner we had some wine and looked at the maps again and just chatted until I was finally finished with the bags. I thought to myself that this didn’t seem too bad, Ian had relaxed at some point and was telling jokes and all that.
The next day we ran into a lot of trouble. A locked gate and the farmer not to be found, not to mention that this was a public road and he wasn’t even supposed to lock it… Some plots turned out to have the wrong trees on them and/or were completely inaccessible. We only did two plots.
But it was beautiful. The second plot was about 45 minutes hike/scramble through dense jungle of ferns as tall as me and all sorts of tangled vines. The two men were of course much faster than me and so I struggled to keep up because I wouldn’t admit that I was slower and also because I was scared I would lose them in the wilderness.
In that second plot I attempted to hammer the soil cores into the soil, which Ian had done in the previous plots. I managed most of them but I realized that I would need a lot more strength for the next trips when it will be me, Chris and a female intern… I felt a bit dizzy too after we had scrambled back to the car and stuffed muesli bars and apples into my mouth. And perhaps I was a bit hallucinating or so but suddenly I looked around and I thought “I am in New Zealand, the other side of the world. Wow”. And suddenly the sky was intensely blue and the grass unnatural green and the trees from another world. I finally understood what my yoga-friend in Freiburg meant by “the green is much greener and the blue much more blue”. It felt like the end of the world, a wild but beautiful place, and having just sampled it, it felt as if it was mine. Oh and I just read an insane book about sheep in Japan (A wild sheep chase - Haruki Murakami) and somehow the scenery reminded me of that book and I could almost feel the presence of the sheepman... Read the book, it is insane.
Back in our cabin we looked at more maps and made a plan for the final day. Ian cooked soup and after we just drank wine and chatted. Ian and me seem to get along better every day.
The third day we managed 3 plots, so we were only 2 shy of our initial goal, not too bad. We drove home and that was the first “preliminary” sampling trip. So much more to come yet.
The "kiwi moment" of the trip: Chris saying in the last plot when we were almost done and it was getting slightly dark "We'll be seeing kiwis soon, time to go".
(the kiwi bird is nocturnal, which is why it was funny ...)
