Hello all and greetings once more from sunny Furneaux Lodge! I have been a bit slack in writing over the last couple of weeks and so here I am again to update you on the thrills and spills of New Zealand. As I write it is the most beautiful evening here with a slight breeze and only a few clouds in the sky, which are slowly turning a lovely pinky-purply colour. It has been a bit of a stormy day, and we spent most of it huddled indoors in front of the fire in the bar reading and playing Pictionary with other bored employees! Our plans of walking to another resort along the Queen Charlotte Track were foiled by the fact that they wouldn’t give us a discount for being staff here and that we would still only get to sleep in bunk beds there, so didn’t really see the point paying $90 for something we are already paying for here. So instead we plan to walk along the track tomorrow and either walk or catch the boat back, depending on how far we get.

As for what we have been up to in the last couple of weeks, it doesn’t really consist of much other than housekeeping outside of our days off. Due to various staff leaving and arriving, I have been moved from the bar and onto housekeeping full-time last week and this (mainly because I complain the least). This is fine as it means I work with Nick and have the evenings free, but does mean that I have to contend with dirty toilets, soaking and washing the kitchen’s repulsive tea towels, and removing people’s used dental floss from their used tea cups. What larks, Pip!

Enough of whingeing, I must instead concentrate on eulogising the fantastic meal we had on our days off last week. We went for a couple of nights in Nelson, which is really a lovely town, and our boss recommended that we go to this “world class” seafood restaurant called the Boat Shed for a meal, which we duly did. Hopefully there will be a photo thereof on the weblog by the time you are all reading this, but it is built out over the sea (an old boat shed, funnily enough) and the legs are covered in oysters and mussels and other various unidentified shell-dwelling creatures. We were seated out on the balcony for our meal and so during the course of the evening were able to watch a beautiful sunset over the water, as the sun descended behind the row of kauri pines growing on a small spit of land opposite the restaurant, turning the sea and the sky a fantastic shade of pink. As for the food, we ate a huge mixed platters to start, with green-lipped mussels, proscuitto ham, venison salami, cured tuna, smoked chilli salmon, gravadlax, cured swordfish tails, and bruschetta. Nick then had moules-frites as his main and I had a fantastic dish of gnocchi with a whole crab, green-lipped mussels, oysters, and king prawns. That, all together with a bottle of 2002 Marlborough Chardonnay, then coffee and port to finish, we were happy chappies by the time we went back to our campervan that night!

The rest of our time in Nelson was spent wandering around the shops, seeing the sights (including full-on culture walking around a cathedral) going for lots of morning/afternoon/anytime tea and cake, and generally enjoying all that civilised conurbations have to offer! A wonderfully relaxed two days, just great to get away from the same old sights, sounds, smells (toilets and burning rubbish) and people here at Furneaux. Not that we don’t enjoy it here but it takes a certain type of person to stay in the same 3 hectares of land and not start to go mad after a couple of weeks!

What other news? I can’t honestly think of very much at all. We have told the boss that our last working day here will be the 5th of March, so we will depart on the 6th and spend a couple of days in Picton (or it’s surroundings as Picton itself is pretty quiet), until friends of ours from Australia (but known to us from the UK), Beth and Mat arrive for a week with us in the South Island. We will then hopefully spend another two weeks travelling around and by that time we hope to have jobs to go to, most likely in Auckland. So that should be our life for the next month or so. Sounds pretty good eh? The novelty of Furneaux is beginning to wear a little thin, although the one-legged weka bird (nicknamed Gimpy) still does provide us with quite a few laughs!

It is getting rather chilly here now so I may retire back to the bar to post this on the weblog and warm my feet by the fire!

Hope you enjoy the couple of new photos. Love and missing-you type thoughts to all.